User’s Guide, Chapter 34: Instruments

All music is made through instruments (if we consider the human voice and synthesis types of instruments). Music21 uses instruments in analysis and in giving hints to output how music should sound. Instruments live in the music21.instrument module and all subclass Articulation.

Instruments and Streams

Instruments are Music21Object subclasses. Thus, they live in streams. Generally a part represents music for one instrument, though it can also represent a single playing performing on multiple instruments (“doublers” or percussionists playing a kit).

You can iterate through all Instruments in a stream using the same getElementsByClass() with recurse() filters as for any other music21 objects, or through the [instrument.Instrument] shortcut:

from music21 import *

# weber = corpus.parse('weber')
lili = corpus.parse('aloha_oe')
for inst in lili[instrument.Instrument]:
    print(repr(inst), inst.midiProgram, inst.getContextByClass(stream.Part))

 <music21.instrument.Soprano 'P1: Soprano'> 53 <music21.stream.Part Soprano>
 <music21.instrument.Alto 'P2: Alto'> 53 <music21.stream.Part Alto>
 <music21.instrument.Tenor 'P3: Tenor'> 53 <music21.stream.Part Tenor>
 <music21.instrument.Bass 'P4: Bass'> 53 <music21.stream.Part Bass>
 <music21.instrument.Vocalist 'P5: Solo Voice'> 53 <music21.stream.Part Solo Voice>
 <music21.instrument.Piano 'P6: Piano'> 0 <music21.stream.PartStaff P6-Staff1>
 <music21.instrument.Piano 'P6: Piano'> 0 <music21.stream.PartStaff P6-Staff2>

# weber.measures(9, 13).show()

lili.measures(12, 16).show()

 

 

 

lili.measures(12, 16).show('midi')

This MIDI player only runs in trusted notebooks. In JupyterLab: File → Trust Notebook, then re-run this cell.

x = stream.Stream()
x.insert(0, instrument.Clarinet())
x.append(note.Note('C5', type='whole'))
x.show('midi')

This MIDI player only runs in trusted notebooks. In JupyterLab: File → Trust Notebook, then re-run this cell.