Using music21
with the Jupyter (iPython) Notebook¶
Setting up the Jupyter environment¶
To get music21
to work it’s best to have a good pip installation
first. Then you should be able to simply install jupyter (and IPython if
you don’t have it):
$ sudo pip install jupyter $ sudo pip install ipython
Using the web-based Jupyter Notebook¶
Start jupyter in a directory you want to save files by typing.
`$ jupyter notebook`
Now in the webbrowser you can type commands such as the ones below:
from music21 import *
c = chord.Chord("C4 E4 G4")
c.isConsonant()
True
All other normal music21
commands will work as they should
Displaying graphics inline¶
By default, you cannot just call .show() because you’ll open up your MusicXML reader locally...
c.show()
<music21.ipython21.objects.IPythonPNGObject at 0x1054dcf60>
Nor does just generating a lilypond PNG or PDF work as you’d like – this will display it on the screen but not in your browser:
c.show('lily.pdf')
Instead do this:
%load_ext music21.ipython21
Now this will work:
c.show()

If you don’t want to do that, then instead do this...
from IPython.core.display import Image
Image(filename=c.write('lily.png'))
SVG is much faster, but it doesn’t work, sadly...
Image(filename=c.write('lily.svg'))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ValueError Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-9-a78ad09b705c> in <module>()
----> 1 Image(filename=c.write('lily.svg'))
/Users/cuthbert/anaconda/lib/python3.4/site-packages/IPython/core/display.py in __init__(self, data, url, filename, format, embed, width, height, retina, unconfined, metadata)
731
732 if self.embed and self.format not in self._ACCEPTABLE_EMBEDDINGS:
--> 733 raise ValueError("Cannot embed the '%s' image format" % (self.format))
734 self.width = width
735 self.height = height
ValueError: Cannot embed the 'svg' image format
Whole pieces will show properly also now that the extension module is loaded
b = corpus.parse('bach/bwv66.6')
b.show()

And that is basically it! We use sphinx
for interwiki links, which,
sadly, won’t show up on the notebook, but should render properly.
But I did make a sphinx-markdown Notebook extension. When it’s ready, I’ll put it up. Make a directory “sphinx-markdown” in a “usability” directory in “nbextensions” (mine is at “~/Library/Jupyter/nbextensions”). And put this file there as “main.js”: [https://gist.github.com/mscuthbert/6411762f98f3536712e0]
Check to see if it exists:
import notebook
notebook.nbextensions.check_nbextension('usability/sphinx-markdown', user=True)
True
Load it with:
E = notebook.nbextensions.EnableNBExtensionApp()
E.enable_nbextension('usability/sphinx-markdown/main')
Save, and reload. Then test it with a markdown cell like:
For more information, see, installing IPython/Jupyter for Music21.
And you should get this output:
For more information, see, installing IPython/Jupyter for Music21. :-)