music21.analysis.metrical

Various tools and utilities for doing metrical or rhythmic analysis.

See the chapter User’s Guide Chapter 14: Time Signatures for more information on defining metrical structures in music21.

Functions

music21.analysis.metrical.labelBeatDepth(streamIn)

Modify a Stream in place by annotating metrical analysis symbols.

This assumes that the Stream is already partitioned into Measures.

>>> s = stream.Stream()
>>> ts = meter.TimeSignature('4/4')
>>> s.insert(0, ts)
>>> n = note.Note(type='eighth')
>>> s.repeatAppend(n, 8)
>>> s.makeMeasures(inPlace=True)
>>> post = analysis.metrical.labelBeatDepth(s)
>>> sOut = []
>>> for n in s.flatten().notes:
...     stars = "".join([l.text for l in n.lyrics])
...     sOut.append("{0:8s} {1}".format(n.beatStr, stars))
>>> print("\n".join(sOut))
1        ****
1 1/2    *
2        **
2 1/2    *
3        ***
3 1/2    *
4        **
4 1/2    *

music21.analysis.metrical.thomassenMelodicAccent(streamIn: Stream)

Adds an attribute, ‘melodicAccent’ to each note’s .editorial within a Stream object according to the method postulated in Joseph M. Thomassen, “Melodic accent: Experiments and a tentative model,” ‘’Journal of the Acoustical Society of America’’, Vol. 71, No. 6 (1982) pp. 1598-1605; with, Erratum, ‘’Journal of the Acoustical Society of America’’, Vol. 73, No. 1 (1983) p.373, and in David Huron and Matthew Royal, “What is melodic accent? Converging evidence from musical practice.” ‘’Music Perception’’, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1996) pp. 489-516.

Similar to the humdrum melac tool.

Takes in a Stream of Note objects (use .flatten().notes to get it, or better .flatten().getElementsByClass(note.Note) to filter out chords) and adds the attribute to each. Note that Huron and Royal’s work suggests that melodic accent has a correlation with metrical accent only for solo works/passages; even treble passages do not have a strong correlation. (Gregorian chants were found to have a strong ‘’negative’’ correlation between melodic accent and syllable onsets)

Following Huron’s lead, we assign a melodicAccent of 1.0 to the first note in a piece and take the accent marker of the first interval alone to the second note and of the last interval alone to be the accent of the last note.

Example from Thomassen, figure 5:

>>> s = converter.parse('tinynotation: 7/4 c4 c c d e d d')
>>> analysis.metrical.thomassenMelodicAccent(s.flatten().notes)
>>> for n in s.flatten().notes:
...    (n.pitch.nameWithOctave, n.editorial.melodicAccent)
('C4', 1.0)
('C4', 0.0)
('C4', 0.0)
('D4', 0.33)
('E4', 0.5561)
('D4', 0.17)
('D4', 0.0)