Display of music21, musicXML PNG objects using iPython Notebook/Enthought Canopy

Question

I am experimenting with the music21 library, in preparation for a Machine Learning project that involves genre classification and categorization. I and following some tutorials available here. I am using MuseScore as my MusicXML program, and I am trying to run the whole thing from iPython.

Although I can run the some of the turtorials from the terminal, some elements don't seem to run well from inside iPython. For example:

In [3]: sBach.show()
Out[3]: <music21.ipython21.objects.IPythonPNGObject at 0x10da0aa10>

The line above shows that the PNG object is created, but not displayed. The expected output for 3 above is the following:

Experimenting with the following iPython command, I get a placeholder for an image, but not image.

In [6]: %load_ext music21.ipython21.ipExtension
In [7]: sBach.show()

I can't find any problem with my MusicXMLPath. This tutorial refers to the use of musc21 with Anaconda, but all my developments is done with Enthought, so I prefer not to run another virtual environment to use music21 with iPython.

Is there any way to run music21 in an Enthought/iPython notebook?

Answer 1

I have been grappling with this issue myself. ... Have you set your musicxmlPath in music21? If you have not, it's done via environment.set(key, value). You can query for available keys with environment.keys(). I hope this isn't too simple an answer, but it cleared up the problem for me.

Answer 2

This should be in the iPython music21 documentation somewhere, my apologies: iPython in music21 requires Lilypond to be installed for images to be generated within the notebook itself. There hasn't been (and won't be until MuseScore 2.0 is released) a way using MusicXML to generate PNG images of scores directly.

Edit: 2015 July; music21 2.0 w/ MuseScore 2 will generate the PNG images with MuseScore if it is installed and fallback to Lilypond if it is not installed.