Sheet music library

Question

I'm a python hacker looking to build a sheet music app. I'm comfortable with reading/understanding sheet music (played piano for many years). Here are my complete newbie questions..

Is there a standard for representing notes digitally? I don't want to reinvent any wheels.

Given a sequence of notes and durations, is there a library for displaying these in a sheet music format?

Basically I'm looking for a place to get started. I'm not heavily into graphics, so a existing open-source library would be awesome. If none exists in Python, I'm competent at Java/Javascript/C as well.

Thanks

Answer 1

Take a look at lilypond. It uses LaTeX to typeset sheet music. Its input format is simple text, and can be generated pretty easily with Python or whatever.

Abjad is a "Python API for Formalized Score Control" and a wrapper around lilypond, but I haven't used it and so can't vouch for it.

Answer 2

As far as I know, abc notation is still the de facto standard text format in traditional/folk music circles. There is quite a bit of software available for it, including abctool and abc2ly (part of GNU LilyPond), both of which are written in python. Being a self-described python hacker, I imagine you could turn either of these into a library without much trouble.