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Clements Theory vs music21

Clements Theory

clementstheory.com

music21

music21.org

Side by side

FigureClements Theorymusic21
Price from£3.92/moFree
Free plan—Yes
Free trialYes—
Open source——
WebYesYes
Windows—Yes
macOS—Yes
Linux—Yes
Plans published31
Spec score · Music Theory Software8.2 (#6)8.3 (#5)
PurposeClements Theory offers online music theory study and practice for students and teachers, including preparation for music theory exams.music21 is a Python-based toolkit for computer-aided musicology.
SupportUsers can submit questions to the Q&A area for responses from the community and the maker's experienced staff, and contact support by email or telephone.The community mailing list offers help, while paid consulting is available at rates that vary by project.

Plans

Clements Theory

  • Individual — 3 months£17 a month
  • Individual — 6 months£27 a month
  • Individual — 1 year£47 a year

Clements Theory pricing →

music21

  • music21Free

music21 pricing →

In their own words

Clements Theory

Clements Theory has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.

Visit clementstheory.com

music21

music21 is a free Python toolkit for computer-aided musicology, used to study music datasets, teach music theory, edit notation, analyze music, generate examples, and compose. It includes a corpus of thousands of encoded works, plus tools for searching that corpus, plotting pitch, and performing advanced analysis such as nPVI. The toolkit works with MIDI and MusicXML and can be extended to handle other formats. Its documentation recommends MuseScore for viewing and editing notation, and describes MusicXML readers including Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico. Optional integrations include LilyPond, Matplotlib, SciPy, PyAudio, and Pygame; music21 can also be used in web-based Jupyter Notebook. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with web use through Jupyter. The toolkit is BSD-licensed and costs nothing. Some corpus works have separate license restrictions. Users need some familiarity with Python, and music21 works primarily with symbolic music data rather than sound waves; it cannot read notation directly from images or PDFs.

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