musif: a Python package for symbolic music feature extraction

TL;DR

musif is a Python package that simplifies the extraction of a wide range of features from symbolic music scores, supporting multiple formats and enabling custom feature creation for music analysis tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, user-friendly Python toolkit for automatic feature extraction from symbolic music data, including custom feature development capabilities.

Findings

Supports multiple music formats including MusicXML, MIDI, MEI, and Kern.

Includes a large set of pre-implemented musicological features.

Facilitates easy extension and customization for diverse music analysis applications.

Abstract

In this work, we introduce musif, a Python package that facilitates the automatic extraction of features from symbolic music scores. The package includes the implementation of a large number of features, which have been developed by a team of experts in musicology, music theory, statistics, and computer science. Additionally, the package allows for the easy creation of custom features using commonly available Python libraries. musif is primarily geared towards processing high-quality musicological data encoded in MusicXML format, but also supports other formats commonly used in music information retrieval tasks, including MIDI, MEI, Kern, and others. We provide comprehensive documentation and tutorials to aid in the extension of the framework and to facilitate the introduction of new and inexperienced users to its usage.