mousike

Published

October 29, 2026

The mousike repository hosts a Python package and data resources for working with texts including ancient Greek musical notation. Musical notation is encoded in Zach Sowerby’s URN scheme. The Python package can parse the notation, align notation with textual editions, and translate musical texts to MIDI representations.

The Python package is available from Pypi. Data releases are in the releases directory.

Fonts

Mousike Notation is an openly-licensed TTF font with all the characters used to display Greek musical notation.

Data sets

The current data release is always available in the github repository’s releases directory.

Image service

At mousike-images.html, you can browse and cite openly-licensed images from the mousike collection, and from other collections published in IIIF manifests.

Companion webapp

agm (Ancient Greek Music) is a web app for reading the documents in mousike in an environment linking texts, notation, images and audio.

Read more

  • sources: digital editions of Greek texts with musical notation
  • data: versioned data releases
  • audio: interpreting texts as MIDI files
  • tutorials: use mousike to analyze musical texts
  • reference: technical notes