music21: get the voice/program/instrument of midi voice from a flat score?

Question

I have a simple script that uses music21 to process the notes in a midi file:

import music21

score = music21.converter.parse('www.vgmusic.com/music/console/nintendo/nes/zanac1a.mid')

for i in score.flat.notes:
  
  print(i.offset, i.quarterLength, i.pitch.midi)

Is there a way to also obtain a note's voicing / midi program using a flat score? Any pointers would be appreciated!

Answer 1

MIDI channels and programs are stored on Instrument instances, so use getContextByClass(instrument.Instrument) to find the closest Instrument in the stream, and then access its .midiProgram.

Be careful:

• .midiChannel and .midiProgram are 0-indexed, so MIDI channel 10 will be 9 in music21, etc., (we're discussing changing this behavior in the next release)
• Some information might be missing if you're not running the bleeding edge version (we merged a patch yesterday on this topic), so I advise pulling from git: pip install git+https://github.com/cuthbertLab/music21
• .flat is going to kill you, though, if the file is multitrack. If you follow my advice you'll just get the last instrument on every track. 90% of the time people doing .flat actually want .recurse().