transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory

transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory is a skill for Claude Code from kennethreitz/pytheory. It costs 85 tokens per session (1,184 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A music tool that turns recordings or MIDI files into editable notes and converts music into formats such as MIDI, sheet music, or guitar tab.

In plain words
What is it for?
Transcribing WAV or other audio into notes, identifying chords, importing MIDI, and exporting melodies or scores as MIDI, MusicXML, LilyPond, ABC, or guitar tab.
Why use it?
It helps when music exists as an audio recording or one file format but needs to be used in another format.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the composing-with-pytheory plugin — 6 skills shipped together

Good fit Transcribing WAV or other audio into notes, identifying chords, importing MIDI, and exporting melodies or scores as MIDI, MusicXML, LilyPond, ABC, or guitar tab.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory
About the project

PyTheory is a Python toolkit for exploring music theory and composing music, with immediate audio playback and visual representations such as guitar tabs and chord diagrams. Musicians and programmers use it to create arrangements across multiple musical systems, instruments, rhythms, and effects. The catalogue add-ons provide agent guidance for working with the project.

kennethreitz/pytheory · 1,639 stars · on GitHub · pytheory.org

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add kennethreitz/pytheory --skill transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kennethreitz/pytheory

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install composing-with-pytheory, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 85 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,184 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00085 $0.01184
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.00592
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00237
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00118

Measured 11d ago against content hash 0e568e432a79, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

plugin/plugins/composing-with-pytheory/skills/transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory/SKILL.md · 110 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 110 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Transcription & Notation

Getting music into PyTheory from audio/MIDI, and out to MIDI, sheet music, and tab.

Transcribe a recording → notes / MIDI

from pytheory import Score

score = Score.from_wav("hum.wav", bpm=80)        # estimates tempo if bpm omitted
for name, part in score.parts.items():
    print(name, len(part.notes), "notes")
score.save_midi("hum.mid")
  • Score.from_wav(path, *, bpm=None, quantize=None, split=False, fmin=50, fmax=1500). quantize=0.25 snaps to sixteenths; split=True separates a full mix into bass + melody (and drums) instead of one monophonic melody part.
  • .m4a/.mp3 work if afconvert/ffmpeg is available; WAV always works.
  • CLI equivalent: pytheory transcribe hum.m4a out.mid (add --split, --quantize 0.25, --bpm 90).

Identify the chord in an audio buffer

from pytheory.audio import identify_chord
import scipy.io.wavfile
sr, data = scipy.io.wavfile.read("clip.wav")
identify_chord(data, sr)
# {'symbol': 'D7', 'confidence': 0.76, 'notes': ['D', 'F#', 'A', 'C']}  (or None)

Returns a best-guess symbol with a confidence (0..1) and the detected notes, or None if it can't tell. Works best on clean, sustained chords; it's a real-time recognizer, not a perfect oracle. (The live version is pytheory tune --chords, in the guitar skill.)

Import MIDI

from pytheory import Score
score = Score.from_midi("song.mid")

Export to every format

score.save_midi("song.mid")                                  # MIDI (drums ch 10)
open("song.abc", "w").write(score.to_abc(title="Song", key="C"))
open("song.xml", "w").write(score.to_musicxml(title="Song"))   # MusicXML for notation apps
open("song.ly",  "w").write(score.to_lilypond(title="Song", key="C"))
print(score.to_tab("part_name"))                             # ASCII guitar tab for a part
  • to_tab(part_name, tuning="guitar", frets=24) turns a single part into tab.
  • to_musicxml opens in MuseScore/Finale/Sibelius; to_lilypond engraves to PDF via LilyPond; to_abc is compact plain-text notation.

Read the full file on GitHub · 110 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 110 lines · 85 tokens per session scan A 0e568e432a79

Subscribe to this mod's changes

transcription-and-notation-with-pytheory is a skill published in the GitHub repository kennethreitz/pytheory (1,639 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 85 tokens to every session and 1,184 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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