Dear Max, what you describe sounds somewhat similar to gridly: https://github.com/openlilylib/gridly
I have never been in need for such an approach. Which is why I don't know enough about gridly to describe it properly. And it is not about spreadsheets just the time/voice-segmentation sounds similar to me. But perhaps you can have a look at it. More links: http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/Gridly-simple-Segmented-Grid-td171558.html#a171704 http://web.archive.org/web/20191223132852/http://lilypondblog.org/2014/10/segment-grid/ But implementing a conversion from spreadsheet to a Python list of lists is pretty straight forward, too. I would use pandas or openpyxl to read the spreadsheet. Sth. like import pandas as pd pd.read_excel(filename).values.tolist() I have doubts that I myself would like to edit it in a spreadsheet - I just appreciate the text based approach and git too much to do that. HTH Joram