Are you talking about audio files (wav, mp3) or MIDI? Converting audio files into discrete notes ("music recognition") is seriously non-trivial, although there are some commercial products you might be able to use for this. On the other hand, you could draw a spectrographs without too much trouble. As
For reading the audio file, you could start with the built-in wave module to read uncompressed WAV files, and worry about other formats later on. Any external audio converter will be able to save as WAV (sox on Linux is one such program) Tkinter's Canvas will work nicely for display, particularly because it's absurdly easy to convert Canvas contents into PostScript for printing. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list