Free tune library: where the music comes from
The falling-notes piano has a free library of over 2,000 out-of-copyright pieces. Every one comes from a project that lets anyone use, change and share its files, and every piece shows its own credit line when you open it.
The sources
| Source | License | Pieces |
|---|---|---|
| OpenScore Lieder Corpus – songs for voice and piano, typeset by OpenScore volunteers | CC0 1.0 | 1,121 |
| OpenScore String Quartets – the shorter quartets only | CC0 1.0 | 28 |
| The Mutopia Project – piano, guitar, choir and other pieces typeset by Mutopia volunteers (from its GitHub archive) | Public domain: 715 CC BY (2.5, 3.0 or 4.0): 161 | 876 |
| Classfern demo tunes – our own easy arrangements of traditional tunes | Classfern | 5 |
Thank you to the volunteers of OpenScore and the Mutopia Project, who typeset these editions and share them freely. OpenScore asks for credit even though CC0 does not require it, so we always give it. For CC BY pieces the credit line names the composer, the person who typeset the edition, the source and the license, and says that Classfern changed the file (notes only, repeats written out, split into parts for learners).
What we leave out
- Anything shared under a ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) or non-commercial license, or with an unclear license.
- Songs by composers who died after 1930 (for OpenScore) or after 1955 (for Mutopia, which only accepts music published early enough to be public domain in the US), so the music itself is out of copyright in both the UK and the US.
- Pieces that are very long (whole string quartets, for example), empty, or that our converter could not read reliably.
- Copyrighted songs. We never fetch them. For those, open your own MusicXML or MIDI file – it stays on your device.
How the pieces were made
Each file was downloaded once from the project's official GitHub archive and converted on our own computer – not on the website – into a small file of notes (a few thousand bytes). OpenScore files are MusicXML and are read by the same code the piano uses. Mutopia files are LilyPond text; we read them with our own strict LilyPond reader, which only keeps a piece when every bar check in the file lines up, every staff has the same length and repeats, and nothing jumps by more than two octaves by mistake. Lyrics, dynamics, ornaments and fingering are not included, and grace notes are left out.
Levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced) are worked out by computer from speed, range, chords and how busy both hands are. They are a rough guide, not a grade. If you spot a wrong note or a piece that should not be here, please use Report a problem at the bottom of the page.