[LAU] Audio to midi, finding notes from an mp3

david gnome at hawaii.rr.com
Tue Sep 25 05:24:20 EDT 2007


Chris Cannam wrote:

>> There are a lot of programs that can turn audio recordings into MIDI
>> files. They all seem to be closed-source, proprietary, pay-money Windows
>> programs. My band leader and I tried out some of them (they can run
>> under WINE, typically, and my band leader uses Windows, anyway).
>>
>> Not a single one produced anything usable! They were able to identify
>> notes, and output them as MIDIs, but the output was pretty useless:
>> every note of every instrument on the same staff.
> 
> That's not a bad result for such a tough problem.  Even monophonic note 
> tracking is tricky, depending a great deal on the instrument.  Note tracking 
> in a dense polyphonic mixture is much harder (if it's possible at all).

I knew it was a tricky problem before we began, but he really wanted to 
find a solution to it, so we tried it. The one he eventually bought did 
a good job of turning pitches into notes, but couldn't track melodies. 
So each beat was a sheaf of tangled notes, with no way of telling which 
note was supposed to be part of which melody. At least, without a lot of 
intense listening while following the score - basically, the same amount 
of effort and time it would have taken to transcribe by ear in the first 
place ...

I had a roommate one summer who was in his fourth year at the Juliard 
(sp?) Conservatory. I had him transcribe a tape for me, of a commercial 
song with full string accompaniment. He got all the voices (solo and 
backup singers), the ordinary instruments (guitars, piano, some other 
solo instruments) and was happily transcribing *the full orchestral 
arrangement* before he decided that I probably wasn't interested in 
that! It took him less than two days of part time effort (he was working 
full time work, plus the other normal parts of life like sleep). (He 
also had perfect pitch - which quarter-inch audio cassettes do NOT have 
- so he transcribed sustained notes complete with the tape's wow and 
flutter ... )

An amazing talent. That is going completely unused as far as I know. He 
graduated a couple of decades ago and works for a book publisher in San 
Francisco, California ...

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community



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