[LAU] Polyphonic pitch detection

david gnome at hawaii.rr.com
Sat Oct 30 21:01:24 UTC 2010


Jonathan Gazeley wrote:
> On 10/30/2010 02:56 PM, allcoms wrote:
>> Last I checked it couldn't do polyphony as I think you desire but
>> there is a Linux app called waon you may want to try that converts wav
>> to MIDI.
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 2:06 PM, Paul 
>> Davis<paul at linuxaudiosystems.com>  wrote:
>>> On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 8:43 AM, Jonathan Gazeley
>>> <jonathan.gazeley at bristol.ac.uk>  wrote:
>>>> On 10/30/2010 01:24 PM, fons at kokkinizita.net wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> The chords all sound like rather classical harmony to me.
>>>>> You don't need a genius for this, it's the sort of thing
>>>>> any church organist would be able to do instantly.
>>>>
>>>> Well, I am a church organist, and have been for years.
>>>>
>>>> I can read music and play it, but unfortunately I seem to lack the 
>>>> ability
>>>> to listen to music and write it down if it's polyphonic. No problem 
>>>> if it's
>>>> monophonic.
>>>
>>> i've seen a demo of Clam doing this sort of thing, but again, its
>>> display is visual, not a list.
> 
> I've had a go with waon and it's done a far better job than anything 
> else I've tried today, so thanks for the heads-up.
> 
> I had originally thought the relative simplicity of this music would let 
> it be easily transcoded by software, but on second thought the pipe 
> organ has lots of other strong harmonics in each note, and this seems to 
> confuse pitch detection algorithms somewhat.
> 
> Maybe for the best results I will simply have to do it by hand (or get 
> someone else to) :(

Best results I ever got (transcribing a complete polyphonic arrangement) 
was having a friend with perfect pitch do it. He was graduating from 
Juilliard at the time, so he brought a whole lot of musical training and 
skill to the task. ;-)

Another thought I had once (when trying some automatic note recognition 
software) was to split the original audio into narrower frequency bands 
(say an octave's worth per band), and run the resulting tracks through 
the note recognition software separately. I didn't try it out, though, 
because I didn't have the time.

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


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