[LAU] Easiest way to extract score from an audio file

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 2013-12-22 at 02:44 +0100, Tim Goetze wrote:
> [Bob van der Poel]
> >On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 4:45 PM, Philipp Überbacher <murks at tuxfamily.org> wrote:
> >> I'm a really bad musician. I can play simple songs on the piano if I
> >> have the score. Now I know a nice little song that I'd like to play
> >> and sing. It's just piano and vocals and I'm sure that for any decent
> >> musician it would be a matter of minutes to figure out the score of this
> >> song. Is there some piece of software that can help to do this?
> [...]
> >Am I right in assuming that you do not have a score and want to play a
> >song that you heard on the radio (or some other audio source)? In this
> >case you'll probably have to rely on your ears and experience to
> >figure out the melody notes, chords, rhythm, etc. The only short-cuts
> >a computer will give you are the ability to loop back over sections.
> 
> Besides (and in addition to) looping, time-stretching can also be a
> great help in transcribing manually from an audio recording.  
> 
> Completely automatic music transcription is an active area of
> research, but the problem seems to remain somewhat thorny so far.  It
> appears that some proprietary solutions are already marketed but I
> have no idea what quality can be expected (but if I had to make a
> guess, it would be a very conservative one).
> 
> If you'll excuse the boldness, I'd like to recommend manual
> transcription as an invaluable tool to build your musicianship and
> your understanding of a particular piece.  And for most contemporary
> songs, getting the chord progression right is all it takes to create a
> credible reinterpretation.

People who are not talented can use mnemonics. For example, to identify
the distance, interval between two notes, learn some intervals from the
first two notes of melodic refrains, from music you like. Just play the
C major scale and A minor pentatonic for a while. Test how it does sound
if you play one note after the other, if you play every second note
etc.. Even without talent you will get a feel for the relation of notes.