22 Dec
2013
22 Dec
'13
2:44 a.m.
[Bob van der Poel]
On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 4:45 PM, Philipp Überbacher
<murks(a)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.
Good Luck,
Tim