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@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
authenticity, honesty, community
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