Application for creating music sheets for composers

[threehalves]

We have made a new application for composers that automatically creates the music sheet from the songs you have played. Very useful for composers who like playing music for a long hour, want to be spontaneous and don't want to write down notes. (It works using wavelegths) 

[perfect_pitch]

HAAA... As a man who does this for a living, I wouldn't trust a computer to notate music to save my life.

I bet you this is a whopping failure.

[ted]

Have there been some new developments in this task ? The first part, which amounts to recognising all individual notes played in a piano piece, I understood was still an unsolved problem. The second part, that of writing a reasonably good written approximation, would seem to be a human task, even if all pitches were known. This if only because of the near impossibility of writing unambiguous notation of most spontaneous rhythm of any complexity.

All programs purporting to do these things which I have tried do not work unless the music is very simple, in which case a computer solution is redundant anyway. I would need to see what it did with a reasonably complex passage of my improvisation before buying anything.

[thesixthsensemusic]

HAAA... As a man who does this for a living, I wouldn't trust a computer to notate music to save my life.

I bet you this is a whopping failure.

I can assure you it's not. There's applications that allow to succesfully identify a piece of music, from a database of hundreds of thousands, by whistling the tune into your phone.

Also, there's a multitude of music production software suites like FL Studio and Cubase, that allow one to enter an improvisation via a MIDI keyboard, then save all the notes played into a block pattern containing the MIDI sequence. One can quantise this, so set a sort of accuracy level and have the computer re-align all misaligned notes.

That means, that the technological basis for this has existed for many years. Haven't looked into the application myself but it is defo possible, but only saves you time, it will not get you a perfect end product as a computer will always either miss out a few mistakes or overcorrect things that were not needed to be corrected.

[ted]

There is also the device known as a "piano bar", which fits over the keyboard of a piano and records key presses. This effectively generates the same result as recording on a digital piano. In either case, there remains the difficult task of transforming a hodge-podge of notes into some semblance of readable musical notation of use to pianists. Unless the rhythm and phrasing is extremely simple and regular this problem is beyond a computer at present.

The first part of automatic transcribing, that of detecting all pitches played to generate a sound wave, remains intractable despite much effort over many years attempting to apply Fourier series and such. As I understand it, the main difficulty is not so much detecting that certain frequencies are present, as mp3 encoding does, but finding precisely where notes start and finish along the time line. If it were possible to reliably locate exactly where a note starts in a waveform, things would be more promising, but so far nobody has been able to do this.

Perhaps the problem will yield to an entirely new approach using techniques not lying along obvious lines. The very best human ears, for example those of people like John Farrell, can do it with amazing accuracy, so it is probably a matter of time.

As my own improvisation is probably not notatable at all, the issue has long since ceased to bother me, but any outstanding problem has a certain intellectual charm.

[perfect_pitch]

Hey Ted - Would be interesting to see how accurate that improvisation I notated for you a while ago turns out using the software... would be interesting to see the comparison.

[oxy60]

I have software on my computer that does everything like that and more. If I had enough musical ideas to last an hour it would easily handle that and not only produce sheet music but allow me to edit all aspects of the piece! This is midi today.

[andrewkoay]

Such software already exist, just use a MIDI keyboard and quite a lot of different music notation software packages are able to transcribe what you have played into a semi-useable score (you need to lower the sensitivity by a LOT, and transcribing any complicated rhythm is only going to screw up the system, it seems that computers are just not very good at rhythm).

I personally dislike using these software, as the time you need to fix all these rhythmic errors that the software does (and your own playing), might as well be used to write down all these notes on a good piece of manuscript book and/or thinking of newer ideas. I just use my phone to record all my ideas in audio format, for e.g. humming a tune, or improvising on the piano. To be honest, I find that less than 10% of the ideas are really good and it would be a waste of time to put all of them into score anyway. I keep a digital folder on Dropbox to store all my musical ideas. Then I listen to them sometimes, add new things to it, string different ideas together, imagine the structure of the piece and how it is going to sound like, what effect do I want to give to the listener. When it all clicks together, then I write them down, using plain manuscript paper. By that time I would probably have quite a good idea of how to piece would sound like already.

[oxy60]

Such software already exist, just use a MIDI keyboard and quite a lot of different music notation software packages are able to transcribe what you have played into a semi-useable score (you need to lower the sensitivity by a LOT, and transcribing any complicated rhythm is only going to screw up the system, it seems that computers are just not very good at rhythm).

I personally dislike using these software, as the time you need to fix all these rhythmic errors that the software does (and your own playing), might as well be used to write down all these notes on a good piece of manuscript book and/or thinking of newer ideas. I just use my phone to record all my ideas in audio format, for e.g. humming a tune, or improvising on the piano. To be honest, I find that less than 10% of the ideas are really good and it would be a waste of time to put all of them into score anyway. I keep a digital folder on Dropbox to store all my musical ideas. Then I listen to them sometimes, add new things to it, string different ideas together, imagine the structure of the piece and how it is going to sound like, what effect do I want to give to the listener. When it all clicks together, then I write them down, using plain manuscript paper. By that time I would probably have quite a good idea of how to piece would sound like already.

What you say about it is true for the novice. If you learn the software it will work for you. If you want it to notate a complicated rhythm then you must play it correctly.

[ted]

Hey Ted - Would be interesting to see how accurate that improvisation I notated for you a while ago turns out using the software... would be interesting to see the comparison.

Yes, it would. For the sake of a couple of dollars I might try it, although like you, I am very sceptical. I downloaded a trial version of a prominent transcribing program once and fed it the maximum few seconds of improvisation. The results were absolutely hopeless. Could have done better myself and my ear is putrid. My memory, however, turned out to be far better than I imagined once your ear gave me a basis to work from. I still can't explain that, but finding out about it has helped me a great deal.

[j_menz]

What you say about it is true for the novice. If you learn the software it will work for you. If you want it to notate a complicated rhythm then you must play it correctly.

Suppose I were to play a waltz with a Viennese lilt. Proper scoring dictates that it be notated straight, but the lilt may well be the preferred playing style. How would software cope with that? Or a swung beat? These are neither especially complicated, but the playing is not strictly in accord with the notation when both are correct.

[ted]

Suppose I were to play a waltz with a Viennese lilt. Proper scoring dictates that it be notated straight, but the lilt may well be the preferred playing style. How would software cope with that? Or a swung beat? These are neither especially complicated, but the playing is not strictly in accord with the notation when both are correct.

Agreed. Notation is a very crude visual representation of musical sound; it is not the music itself. However, two hundred or more years of Western tradition have inculcated the notion that it is, that the end product of creation really has to be a piece of paper with marks on it. A corollary of this deeply infused but completely wrong assumption is that improvisation is a poor man's composition, at best a transient process to imitate established notational forms of the past. As you imply, it is in the area of rhythm that notation is completely hopeless. Most intuitively felt rhythms of any real interest cannot be notated at all; unless of course one's conception of rhythm has become so atrophied as to exclude all but notational rhythm. And a saddening number of highly trained, even technically brilliant players seem to lie in that category.

[ted]

This point partly caused the abrupt termination of lessons I once had from a very prominent local musician. "Your music is simply out of time, Ted," he would say. "What you are doing has no beat, no metre." Well of course, any fool could hear that, but it had vital rhythm and no mistake. Rhythm is an infinitely deeper property than notational groupings, metre or beat. What he meant by implication was probably that he couldn't think outside notational rhythm. As you can imagine, the interaction deteriorated after that.

[oxy60]

It is very difficult for both the human ear and a computer to determine what is being played if there is no beat value with which to measure the length of the notes.

[perfect_pitch]

NO, but a human can make a very good educated guess. A computer can't.