Converting a Musical Score to a Playable Melody? 78
SA_Democrat asks: "As a geek who has recently discovered that he has a voice, I find myself looking for a particular style of software. I've joined a local chorale group, and am often the only bass singer in attendance. This means that I have to puzzle out fairly complicated pieces of music and pick out the melody on a keyboard between rehearsals. As a person who decodes music rather than someone who sight-reads, I find this extraordinarily difficult, especially when managing differing key and time signatures within a given piece. Does anyone have any experience with open-source software that allows the user to enter a piece of music using musical notation, and then plays that piece? I have found an astonishing array of programs that will play MP3, WAV files etc. but have not located anything that uses this more old fashioned method. If possible, the software should understand common notation like time signatures, keys, glissades, and so forth. What does Slashdot recommend?"
Easy Question. (Score:5, Informative)
$ latex filename.tex
$ musixflx filename.tex
$ latex filename.tex
I got this wrong for a while, even with the VERY noticable reminder from NoteEdit.
One of the other programs available is Rose Garden [rosegardenmusic.com]. Rose Garden is more mature but also less intuitive and oriented towards synthesis as opposed to performances.
If you get to be hard-core about editing scores on your Linux box, the best program around for professional score engraving will already be installed on your computer with the LaTeX distribution you aquired for printing the output from NoteEdit. See this Giant Musixtex Manual [icking-music-archive.org]. I often typeset complex mathematics, but I have not yet been able to master musixtex, so good luck there.
Re:Easy Question. (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but just reading that laundry list of problems with the program, I'm thinking that it still needs a bit more work. To sum up:
NoteEdit is a good piece of software except:
1) It's very hard to install on a popular modern distro
2) It requires another piece of software to also be installed and running, otherwise you get an obscure error message and a crash
3) Sometimes running this program will screw up the sound from other programs, you need to restart it until the problem no longer occurs
4) If y
Re:Easy Question. (Score:5, Insightful)
As for it being hard to install, Debian didn't seem to have a problem with it. Not my cup of tea (I use emacs + lilypond + timidity), but it's not as bad as you would think. If you're a Windows or Mac user used to having everything under one GUI and one program performing thousands of tasks, it's a change in your workflow. But it's how UNIX works, and this program is not the first to work like this. (Look at any X program. It requires an X server to run. A sound program requiring a sound server is no different! Not every app can use the screen at once, so X manages it. Not every app can use the CPU at once, so the kernel manages that. Not every app can play/record sound/midi at once, so a sound server manages that.)
If there are other problems (with usability, etc.), I think the developers would like to hear about them so they can fix them
Re:Easy Question. (Score:1)
5) The three commands are for converting music saved in latex format to DVI for printing. It was a simple matter to write a shell script that can simplify this. Then you can configure noteedit to run the script automatically.
Re:Easy Question. (Score:1)
If you don't know how something works, you're up the creek when it doesn't. That's why I do all my music tasks with Linux.
Re:Easy Question. (Score:1)
Midi? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Midi? (Score:3, Informative)
It has nothing whatsoever to do with notation.
Re:Midi? (Score:1)
Re:Midi? (Score:3, Informative)
You may wish to investigate FInale, although I believe that will cost you a pretty penny these days.
Re:Midi? (Score:5, Insightful)
It has nothing whatsoever to do with notation.
And MP3 is a compression codec and has nothing to do with music, right?
MIDI is both a wire interface/protocol and a file format; it lends itself to describing music in terms of notes as opposed to waveforms, which is what this guy was asking about.
Re:Midi? (Score:3, Informative)
It does not describe music as notes, but as events, and has no direct representation of most score notations.
Some (most) Notation editors may well have export to MIDI files, and will probably allow playback via a MIDI device.
Also, most MIDI sequencing software will probably have some sort of notation view for entry. But that still doesn't change the fact that MIDI is not the answer, software that allows entry of Notation, and playback by
OSS Musical Notators (Score:2)
MIDI (Score:1)
Re:MIDI (Score:2)
http://www.finalemusic.com/notepad/default.aspx [finalemusic.com]
and pick up a FREE copy of finale notepad which isnt really the supreme "composing" software but will work for entry and playback. Unfortunately, the free Finale Notepad doeasnt support
Free music notation software (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a page listing them: http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/ [gre.ac.uk]
This lets you enter music using letters and other utilities will convert it into midi or wav files.
Something similiar and free is the Guido system. It is designed to handle more complicated pieces:
http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/AFS/GUIDO/ [tu-darmstadt.de]
Another free system is Rosegarden:http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ [rosegardenmusic.com]
Re:Free music notation software (Score:3)
Re:Free music notation software (Score:2)
Re:Free music notation software (Score:2)
Re:Free music notation software (Score:1)
For DOS users there is Pianoman, which is fairly advanced in terms of what it can do, up to and including timesharing the monophonic PC speaker between parts to simulate harmony. Pianoman was *the* way to go for music on the PC, until sound cards came along.
Re:Free music notation software (Score:1)
This is the first I have ever heard of this, despite that I have done *substantial* QBasic programming. (The prof in my Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis course told me I did things in QBasic that should not be done [in QBasic]. I used it for all of my assignments for that course, and then proceeded to continue to use it for the bulk of the programming I did for several more years until I learned Perl.)
Are you certain yo
Denemo (Score:1)
Lilypond (Score:4, Informative)
As an alternative you can use the ABC format [gre.ac.uk]. You can then use abc2ly to convert to Lilypond format and then use the command above to convert to MIDI. Example:
I know you asked for open-source software, but if you are using a Mac or Windows machine you might want to look at Finale Notepad [finalemusic.com]. It's free and should let you drag and drop notes to recreate the score and then play it back as MIDI.
Re:Lilypond (Score:2)
And if he does that (and the original edition he's working from is public domain), he might want to submit it to Mutopia [mutopiaproject.org]. And in fact, before he does that, he might want to check whether the piece he's learning is already on Mutopia. However, for choral music, CPDL [cpdl.org] seems to be the place that has the most music; unfortunately, they use a proprietary format (Finale).
get a keyboard (Score:1)
Plus, you'll then be able to practice anywhere there's a piano, rather than being tied to your computer.
Maybe you should learn to sight-sing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, I'm a music minor so maybe I am too much of a purist.
Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are.
> Knowing "how music works" is essential for singing it -- the notes
> on the page aren't randomly generated, you know. Therefore, knowing
> something about music theory would also help you. More than some
> computer program, anyway.
What's wrong with using the computer as a learning tool? Like the OP, I would like to learn to read music (he's farther along than I am). With the program I am looking for, I could enter bits o
Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Which leads us back to the original question...
Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing? (Score:2)
Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing? (Score:5, Informative)
A free alternative to Ottman: Eyes and Ears [lightandmatter.com]
Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing? (Score:2)
Parent is dead on (Score:5, Informative)
Also in my case, playin' French horn tends to make one need to know this stuff, since the intervals are too close to just mash the keys and hope the right note comes out.
Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing? (Score:5, Informative)
Irving Berlin [wikipedia.org] is a case in point. Despite being a gifted songwriter (literally hundreds of hits), he never learned to read music at all, and only learned to play the piano in one key. Solution: hire somebody to build a special piano that could transpose with the pull of a lever, and somebody else to transcribe the music and songs he created.
OK, not a solution for everybody. And besides, the musical skills you mention are certainly work acquiring. But there are passable technological substitutes. Berlin had no trouble finding them 80 years ago. He'd have even less now.
I'm told that Danny Elfman [wikipedia.org] also resorts to technological substitutes for musical training. But I find his work predictable and repetitive, so never mind.
Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing? (Score:3, Insightful)
> you mention are certainly work acquiring. But there are passable
> technological substitutes.
Like me, the OP appears to be looking for technological learning tools, not technological subsitutes for learning.
Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing? (Score:1)
Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing? (Score:1)
Re: Maybe you should learn to sight-sing? (Score:2)
If you're not sure of the basics, then learn them: read a book, or find a music teacher. There are probably some good resources online, too, of course.
But once you know what the notation means, then it's just a matter of practice. Lots of it! Spend time on your own, note-bashing; attend lots of rehearsals (especially if you're the only voice on your part, coz that forces you to work it out for yourself); get a friend or two to help if necessary.
I speak from experience here. Ever since I w
Re:Face time with the Director (Score:2)
Re:Nothing. (Score:1)
Re:Nothing. (Score:1)
Noteworthy Composer (Score:2)
Finale!!! (Score:2, Informative)
It will let you enter music note by note, or from a midi keyboard. Best of all, it will let you import sheet music with your scanner, very slick.
I know that at my local college I can pick up the student edition for next to nothing.
My take (Score:4, Informative)
As a composer and instrumentalist, I love Rosegarden. I haven't had a chance to produce any major works in it yet, though; I'm still familiarizing myself with it. Regardless, the power of it is incredible.
Only problem is it can be a bit of a hassle to get working. Other than that, I love it.
Most of my recent pieces I have done in Steinberg Cubasis VST (Creative Edition), just because I can use the Sampletank2 Free VST instrument with it (in Windows). If you'd like to hear some of my stuff, you'll have to visit my site and find em' (sorry, gotta save bandwidth, so lazy people aren't just downloading because they have phat pipe :)).
C-64 (Score:1, Redundant)
Try LilyPond (Score:2, Informative)
Like TeX, LilyPond uses text input rather than a GUI (although GUIs exist which output in LilyPond format). It is a little awkward at first, but with practice I (and several others) have found that input
"Church oriented people"... (Score:1, Offtopic)
linux-sound.org (Score:3, Informative)
learn solfege (Score:3, Informative)
However, I think that improving your solfege skills directly a much better investment of your time, since you won't have to muck around with producing notation. It's something you can practice with a piano, but there is also software. If you run linux you can consider GNU Solfege [solfege.org]. It's got a lot of theoretical stuff that's not useful for a beginning singer, but there are also a lot of practical excercises IIRC.
Breakdown of what is needed (Score:2)
As I understand it, what you've got to work with is the bass portion of the musical score, and what you want is to hear it played. Based on this, you've got the following sequence of problems to deal with:
Without a very good, specialized OCR (think big $$$), the initial digitizing is going to have to be by hand. I recall looking at a plain text notation sys
Optical Music Recognition (Score:3, Interesting)
For fun, Don also maintains the Extremes of Conventional Music Notation [iu.edu] where he records the extremes found in written music. Some interesting excerpted tidbits:
There are many others, quite interesting.
Obvious (Score:2)
time signatures and keys (Score:2)
Why is OSS so important? (Score:1)
Don't get me wrong. OSS is cool and is changing the way people think about software. I just
Software interpretting the music, musically (Score:2)
Now if anyone knows of any open-source software which