making sheet music?

Whistle
1

At one point during the couple weeks that I have been participating in this forum I read about a free application that creates notes from recordings. Now I can’t find the thread.

I am trying to convert songs to whistle from memory. Since I am way new at this I am focusing on slow songs grin. I am also trying to commit these songs to memory rather than writing the notes down.

Some of my more notable failures are:

“Down in the River To Pray” from the movie O Brother…

“O Jerusalem”, a British Hymn from the age of Empire.. I heard it first on an Emmerson Lake and Palmer albumn. Many years ago.

While practicing the scales I noticed that “Little Drummer Boy” is easy to play with.. up to a point. I was looking for notes on that particular ditty for the holiday.

Remember please, that I am no musician THIS is my first attempt at music and although I love it I have little experience or knowledge to draw upon.

In short… HELLLLLLP!

(I originally yelled HELLLLLPPPP! but sounded a bit like Sylvester the cat)

2

there was a bit about Noteworthy Composer converting Midi files into printed scores. Recordings, hm, I don’t think they do those yet. You can get a slow downer at Ronimusic.com which slows the music down for you to facilitate learning but that’s,as far as I know, as easy as it will get for you.

3

I don’t know of any free software that’ll take midi or recording input and convert it to sheet music. I know that Finale (from Coda Music) will do it with MIDI files…but Finale’s far from free!

I don’t want to just post the sheet music, and deprive you of a learning experience (which seems to be what you’re shooting for), but if you’re interested, I know the tune and can probably notate it realtively quickly and send it.

Greg

4

Noteworthy will take a MIDI file and convert it to sheet music. It’s not completely “automagic”, it requires you to input a set of parameters that it asks for (stuff like time/key signature, shortest note value) and sometimes you gotta tweak them a little. It gets the best results with stuff that has been written and converted to MIDI; for those things that have been recorded from a MIDI keyboard you often get funky timings arising from the player’s different rhythmic feel; but I’ve found it really useful at times.

There is S/W that converts from audio to notation (my Stick teacher uses one version), but I can’t remember the name. It’s far from free, anyway, quite expensive.

joe

5

I don’t know of any music that does recordings but several packages do midi files. Melody Assistant is the one I use.
Here’s a link to Melody](http://www.myriad-online.com/enindex.htm%3EMelody) Assistant Website and a copy of a post I did some time ago about midi and Melody Assistant.

Melody Assistant Midi files can be separated into 2 types. Computer generated and Instrument generated.

Computer generated midi are programed by a piece of software and some type of score. Instrument generated are created by someone playing an instrument (often a key board) through a midi interface.

Melody Assistant translates both. The Computer generated stuff comes out almost perfect with very little, if any, clean up neccessary. The instrument generated stuff come out a little verbose. It translate what is played almost exactly, including little pauses and rests the play may be putting into his performance.

When I converted ‘Gift of a Thistle’ it was from an instrument generated midi. It gave me 5 or 6 melody lines 2 harmony lines and 2 percussion lines. It included a lot of minor rests where the person playing the midi instrument was not exactly on beat. But it did identify 2 bag pipe lines, a flute/whistle line, and 2 string lines.
The midi file I was using passed the melody between all these voices.

Clean up was easy because after I made a change, I could alway replay the score by just pressing the play button. The play button, plays a midi (computer generated version) sound file of the score as it is now written. This feature is also good when trying to transcribe something by ear.

Another thing Myriad (makers of MA) is good at is upgrades. I’ve had my software for 3 months and gone through 2 upgrades. Each added or improved something on the product. The most recent upgrade allows you to not only print the score but you can now export the score in graphic format. It has always imported and exported in ABC format. The graphic format selection is limited to BMP but my Adobe Photoshop quickly converted the BMP to a GIF file so I could send it to a friend. Both upgrade were painless, no errors, no blow ups, not even any reboots required.

When I was looking for an inexpensive notation software package I looked at a number of software programs including Noteworthy Composer. At the time Melody Assistant was much better and gave me much more control. It’s intutive and pretty well supported through the website.
I have been suprised how persistant Myriad has been about adding needed features. it was allready more robust than Noteworthy, and Myriad just keeps making it better.

Once I get my scanner fixed I plan to get their OSR (optical score recognition) package that will let me scan standard notation into the Melody assistant. ( OSR is Like an OCR but for music notes instead of test characters.) I can then add harmony lines, custom chord acompanyments, etc. with the result of have group arrangements of some of my favorite tunes.

I keep planning on writting a full blown review of this package to send to Dale to add to the sight. But I keep putting off and generateing these little mini reviews.

Hope this answers your question about MA and its midi conversion.
And no, I am not a Myriad representative, I just really like their software, I think for 15 bucks, It can’t be beat.

6

MA is also my notation software of choice, reasonable cost of registration and
phenominal (for this day & age) support are big factors. We have recently been
experiencing some slowdowns and glitches with the newer versions, but am quite sure
that this is a systems rather than software issue.
One of my favorite tricks is to pull a MIDI file off of a music site such as
“CyberHymnal”, ( http://www.cyberhymnal.org/ )

Here?s another good one: http://www.snowcrest.net/lassen/midi.html
And: http://www.apostolic-voice.org/midi.htm

…convert it to written score with MA (which it usually does amazingly well), then
transcribe it if need be to “D” or “G” so as to be “whistle freindly”, edit the sound or
“instrument” setting to something that sounds like a whistle, and then if so inclined
concoct an arrangement or fiddle with harmony lines, or have it figure out guitar
chords. Although MA has a lyrics function, I have never had much luck with it -
although the Guillion Brothers seem to be constantly working on it.

As soon as I heard about OmER, the OCR for music, I got it right away, having
desired just such a program for years. Unfortunately, my experience has been that the
scanned score has to be perfectly clean and spotless or the prog just can’t deal with it.
Since the music I collect is sometimes 200 years old, this is a problem. Even with
“clean” copy, the results require so much editing that I found I could transcribe the
score into MA in about the same amount of time as it takes to work it through Omer.
Upgrades for Omer do not seem to come as frequently as for MA, but we are in hopes
that someday it will realize it’s potential to be a really usefull program.

Just last night we were surfing through some freebie / shareware download sites

(Sample: http://www.audiomelody.com/ )

and I noticed several interesting utilities offered, including one that seems to do just
what you are looking for - convert sound files to written score. Another one which I
may download converts various music file formats like MIDI and WAV and Mp3 and
back, so I suppose one could record audio into WAV, convert to MIDI, and have MA
bring it up as a score for you.

http://www.afreego.com/Categories/Multimedia/Audio_and_Sound_Tools/004523.htm
(SW; $29.95)

With a good clean instrumental track this might work, but I suspect that it wouldn’t
ake much orchestration to bollox thing up. Frankly, I’m a little skeptical, but if you
have the time and inclination to experiment, I would be interested to know your
results.

7

I also use Melody Assistant and second all the good things that Lee Marsh and others have said about this great and inexpensive music notation program. As far as converting actual audio files to music notation let me quote something interesting from a description I have of Cakewalk Pro Audio 9, a MIDI editing program.

With recent advances in digital audio processing technology, under certain circumstances, audio data can be scanned for pitch and rhythmic values. By using the Pitch Detection feature, you can have Pro Audio scan audio Events for melodic pitches and then turn that data into MIDI notes. Unfortunately, it works only in certain situations. The audio data can contain only a single-note (monophonic) melody being played by some kind of musical instrument. These are the only circumstances under which the feature will work, and even then the results aren’t very good.

When my copy of Pro Audio 9 arrives, I’ll try this feature on some whistle wave files and report on the results. I’m getting the software for other reasons but if the Pitch Detection feature works, then the MIDI files produced would convert to music notation and this might end all those hours spent transcribing CD whistle tracks!

Best wishes, Tom