OT: MIDI Keyboard Input > Output to Music Notation

[Sivakatirswami]

[[cc Revolution users... any music-midi buffs who have ideas-interest  
on this please contact me off list. This whole project is currently  
being worked up inside Revolution, Tamil songs, English  
transliteration, English translations etc. and I would love to  
integrate the music side in the same Rev framework if possible. It's  
probably the only single thing I miss from the old hypercard days:  
play "c d e f")

Aloha, Jeff: Thank you for sharing MIDI Keyboard. Is it possible to  
record the output to a running sound processing program? In  
particular: we use PEAK. I'm listening to some songs and then I want  
to play back the melody and record this... saving it to a MIDI file  
would also serve my purpose but I don't know how to  do that.

I'm not an expert in MIDI or JAVA, but I'm pretty savvy with OSX and  
the Mac... and could get up to speed with anything if I knew  where  
to go to find the "how to do it." resources...

What we are really looking for some tools that can take midi or sound  
input and output the notes in the old "Hypercard" notation format: c,c 
+,d... etc. Basically this would be a "pitch" analyzer of some  
kind... that output a parseable text stream that represented notes/ 
pitches (and note durations, if possible)

There may be other strategies: the "end" goal here is to document,  
and thus preserve, in notation form, certain melodies that are only  
known to a few elderly "folk" singers... in this case the music  
happens to be Tamil spiritual songs. The Indian style of raga  
singing  lends itself very well to replication by single note  
keyboard input. I have fairly good ear and can replicate the melody  
on the keyboard without much difficulty...but saving that and   
converting it to notation is the challenge. I could just send  
recordings to professionals and ask them to "write down the  
melodies," but that could take forever....

A massive music program like Finale, is not wanted: it's  way  
"overkill" for this project. Indian music is fundamentally a single  
note melodic line (no chords) and a full staff, double stave music  
format is not needed. It would seem  midi could be perfect for  
this... I mean if the input is to hit the A key on the key board to  
induce  the pitch note middle C... it would seem to be a "no brainer"  
that there must be *something* that can take that midi file and do  
the reverse: "listen" to the midi and output a text stream: C C# E F  
A F E, which lends it self to Indian style notation which is a  
textual notation form where notes are written underneath the words of  
a song on a single text line. "sa r ga ma"   i.e. it seems like it  
*could* be very simple: key in the song > to midi > output to notes.

TIA

Sivakatirswami
Himalayan Academy Publications
at Kauai's Hindu Monastery
katir at hindu.org

www.HimalayanAcademy.com,
www.HinduismToday.com
www.Gurudeva.org
www.Hindu.org