[ANN] Audio Waveform display

[Sivakatirswami]

Fascinating... I wonder how far we can take this: "analyze sound"  -- 
 > analyze song --> output notes. Here's is a specific application I  
would  be very interested in:

Take a vocal song and analyze the pitch-melody and output some  
musical notation. The idea is to "capture the tune."  In this case we  
need to display shifts in hertz over time, and not just amplitude.

Of course this may be inventing the wheel, but a search on the web  
doesn't turn up much other than MIDI to notation and some very  
obscure cmd line tools from the world of European polyphonic music.  
Maybe some of our other music wizard will chime in here. I had a tool  
for this years ago but they went out of business. I thought Finale  
had a plug in for it, but I don't see it and this is the premier  
notation program...

Even if thereis something out there... a rev app would be nice:

One would have to set up a range-distance in hertz for pitch changes  
that would be equivalent to a half step on the 12 note octave.   
73.333 hertz per step, I think...  The pitch wave form would set a  
marker every time the pitch changes by that much.... Now you could  
use known values (440 = A with a toleance of 2 ,  438-442 = the note A).

I always thought the "pollution" of a sound track (singer had  
instruments playing behind him or her) would make it nigh well  
impossible for artificial intelligence to pull out the voice only and  
export to notes. They have stuff for this that you can attach to a  
clarinet or an oboe, but thats a single sound, not a music  
recording... But if we had a GUI that showed pitches and the user  
could chose points through time as "the ones to use" then the program  
would use those points (which would have hertz values) and export to  
notation.

For the kind of Indian musical vocal I'm talking about, there will be  
a very strong melodic line, akin to recording a clarinet sans much  
else behind it. Outputting to western standard time values (quarter  
notes, half notes, whole notes) could be dispensed with initially  
(too big a mountain to climb) I would get the melodic line output and  
send it to one on our team in Indian Svaram notation and let them  
enter them into the tala. The indian system is very simple since it  
makes no attempt to offer an entire musical staff (chords), but you  
would just get, ala the old hypercard music notation (where minus  
equals flat and plus = sharp):  output like this:

Mohana raga: c d f g a c c a g f d c  or Mayamalavagaula; c c+ e f g g 
+ b c

  (I wrote some stuff in HC for this years ago, brought it into  
Supercard and then lost it...but I'm sure there is lots of stuff  
around still playing in this pond.)

Point: the output is a simple linear export of hertz values  
represented  as chars that = musical notes, separated by  a space.  I  
believe there is a convention for this linear form, already well  
established, (what you put for next octave or lower octave... etc.)   
that can even be read and played back as MIDI by Hypercard .... but  
it's been so long...

Sivakatirswami





On Jan 14, 2006, at 4:49 PM, Mark Smith wrote:

> Alejandro, there shouldn't be any problem using it in Windows, or  
> 'Nix for that matter, I just don't have anything but OS X machines   
> to test it on. It's all pure transcript.
>
> I still have a way to go until it's really finished, but hopefully  
> I'll get it done over the next few days.
>
> Mark
>