Slashdot Mirror
Converting a Musical Score to a Playable Melody?
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?"
I don't think this is a problem that a computer can solve for you. I think you need to learn to sight-sing like everyone else. If you can at least sing major scales, then I think practicing from a book like "Music for Sight Singing" by Robert W. Ottman (ISBN 0-13-189662-8) might be helpful. 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.
Anyway, I'm a music minor so maybe I am too much of a purist.
My other car is first.
MIDI is a wire protocol and physical interface for communicating between different instruments. (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)
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.
Problems? This is how UNIX works. One program handles sound. Another program handles typesetting. A third program handles data entry. This allows people to change one component without changing (or reimplementing) the others. It's a good thing. If you write your own typesetting engine, for example, you can still use the same software to edit and play the music. That's pretty cool. And it wouldn't happen if everything was one giant rolled-together piece of software.
:) If you know how to code, providing code would be good. That's how OSS works. Whining on slashdot about how something you didn't pay for is hard to use isn't going to get you sympathy or, for that matter, anywhere useful. Be part of the solution, not the problem :)
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
My other car is first.