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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?"
There are a wide variety of these programs. I use NoteEdit. It was very hard for me to install it on my SuSE 9 machine, but it works well. Make sure you have TiMidity server, which is used for playback, installed and running or else NoteEdit will crash as soon as you start it, giving a cryptic error message. Sometimes running TiMidity will interfere with other sounds on my box, which is annoying, so I have to turn it on and off. If you want to print music you've inputed to NoteEdit, you need LaTeX installed. Remember, the commands to convert a LaTeX file to a musical score are:
$ 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. 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. I often typeset complex mathematics, but I have not yet been able to master musixtex, so good luck there.
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I'm assuming you don't want MIDI despite its wide range of support and whatnot. It is limited, however, so I can see why you'd like something better. Honestly though, have you tried using MIDI? It's decades old and still used widely.
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For simple songs and melodies there are various utilities that use abc music notation.
Here is a page listing them: http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/
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/
Another free system is Rosegarden:http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
Denemo is decent, too. Simple to use and has quite a few features, including playback, which i'm not sure is fully working.
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As an alternative you can use the ABC format. 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. It's free and should let you drag and drop notes to recreate the score and then play it back as MIDI.
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Plus, you'll then be able to practice anywhere there's a piano, rather than being tied to your computer.
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.
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I used the Noteworthy Composer demo a while back, it is a nice score-based midi editor.
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Try Finale at http://www.finalemusic.com/ from Code software.
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.
Several semesters of music theory in college - three hours a week analyzing and two hours a week singing - did amazing things for my sightsinging ability. Go to your local university music department and audit a class, if that's an option. You will learn far more than you thought you would. Before that class, I couldn't find middle C on a piano. Now, I can sing just about any interval you like, up to and including twelve-tone stuff. It ain't just me.
:P Singing isn't really too much farther off.
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.
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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 :)).
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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 inputting scores is much faster via this method.
Since nobody has mentioned it yet, the best place to find music and sound related software for Linux based systems is Dave Phillips's site linux-sound.org. It lists, among other things, lots of notation software and helpful tools for musicians.
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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. 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.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
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 system developed maybe in 1930s or 1950s for guitarists who didn't know musical notation. Notes were entered as A-G with sharp and flat symbols and a number for duration. Since bass lines tend not to have a lot of trills and complexities, it would probably be easy to transcribe from the music sheet into a text file using this system. I cannot recall the name of the system or even think of a good search term, sorry.
I do recall that there was at least one freeware music editor from the early 1990s that could read these text files and would generate a simple MIDI file as output. Again I don't recall any names, sorry. Also it was DOS software so I doubt that it would be relevant today.
There are any number of freeware MIDI handlers out there that would take care of actually playing the result.
Have you given any thought to looking for a free library of music that would have the pieces you are singing? It might be easier to locate mpgs or whatever and use the playback software to filter out everything but the bass portion.
In any event, probably the easiest approach is the low tech one: ask someone in your music group if they would mind playing the bass line for you on a piano or organ. That could also give your director a chance to clarify what *he* wants from you, which might well be a bit different from the original score.
HTH
http://www.finalemusic.com/notepad/default.aspx
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 scanning IIRC which can be nice (scan in a piece of sheet music and it interprets the notation) though its not so hard to find a copy of Finale 2006 floating around if you look.
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NoteEdit seems pretty good to me. I just entered the Free Software Song into it with no trouble at all, and created an attractive printable version by exporting it as a Lilypond score. It's the easiest Linux program I know of for doing what you want, and NoteWorthy Composer is the easiest Windows program for it. So you have two choices. Either try out some of the programs people are listing, or listen to trolls and don't do anything.
Despite disagreeing with you minutes earlier and calling you a troll, Hydrogen seems like a pretty cool program; thanks for cluing me in.
For fun, Don also maintains the Extremes of Conventional Music Notation where he records the extremes found in written music. Some interesting excerpted tidbits:
There are many others, quite interesting.
I'm going to go with the obvious answer (which has already been stated several times), which is just to plain old learn to read music. Sure, a computer can aid in that process to some degree, but really, your best bet is sitting down with the music, a pianoish instrument, and learn to play out the lines and sing along with them. If you're only dealing with the bass lines, it's not like you'll need to be terribly proficient at piano playing to do this.
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Also, something that the original parent mentioned that is being neglected by nearly every comment is that choral music often has odd time and key changes thrown in from time to time. Not necessarily your typical 4/4 with a measure of 3/4 thrown in, but oftentimes 4/4 switching to 5/8 to 7/8 to 3/4 back to 4/4 (yeah, a somewhat extreme example, but still...things can easily get far more complicated than that). Throw in a key change or two during all of that and you'll easily get lost in some basic program that doesn't have good facilities for these sorts of changes. You'll end up spending more time dealing with the program than you would dealing with the music. If the time changes alone are enough to throw you for a loop, sit down with a tape recorder and clap and count out the rhythms (yeah, basic intro to music theory type stuff). Again, the solution will most likely be a low tech one based around learning the basics. You don't walk up to a writer and say "I don't write good. Do you know of a computer program that will make me write like Shakespeare?" (Or to put it in geek terms, "I don't care about learning programming fundamentals, but I want to write an app that does x, y, and z.")
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I understand that noone wants to pay $500 for a piece of software for most hobbies. I don't understand why people are always looking exclusively for free software. Often there are packages for $20-50 that exactly fill the needs of what people are asking. I have seen several packages that fill this need in that price range. While it is true that he won't be able to modify them, they meet the needs of what he is asking.
Don't get me wrong. OSS is cool and is changing the way people think about software. I just don't think that it should always be a crucial factor when looking for software to solve a problem.
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Now if anyone knows of any open-source software which can musically perform, I'd be interested. Most computer playback has all the nuance of a calculator.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
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The second note of Mary Had A Little Lamb is the second scale degree (starts on 3). The interval between these two notes is a major second. The interval between the first and third notes is a major third. I don't know where this minor third of yours is coming from.
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LilyPond is a pretty good one, although it has an odd interface for some (text files) and is primarily a TeX interface to create pretty notation, not for playing. Personally, I find that the text input means less fighitng with a GUI to get it to do exactly what you want.
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