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Converting a Musical Score to a Playable Melody?

Posted by Cliff on

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?"

2 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Easy Question. by students · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Simon's Rock College
  2. Free music notation software by Ugmo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/