Transcribing solo paino recordings

[Sherry C]

Hi,

Actually any transcriptions that are sold are supposed to also send royalties for the sale to the copyright holder of the song in question, which often explains the price of such.

And yes, there are some folks who are quite gifted at listening and transcribing recordings. We have some of those here in the forum as a matter of fact However, they use their ears to hear the instruments/notes and then Notation Composer to put the notes in. One very fine example of this procedure is in this thread here.

One can definitely get better with practice, but like all good things, there is a learning curve involved and just plain old putting time into it to get good.

ttfn,
Sherry

[brookbend]

Nah sherry. Playing is tough enough. Leave notation and transcribing to everyone else. Bye and thanx for answering.

[brookbend]

Speech recognition is more complicated than a few notes.

[Sherry C]

Hi,

Speech recognition is tougher than a few notes, but that's not what we're talking about here

I used to work in hearing research (Kresge Hearing Research Institute at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, USA), and research on speech recognition has been going on for decades, with a lot of funding from the government Given what I know of it as well as music, I would have to disagree as to a difference in complexity. Both are quite complex analyses - pretty much 4D. With both you have pitch (essential in some languages and definitely essential to music), duration, loudness, and timbre (formants in speech; timbre is essential to distinguishing between instruments and even different pitches from the same instrument).

Speech recognition is a much more universal application, and also more lucrative in terms of financial reward. Ergo a lot more time and effort have been spent there. Not so much (unfortunately) with musical analysis and transcription. You'll also notice that speech recognition technology typically requires some 'training' period for the software, as well as clearly spoken words by a single person. This is analogous to a single-note melody line for a clearly-played (eg. no vibrato, no reverb, etc.) instrument. Try singing to a speech recognition program some time and add vibrato and fermatas and other musical embellishments - the results will not be the same as with regular speech

As I mentioned previously, the Melodyne Editor actually does a phenomenal job of separating audio signals, but still does not put out a satisfactory (yet) MIDI for notation purposes unless it is a fairly uncomplicated piece (ie. a single-instrument with a "clean" recording.) It doesn't separate out the audio analysis on a per-instrument basis for multi-instrument pieces - that's a job that still requires a human to discern However, it is heartening that folks are still working on the problem.

I hope this helps explain part of the complexity and comparison of the technologies. Maybe it was more than you wanted to know (my kids tell me I do that often ).

ttfn,
Sherry

[brookbend]

I was a supplier to the speech recognition industry back in the 80's. Yes a **** of a lot more $ was put into that, and for decades longer. It also has a contextual / meaning challenge. Another brutal problem to overcome - which they've done.

So you're saying for clean, solo instrument solo's Melodyne is very good and reproduces notation accurately? These kind of solos are exactly what I need.

Usually CHORDS IN THE RIGHT HAND ARE NOT PRESENT in these solos. Does this help the output accuracy? [I use the solos to find the right notes and lines so I can improvise better, esp in keys I struggle with. I could learn some solos on my own. But I'm not 25 yrs old anymore. Time has much greater value today].

Melodyne is $99. Small change for me, if it works. Can't think of any accessory features needed. So the upper end packages not needed.

[Sherry C]

Hi,

Originally Posted by brookbend

So you're saying for clean, solo instrument solo's Melodyne is very good and reproduces notation accurately? These kind of solos are exactly what I need.

Melodyne is an audio editor that will give you a MIDI output but does not give sheet music notation. It is not our product, but is developed by Celemony. Melodyne plus one of our products - which will take that .mid file and transcribe it to sheet music - may get you where you want to go

Usually CHORDS IN THE RIGHT HAND ARE NOT PRESENT in these solos. Does this help the output accuracy?

Chord notes won't make any difference to the transcription accuracy, but they do help when improvising over changes (I play bass in a big band, and ergo have to read sheets AND know the changes if I only get chord names).

Melodyne is $99. Small change for me, if it works. Can't think of any accessory features needed. So the upper end packages not needed.

I don't know if the "Melodyne Essential" contains the MIDI export - which is what you would need for sheet music - or not. I have an older version of the Melodyne Editor (they've only with the latest release offered smaller subsets of features.) I guess the best thing to do is give it a trial run and see if it does what you want.

Do let us know if it works for you. We get a lot of queries about getting sheet music from audio recordings, so we're always interested in the results that others get from various resources.

ttfn,
Sherry

[brookbend]

How do you get a Youtube video file into Melodyne? How do I download the video? I guess after downloading I import into Melodyne?

[brookbend]

How do you get a YouTube video into Melodyne?

Do you import a downloaded video file into Melodyne.... or play the video, and get its audio into Melodyne vis a vis the recorder's microphones... I own a Zoom H5 recorder.

[Sherry C]

Hi,

My version of Melodyne only opens .wav files - so you'd need to get a .wav audio file of whatever you're wanting to work with, unless the newer version accepts other formats.

I was going to suggest asking some questions on their User Forum, but I see that they have closed the user forum with the advent of their latest v4 release. You can check the website (they have a number of video tutorials) as well as just contact them to ask questions.

ttfn,
Sherry