Harmonic Generation in a Whale’s Belly
Via oddmusic:
Dunno what it sounds like, because the ain’t got any samples up on the website yet. Coming soon, they say. This beast a beauty though, in appearance at least.
Score Processing, Part II
No-one exists here. We are still within the midst (or midsts? Which is it? Well, given that it is from the 15th century I guess I can get away with either. That’s how they used to roll.) of thanksgiving. No-one is here. Except me. I think my supervisor would have murdered me if I left this weekend, given that I was skipping around NYC for most of last week.
I did have some time to play around a bit more with the score processing. Here’s my standard guinea-pig type piece, Beethoven Op. 111:
Do you love the glorious widescreen? Oh wait… the embedded player doesn’t work with widescreen yet. Well, if you (like me) are hot for 16:9 you can watch the full thing here. HOWEVER. It still won’t have any audio. Why not? It turns out that synchronizing the audio is actually the real crux of this score analysis malarkey.
You see, the notes in the video are a literal transcription of the score (extracted from MusicXML versions of MIDI files), but no-one ever plays a literal transcription of the score. The tempos vary all the time. So making the audio match the notes is a much more difficult problem than getting the notes themselves. I have about five different ideas for getting this to work, but all of them are several day long programming sessions.
Still, the video looks kind of pretty, right?
Trumpet Hero
Trumpet Hero exists, courtesy of MAKE magazine:
I will marry with great glee whoever hacks together bassoon hero.
Score Processing, Part I
Dear regular readers, you know that fantastic idea I had last week about automatically analyzing scores? Well, it’s a bit more complicated than (the royal) we had hoped. Of course. Stuff like that always is. It’s the same with lab research: when I look back at the sum of the previous year’s work, it is frickin’ astounding how much effort I have put in, in order to advance such a tiny distance. Oh woe, woe is we.
But enough of the whining. Here is why it doesn’t work:
The top line is the first violin part from… well… any guesses? The bottom, in red, is the average amount of “stuff” happening at each point in time. Specifically, it’s a measure of the average pixel intensity — which is why it dips down when notes are being played, because there are more black pixels, which have zero intensity. If this system worked as well as I would like then every note would be associated with a dip in the red line. That does in fact happen, but the problem is that all the other junk also makes it dip, like those f’s and accidentals.
So I’m going to have to implement something a bit more sneaky, like a normalized cross-correlation. Instead of just looking at blackness, an NCC would search through the score for stuff that “looks like” a note. Unfortunately it’s a lot slower, and more difficult to program.
All Us Genus
Today I trundled and turned and hurtled upward up the upstate hills. And down. Off of 81 I couldn’t tell if the road was white from snow or salt, or if the black patches where all good, or icy. Since I am tapping out this text you can all rest all assured that everything went basically ok.
The last three or four or five days were spent in the city, meeting my parents and sister, who all flew over to visit from england (I think I prefer small letters for proper nouns — at least for countries). I was also interlacing this time with the usual G (proper nouns get a capital letter if a capital letter is all they are) visitation. We got tonnes of stuff done: sightseeing, eating, show-going, chatting, coming up with names for spaniels — all in such a short time. It’s so sad to say goodbye, and so weird waving my family off from 42nd street. I wish they could have stayed longer, and that G wasn’t so stressed out with her impending almost-final review. It was very fun though.
But after all of that planning and arranging and synchronizing I think I will appreciate the dull predictability of work tomorrow.
Well, for an hour or so.