Trumpet Hero
Trumpet Hero exists, courtesy of MAKE magazine:
I will marry with great glee whoever hacks together bassoon hero.
Tags: trumpet heroScore 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.
Tags: programming, score analysisAll 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.
More Open-Source Music
Hooray! Free sheet music for all!
I only just came across this site, even though all the drama of it reappearing happened half a year ago. I didn’t notice it back then because my visits into sheetmusicland only occur rarely. In fact I only go in search of scores for one of about, errr, two reasons:
- I’ve decided to try and play the piano again.
- I am obsessing about a particular passage in a piece of music, and want to know the key, or time-signature, or which instrument is making that funny noise (like that weird buzzing in Shostakovich 4)
Well hang onto your three-cornered hats, because today it was for another reason. The reason of animation. I had this totally awesome idea for animating a piece of classical music in which you’d have an orchestra layout:
And then the different sections would light up when they were playing. I thought it’d be interesting to get a visual feel for how the melodies are getting passed around, like you do with a live performance. Of course, in order to do this you need a copy of the score (or an insanely good ear and lots of time).
Instead of doing it manually — that is, looking at the score and by hand turning that into frames of animation — I want to automate it, at least a little bit. In the most basic version you don’t even need to try and work out which exact notes are being played. All you need to do is draw a line (or rather, a rectangular box) vertically across the clef and see how many black pixels there are inside. When a note is being played it will be darker than average. If you do this for the whole score you should have a pretty good indication of when notes are being played by each instrument.
Of course, things like this are always way easier to describe then to actually accomplish, but I’m gonna give it a shot when I get a bit of free time that isn;t spent playing on teh internets.
Tags: animation, classical music, orchestraNovelties
I hate the word “novel”. Scientists are obsessed with it. Not in the bookish sense, in the “like wow, that’s totally crazy” sense (which is how scientists talk). To give you an idea of how often it’s used, there are over 380,000 papers containing that word on PubMed (an index of US life-sciences papers) ALONE. That doesn’t include papers from physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. Novel this, novel that. Everything is freakin’ novel. It’s not an “unusual” enzyme, or a “creative” technique, they are “novel”. Eugh. I can’t stand it.
This rant (I think, I’ve completely sidetracked myself now) came from that being the first word which got all up in my grill when trying to discuss the following two… atypical… ways of interacting with sounds.
This is Visible Sound from the design group (whatever that is) with the appropriately pretentious name SOUNDS.BUTTER. It sews sounds. Well, their waveform anyway.
And then we have….
Which uses a handheld scanner to play notes which seem to (loosely) correspond to squiggles scribbled on a piece of illuminated paper.
Any more of this kinda thing out there? If I find about seven of them I can do one of those link-whoring list posts.
Tags: music, novel, technology-
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