MIDI (Sound 2 Midi)

Hi Can,

> Here is a "stupid" question for anyone who might care to respond.

> Sound cards that come with an off-the-shelf PC: Do they contain a built-in
> "voice to MIDI" converter for converting an analog musical waveform into
> the MIDI language? I would like to feed into the sound card analog music
> using the external jack on the card and have it converted into a MIDI file.

Not as standard, but you can get software to do it. Usually they convert
to the nearest twelve equal notes. Mixed results - it is quite a programming
challenge and they tend to add extra notes to the music.

I've been experimenting with this also in my Tune Smithy program
- there I've concentrated on trying to convert a single part to midi,
no attempt at polyphony, and to try to get the pitch as accurate as
possible - of course not 12-et.

It actually works fairly well now for slow-ish tunes on descant
recorder. Very variable depending on the instrument one uses.
I hope to do much more work on this later on.

http://tunesmithy.co.uk

View | Analyse Recording or Midi Voice | Find Seed.
The wave counting method usually works best at present, where you unselect
Use frequency spectrum.

However I don't make much of it yet as it is a very new feature and
still rather kind of experimental. In fact I don't think I've done
any help for it yet at all.

But basic idea is you make a recording, or open one using the
Open Audio file of Seed button. Then click the Find and -> Seed
button. Select Play on -> Seed, and Record to Midi, and
you give the file name for the midi recording in Bs | Record to File Options.

Anyway not much developed but if you are interested to try it out and
want to ask how to do something then I'm delighted to help with it,
as far as it goes so far. It's something I plan to go back to.

I actually also used it to make some conversions of birdsong to midi
- though this required a lot of tweaking and it doesn't have any preset
options to do this yet, in fact not sure if present version can still
do this as this was a fair while ago using an earlier version of the wave 2 midi.

http://www.musicandvirtualflowers.co.uk/cards/birdsong.htm

I don't know of any other program that attempts to convert wave to midi
with the exact pitches of the original rather than the nearest
12 equal pitch.

There are quite a few of the twelve equal ones and I've
tried some of them, forget the names now. With mixed results as
explained, they all tend to add a few extra notes.

Here is one I just found in a web search, not sure if I've tried
it yet.

http://www.5star-shareware.com/Music/MIDIPlayersandUtilities/sound2midi.html

There's quite a lot of interest in this field. The reason it is hard to do
is that the ear is just amazingly good at picking out musical notes, and
it is extremely hard to parallel that in software. One can find all the
pitches in the spectrum - that's easy enough, but one can't easily figure out
which of the pitches in the sound spectrum belong to which instruments, which ones
are just background noise or incidental noise that you get while playing
the instrument.

Perhaps this is a bit related to vision where the same thing
happens - that software can anlyse a picture in great detail but is
easily lost if you try to get it to count particular types of object
in the picture or something like that. It's a pattern recognition
problem - how to recognise a particular instrument, which the
ear does readily while current software programs find it so hard to
do the same thing.

Anyway that's a perspective from someone who has attempted to probram it
in software. I don't have much experience thoug of using the 12-et
wav2midi programs, maybe others here do?...

Robert