Converting musical audio to data?
September 20, 2011 12:14 PM   Subscribe

Is there software capable of analyzing the note-to-note event data from a melody played on a solo acoustic instrument (live or recorded), and then generating a text file containing said data in a list form?

This is for a research study in which musicians practice a 13-note melody over and over during one session and return the next day for a retest. We would like to be able to assess each performance of the melody in terms of the pitch accuracy, speed, and temporal evenness. We've done this sort of analysis in previous studies with performances played on an electronic keyboard, using MAX/MSP as an interface to run the protocol and to generate a text file containing the relevant MIDI data for each note/event (e.g., pitch, onset timing, inter-onset intervals between notes). Is it possible to derive this sort of data from performances on acoustic instruments? I know there are many products out there that can convert audio to MIDI, but I can't seem to find any that can generate a text file with raw performance data for each note played. Maybe there are non-MIDI alternatives?
posted by jamjames to Technology (5 answers total)
 
Just export the midi as text.
posted by empath at 12:15 PM on September 20, 2011


Best answer: celemony might be able to do this with their so called "direct note access" technology. I remember seeing a mind-blowing video a few years ago in which they were able to do some amazing things -- seemingly able to separate out and adjust (fix pitch problems with) individual notes in a polyphonic recording.

http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=dna
posted by smcameron at 12:51 PM on September 20, 2011


There are objects for Max/MSP that track pitch...how facile are you at Max?
posted by aloiv2 at 9:07 PM on September 20, 2011


http://crca.ucsd.edu/~tapel/software.html
posted by aloiv2 at 9:09 PM on September 20, 2011


Response by poster: Thanks everyone. We were able to achieve what we wanted by using Celemony's Melodyne software for the audio to MIDI conversion in combination with a script that will convert the MIDI data to text. Appreciate the Celemony tip, scameron.
posted by jamjames at 7:08 PM on November 1, 2011


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