voice activated musical score

2004-01-13 07:23 pm

Do you know of any software that will record a voice/song into musical score?

Re: voice activated musical score

Reply #1 – 2004-01-13 09:07 pm

Short answer: No.

Long answer: From time to time, there are inquiries regarding conversion of some instrument to musical score (voice being one particular example of an instrument). And from time to time, programs appear which claim to be able to do it. Only in the most limited cases (instrument with exact pitch, no chords, played to tempo) has there been anything like semi-acceptable results. Even those require a lot of human modificaion.

What you can do is record your voice to a digital file, then analyze it for pitch using any of several digital spectrogram programs. One such program is Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net), which is free. If you can sing, but do not know what note you are singing, that will help you. But it will not automatically extract musical notation.

Re: voice activated musical score

Reply #2 – 2004-01-13 09:28 pm

Akoff Music Composer will record your voice to midi and can then be opened and notated in Noteworthy. It does work but can't comment about how successful you will find it because there are huge variables in any sound program and attempting to notate them accurately has been the subject of many peoples work.Try http://www.akoff.com/

Re: voice activated musical score

Reply #3 – 2004-01-14 02:29 am

I am a reasonably competent singer (others would disagree). But without a pitch reference, I would be unlikely to be on pitch to the nearest semitone. Only the relative pitches would be somewhat accurate. Even then, without an external pitch reference, I might slowly drift (accumulating imperciptible pitch erros from note to note). An entire choir can gradually drift off pitch.

Even if relative pitch is acceptable, a sung note is rarely at a well-defined pitch, unless it is a pure, prolonged vowel.

A program can record your voice, apply a spectrogram transform, then look for fundamental frequency and sharp pitch changes. It could convert that information to MIDI or other notation.

I would expect that a solo singer, who is accurate enough to produce acceptable MIDI, would know precisely what note was being sung, and could simply write it down!

If the voice is accompanied - forget it!

If you would like to determine the melody from someone else's recorded voice, the best way is to get a piano keyboard, and plunk the keys until it sound right.

For the adult male voice, the typical "popular music" range has its highest pitch at the D or E just above middle C. The lowest pitch is typically at A, slightly more than an octave below middle C. That's a span of less than two octaves.

The popular music range for adult females is an octave higher than for males.

Most popular music, written in a major key, does not have a lot of accidental notes. That is, nearly all notes (whether black or white on the piano keyboard) will be part of the key signature. If you can determine the key signature, there's less guesswork. If the song has a "happy ending," then the chances are good that the key is the last note sung.

Re: voice activated musical score

Reply #4 – 2004-09-11 07:18 pm

try autoscore program. on web