Type of Submission
Poster
Keywords
MIDI, Spectral Estimation, Signal Processing, FFT, Sheet Music, Music Notation, Audio Transcription
Proposal
The goal of our project is to take an audio signal and automatically convert it into sheet music using MIDI. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the protocol most professional musicians and sound engineers use when making and editing music, specifically sheet music. Some instruments have a digital interface, allowing them to communicate with a computer via MIDI protocol, and thus notate the music being played into sheet music. Many instruments, however, do not have this capability, which leaves only two options for notating music into sheet music. The first option is to do it manually, which is tedious and taxing. The other option is to record the music, analyze it in software, and convert it to a digital format, which can be viewed as sheet music. If we accomplish this successfully, it would bridge the gap between MIDI capable instruments and analog instruments. Optimally, this would enable users to have a single package of hardware and software that can immediately notate into sheet music any melody played from any instrument.
The hardware component takes input from the user's microphone, and then filters out high and low frequency noise as well as unwanted harmonics. This is done using high-order, cascaded high-pass and low-pass, analog filters. The input signal is also amplified, and then sent to the computer to digitize. The software then reads in the audio and uses various digital signal processing techniques to evaluate the frequencies being played and the times at which they occur. This data is then used to create the MIDI file, using the universal MIDI file format. This can then be viewed as digital sheet music.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Automatic Audio Transcription
The goal of our project is to take an audio signal and automatically convert it into sheet music using MIDI. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the protocol most professional musicians and sound engineers use when making and editing music, specifically sheet music. Some instruments have a digital interface, allowing them to communicate with a computer via MIDI protocol, and thus notate the music being played into sheet music. Many instruments, however, do not have this capability, which leaves only two options for notating music into sheet music. The first option is to do it manually, which is tedious and taxing. The other option is to record the music, analyze it in software, and convert it to a digital format, which can be viewed as sheet music. If we accomplish this successfully, it would bridge the gap between MIDI capable instruments and analog instruments. Optimally, this would enable users to have a single package of hardware and software that can immediately notate into sheet music any melody played from any instrument.
The hardware component takes input from the user's microphone, and then filters out high and low frequency noise as well as unwanted harmonics. This is done using high-order, cascaded high-pass and low-pass, analog filters. The input signal is also amplified, and then sent to the computer to digitize. The software then reads in the audio and uses various digital signal processing techniques to evaluate the frequencies being played and the times at which they occur. This data is then used to create the MIDI file, using the universal MIDI file format. This can then be viewed as digital sheet music.
