Piano pieces not displayed in the right key
Hello everyone, I'd like to start my first message on the MuseScore forum by giving a huge thanks to the developers for offering the community this excellent freeware tool.
I've used MuseScore so far to open two MIDI files, with the intention of studying the score. Both MIDI files had PDF files attached that contained the score for the music inside the MIDIs. Naturally, I expected to see in MuseScore the same score as in the PDF, but what I saw is a transposed version, i.e. it was not in the right key. I would have suspected that the PDFs are wrong except I knew what key the piece was supposed to be in, and so I take it that MuseScore misinterpreted this information.
I looked for an option for this, under PReferences, but could not find one. I attach two pictures, one with how the score of one of the MIDIs should look like (from the PDF) and another picture containing a screenshot of how MuseScore displays the contents of the MIDI.
I may not be using MuseScore correctly, but I thought that all you have to do is open a MIDI for it to be displayed in the right key (or, in case this information is not included in a MIDI, I expected to be asked what key I would like to render the piece in).
Any help would be much appreciate, thanks in advance!
| Attachment | Size |
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| correct score.jpg | 178.96 KB |
| MuseScore.jpg | 363.71 KB |
Comments
Without examining the MIDI file itself in another program, it's impossible to say for sure, but I wouldn't assume the MIDI file had the correct key signature in it to begin with. It appears to also have the messed up the pickup notes; everything is a beat off from where it should be. That's the sort of stuff that would routinely happen if someone created a MIDI file intended primarily for playback, without going out of their way to make sure that programs attempting to display notation would be able to get those details right. Or, it is indeed possible that the info *was* there and MuseScore missed it. Again, impossible to say without seeing the MIDI file. But in general, you can't depend on being able to reconstruct score from MIDI. Even if the key signature and pickup info had been entered correctly, there are a million other things that are *not* possible to preserve in a MIDI file. Programs attempting to reconstruct a score from a MIDI file will have to just guess on tons of things - like whether to call the second note of the piece D# or Eb, like which notes should be aplyed with which hands, etc. So even if you got a better MIDI file that had the key signature and pickup info correct, or got MuseScore to read that info correctly if it is correct, there would be still be a thousand things not right.
In reply to Without examining the MIDI by Marc Sabatella
Hi Marc, I had a suspicion that this might be the case, many thanks for explaining this, it's always good to have a better understanding of how things that you use routinely work, it seems it's a much better idea to get a "paper" score than attempting to reconstruct it from a MIDI file.
In reply to Thanks! by longtalker
Just a follow up on Marc's comment, MIDI isn't really intended nor is it the best method to use to transport written notation, MusicXML is. The problem is that MIDI is widely recognized, and MusicXML is just becoming more well known as a platform/program independent solution. MusicXML preserves many of the properties of the written piece, including key signatures, dynamics, articulations, etc.