How to connect keyboard to musescore?

• Jul 31, 2021 - 03:25

I recently got a USB A to B cord to connect my Yamaha DGX-660 portable grand to my PC. Whenever I play notes either nothing goes onto the score, or random notes appear on the score, pleas help


Comments

In reply to by Jm6stringer

Step 1: I turn on my computer (I already have my piano plugged into the computer)
Step 2: I start up the file that lets me play piano on the computer
Step 3: I open up musescore
Step 4: I press on a rest
Step 5: I press N
Step 6: I start playing on my piano and nothing comes out

In reply to by gpp005

OK... after you press N (step 5) to enter note input mode, you start playing what in step 6? A song?

After step 5, do this:
Select a note duration such as 5 for quarter notes (crotchets),
Press one note on your MIDI keyboard.
Does it get entered onto the MuseScore staff, where the rest was?

In reply to by gpp005

I wrote:
Select a note duration such as 5 for quarter notes (crotchets),
Press one note on your MIDI keyboard.

You wrote:
...it types random symbols and letters under the staff.

How does pressing one note on your MIDI keyboard produce random symbols and letters?

Please attach the score showing these "random symbols and letters" and explain which single key press (of the 88 piano keys on your DGX-660) produces such notation, and "under the staff", no less.

See:
https://musescore.org/en/node/289899

In reply to by gpp005

Note that MuseScore isn't designed to let you simply "start playing" on your piano. Note input works a very specific way, one note a time, choose duration, press a key to enter that pitch, rinse & repeat. There is a limited realtime mode available as well, but if you're expecting to simply playing anything and have it notated with rhythms etc all figured out automatically, unfortunately AI technology hasn't come that far yet. But you can come closer to it by first recording a MIDI file (your keyboard may have that ability, or use a program designed for recording MIDI), then importing that into MuseScore. Be sure to play with a metronome or the results will be gibberish, but either way, as I said, AI technology isn't really to the point where you can just play and get readable notation.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Hi Marc,
As a software engineer with some knowledge in AI, I just have to chime in and say that no AI is needed to convert MIDI input into a part of a score, in principle. MuseScore may not have that feature, but for instance Sibelius, Cubase and Finale do this, as far as I know.

Technically, a MIDI file is exactly the same data as a live MIDI stream. When MuseScore converts a MIDI file into a score, it must go through a process known as "quantization", where it tries to find the best alignment of each note, with whatever smallest note value is desired. It could in principle do the same "live". The display would have some delay in updating, but it's not technically much more difficult than importing a MIDI file. I'm sure the code for quantizing and converting to written notes is already present in MuseScore. It may just lack the real-time MIDI recording part.

Pardon the derail of the thread but I got a little upset by your attitude which reads to me like "this looks like a lot of work, therefore I'll dismiss it as being impossible". Better to acknowledge that MuseScore simply doesn't have this feature because the community didn't put in the work yet, to add it.

In reply to by jolter

First, MuseScore does convert MIDI into score data, not sure where you got the idea it doesn't. It can do so via import of a standard MIDI file or in a more limited way through real-time input. But in either case, it is absolutely positively employing AI heuristics. Not sure why you'd say it's isn't AI - it absolutely is, given any historically-accurate definition of the term. Think about it - how do you know which hand played which note? How do you know whether a note played for 42% of a beat should be notated as a staccato quarter, an eighth, or a dotted sixteenth? How do you know if there a note is played and then a second note comes in 26 milliseconds later, if those should be considered a single chord or if multiple voices should be used to notate the rhythms independently? For that matter, you play the black note between G and A in the key of C - is that notated as G# or Ab? These are all decisions that require intelligence to determine reasonable answers to. So we have heuristics we employ to attempt to do so. But results are typically far from ideal, because it's a crazy hard problem. You would have a hard enough time getting to expert humans to agree on the correct transcription of any given random MIDI input stream.

Again, the problem is what it is - a technical one, not an attitude one. That's just a fact of life inherent in how music notation and MIDI works. It's a hard problem with no great solution. We try pretty hard in the case of MIDI import, we currently don't try so hard for real-time input because in point of fact MuseScore doesn't have any real-time processing whatsoever built in so there is no way to achieve this with the current architecture. MuseScore 4 may change that, I don't know.

Meanwhile, though, my goal here is simply to educate and help[p set reasonable expectation - no, it is not within the realm of current technology to expect to play anything you want on the keyboard in real-time and get readable results. Dots on a page, sure, any program can do that. Musically correct, readable results? That's AI, and even the very best programs out there aren't even close yet.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I appreciate that there are not real-time processing capabilities in MuseScore at the moment -- if that had been your original answer, I would not have reacted.

I guess we just have diverging definitions of what constitutes AI? Not sure what your "historically-accurate definition of the term" is. It looks to me like you include any sufficiently-complex algorithm or program. Most current-day use of the term AI would include some aspect of machine learning, or alternatively an attempt to mimic human thinking. Without even having read any of the MuseScore C++ code, I am fairly sure that neither machine learning nor "human-like intelligence" are used when quantizing/interpreting MIDI. Heuristics, yes, but a set of heuristics is hardly "intelligence". Using the term AI like you do is confusing.

In reply to by jolter

The historical definition of AI is not about whether an algorithm is "sufficiently-complex" or not or whether it the implementation happens to involve some specific technology such as "machine learning" as a means to the end. The historical definition is simply a matter of whether the purpose of the algorithm is to perform some action that ordinarily requires human expertise. That's the definition I learned in grad school at UC Berkeley, that's what the dictionaries typically say (eg, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.2011080309542…). If you prefer to define the term more narrowly according to some highly specialized fine distinction, that's fine, but please don't take my words out of context. I only meant the normal sense of the phrase as used for decades and understood by the general public.

In this case, I gave a number of examples of specific decisions that normally require human expertise to determine. That's really just the tip of the iceberg. It's not in the slightest bit a stretch to say that these sorts of determinations - taking arbitrary MIDI data and attempting to figure out how to turn that into a readable score - involves AI. Taking that data and just blindly sticking dots on the page with no concern for what might make musical sense - that much wouldn't be. But MuseScore already goes far beyond that in the MIDI file import case, and it's still a long way from the goal of getting readable sheet music from arbitrary MIDI data.

Anyhow, I think also if you re-read my original response, you'll see you are really attacking a straw man overall here. Right from the beginning, I said, "Note that MuseScore isn't designed to...". I didn't say "We have decided to never consider extending MuseScore to be able to..." or "It would be categorically imposslbe to ever design an algorithm to...". It's just a plain simple statement of fact, to help one user today, by setting his expectations for what he might be able to accomplish with MuseScore today. That is all.

In reply to by jolter

BTW, I'm also not saying I don't think it's worth pursuing this sort of AI (and the real-time architecture necessary to support it). It is worth pursuing, because it's a common request, and clearly - once the real-time-architecture support is there - it would become possible to do a better job than we do currently. But still, my reply here was not to speculate about the future of technology. it was to help one user understand what is and what is not reasonable to expect from MuseScore 3.6.2 today.

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