Creating a score

• Nov 29, 2011 - 14:30

Thank you,Marc for your response to my questions. I had feared that this was an ambition beyond the program and my aging Mac. I have been successful in physically taking my Kawai digital piano with one of my improvisations in the memory into a "state of the art" studio and getting a musical notation transcription. This gets expensive.

I am lowering my sights, I suppose. I am now hopeful that I can create a MIDI file via interface, digital keyboard to my Mac using the Audio MIDI Setup which is included on the MacG3. This done, perhaps I can get this file to the studio, flash drive
or disk. This then, again hopefully, could be loaded onto their sophisticated system to get me the printed score.

Any thoughts?

Much appreciated,
Stan


Comments

Just what I said earlier - while you can certainly load a MIDI file into MuseScore (it's as simple as File->Open), the results are likely to be gibberish, at least if you are really improvising freely as you initially said. This is not a limitation of MuseScore that some more sophisticated program would do better with, but rather, an inherent technical difficulty. There are too many difficult decisions to make in terms of representing rhythms, spelling of accidentals, and other issues specific to keyboard notation - like which hand plays which notes, how to handle situations where you have notes of different lengths being played at the same time, notes that start while other notes are still sounding, etc - to expect a computer to create something readable. Which I have to assume is your goal. You'll get something, no doubt, but it won't be usable for anything without a lot of hand editing.

To make an analogy, consider a program that converts speech to text. They exist, and work about as as well, or poorly, as you might expect. And even if you got a perfect rendition of the text word by word (currently not likely), turning that into something you could actually use would mean going in by hand to add punctuation, breaking up into paragraphs, cleaning up the "ums", stutters, and half-started sentences, etc. It's not like just by reading a book into a computer, you could ever hope to get something that would actually be readable. At most, it would be a start that you'd then have to work with for quite a while to turn into something readable. And of course, none of that work would be possible if you didn't already know how to read and write - the speech to text conversion would not be a substitute for that.

Similarly with music. Opening a MIDI file will be like the raw unedited results of text to speech conversion. So it's good for what it is, but if you're think of it as an easy way to create readable music, that's basically not going to happen.

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.