NoteMapper pitch-transformation plugins

• Sep 14, 2018 - 22:04

I’ve been working on a handful of MuseScore plugins. I don’t know if there will be much interest, but I’m excited to share them. I hope you’ll find these simple plugins useful and fun, and I would be grateful for your feedback.

The plugins, which I call NoteMappers, are variations on the idea of mapping notes to new pitch values throughout a selected passage or a whole score. The Pitch to Pitch plugin lets users assign new values to one or more MIDI pitches. (If you build a big enough map you can map all 127 at once.) Here’s a practical application: if you import a drumkit part from a MIDI file, you can map all the notes to standard staff positions.

Since constructing longer maps can be cumbersome, I also made a Map Assistant plugin, which builds a map based on the notes in a specially formatted score. Nothing fancy: it expects two staves, each with a succession of single notes, and it produces a map that sends the first note of the upper staff to the first of the lower, the second of the upper to the second of the lower, third to third, and so on. Results can be copied from the Map Assistant and pasted into the Pitch to Pitch NoteMapper.

Finally — for now — there’s a Pc to Pc NoteMapper. It operates on pitch class values 0 to 11, representing steps of the chromatic scale: 0 is C (and its enharmonic equivalents), 1 is C-sharp (ditto), and so forth. In contrast to the Pitch to Pitch plugin, this one acts uniformly on octave-related notes: if high C becomes high E-flat, then low C becomes low E-flat too. The Pc to Pc NoteMapper can be used to map a melody from one mode to another — say, from minor pentatonic to whole-tone.

If you’re willing to help me out and give these tools a test drive, the Pc to Pc NoteMapper might be the easiest and most interesting place to start. In any case, please save a copy of your score before trying any of these plugins! I’ve tested them to the best of my ability, but they should be considered beta versions, and I’m eager to get feedback (which you can post here in this thread) before uploading them to the MuseScore plugin repository. Each plugin requires MuseScore 2.x (2.3 recommended) and can be installed by downloading the *.qml file, placing it in your MuseScore > Plugins folder, and then activating it in the Plugin Manager (MuseScore Plugins menu). Details of the installation process are at: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/plugins#installation

Documentation is still on my to-do list, but I’ve tried to give the plugins friendly interfaces complete with help screens.

PitchToPitch.PNG
MapAssistant.PNG
PcToPc.PNG

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