Pitch Recognition

I spend a lot of time preparing data to make my animated graphical scores:
entering scores into notation software, synchronizing MIDI data to recordings, etc.

People often ask "can't all that stuff be done automatically?"

The short answer is "no."

A longer answer is "yes, but not well enough to save any time."

It would be great if software could automatically extract a score from an audio recording,
but we're not there yet.

They've been working on this for years; let me show you where they are now ...


Here's a recording I made of a simple two-part piece:


I took put that recording through pitch recognition software; here's the result:


This is a pretty simple test: only two notes, single instrument, etc.
For ensemble music and music of greater complexity, the results are much worse.

Sometimes, if there's no score for a piece and it's relatively simple,
I will use pitch recognition software and then edit the result by hand.

That's what I did for this video:


But that's a lot of work: nearly every note needed some sort of hand-adjustment.
Compared to entering a score from sheet music and synchronizing it to an audio recording by hand,
it didn't save any time.