Converting a Musical Score to a Playable Melody?

SA_Democrat asks: "As a geek who has recently discovered that he has a voice, I find myself looking for a particular style of software. I've joined a local chorale group, and am often the only bass singer in attendance. This means that I have to puzzle out fairly complicated pieces of music and pick out the melody on a keyboard between rehearsals. As a person who decodes music rather than someone who sight-reads, I find this extraordinarily difficult, especially when managing differing key and time signatures within a given piece. Does anyone have any experience with open-source software that allows the user to enter a piece of music using musical notation, and then plays that piece? I have found an astonishing array of programs that will play MP3, WAV files etc. but have not located anything that uses this more old fashioned method. If possible, the software should understand common notation like time signatures, keys, glissades, and so forth. What does Slashdot recommend?"

Easy Question.

[students]

There are a wide variety of these programs. I use NoteEdit [berlios.de]. It was very hard for me to install it on my SuSE 9 machine, but it works well. Make sure you have TiMidity [sourceforge.net] server, which is used for playback, installed and running or else NoteEdit will crash as soon as you start it, giving a cryptic error message. Sometimes running TiMidity will interfere with other sounds on my box, which is annoying, so I have to turn it on and off. If you want to print music you've inputed to NoteEdit, you need LaTeX installed. Remember, the commands to convert a LaTeX file to a musical score are:

$ latex filename.tex
$ musixflx filename.tex
$ latex filename.tex

I got this wrong for a while, even with the VERY noticable reminder from NoteEdit.

One of the other programs available is Rose Garden [rosegardenmusic.com]. Rose Garden is more mature but also less intuitive and oriented towards synthesis as opposed to performances.

If you get to be hard-core about editing scores on your Linux box, the best program around for professional score engraving will already be installed on your computer with the LaTeX distribution you aquired for printing the output from NoteEdit. See this Giant Musixtex Manual [icking-music-archive.org]. I often typeset complex mathematics, but I have not yet been able to master musixtex, so good luck there.

Midi?

[jZnat]

I'm assuming you don't want MIDI despite its wide range of support and whatnot. It is limited, however, so I can see why you'd like something better. Honestly though, have you tried using MIDI? It's decades old and still used widely.

Free music notation software

[Ugmo]

For simple songs and melodies there are various utilities that use abc music notation.
Here is a page listing them: http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/ [gre.ac.uk]

This lets you enter music using letters and other utilities will convert it into midi or wav files.

Something similiar and free is the Guido system. It is designed to handle more complicated pieces:
http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/AFS/GUIDO/ [tu-darmstadt.de]

Another free system is Rosegarden:http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ [rosegardenmusic.com]

Lilypond

[Matt Perry]

This might be more work than you want to do. You can re-enter the music in Lilypond's format [lilypond.org] and then use Lilypond to convert the score to a MIDI file for playback. You can covert a score by doing the following:

lilypond -m score.ly

which should output a MIDI file for you.

As an alternative you can use the ABC format [gre.ac.uk]. You can then use abc2ly to convert to Lilypond format and then use the command above to convert to MIDI. Example:

abc2ly score.abc
lilypond -m score.ly

I know you asked for open-source software, but if you are using a Mac or Windows machine you might want to look at Finale Notepad [finalemusic.com]. It's free and should let you drag and drop notes to recreate the score and then play it back as MIDI.

Re:Midi?

[mabinogi]

MIDI is a wire protocol and physical interface for communicating between different instruments. (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)
It has nothing whatsoever to do with notation.

Finale!!!

[Keick]

Try Finale at http://www.finalemusic.com/ [finalemusic.com] from Code software.

It will let you enter music note by note, or from a midi keyboard. Best of all, it will let you import sheet music with your scanner, very slick.

I know that at my local college I can pick up the student edition for next to nothing.

Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing?

[bcrowell]

If you can at least sing major scales, then I think practicing from a book like "Music for Sight Singing" by Robert W. Ottman (ISBN 0-13-189662-8) might be helpful.
A free alternative to Ottman: Eyes and Ears [lightandmatter.com]

Parent is dead on

[Corf]

Several semesters of music theory in college - three hours a week analyzing and two hours a week singing - did amazing things for my sightsinging ability. Go to your local university music department and audit a class, if that's an option. You will learn far more than you thought you would. Before that class, I couldn't find middle C on a piano. Now, I can sing just about any interval you like, up to and including twelve-tone stuff. It ain't just me.

Also in my case, playin' French horn tends to make one need to know this stuff, since the intervals are too close to just mash the keys and hope the right note comes out. :P Singing isn't really too much farther off.

Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing?

[bcrowell]

The OP sounds like he wants to do some pretty serious choral singing. If he wants to do that, it's going to be extremely limiting if he doesn't learn at least a little bit of sight reading. The simplest thing to do would be to enroll in a musicianship course at a community college (typically 1 unit).

Re:Maybe you should learn to sight-sing?

[fm6]

Knowing "how music works" is essential for singing it

Nonsense. There was music long before there were books about it. Music is hard-wired into the mammalian brain. The skills you learn from a music teacher is extremely helpful and useful, but music itself is something you're born knowing how to do.

Irving Berlin [wikipedia.org] is a case in point. Despite being a gifted songwriter (literally hundreds of hits), he never learned to read music at all, and only learned to play the piano in one key. Solution: hire somebody to build a special piano that could transpose with the pull of a lever, and somebody else to transcribe the music and songs he created.

OK, not a solution for everybody. And besides, the musical skills you mention are certainly work acquiring. But there are passable technological substitutes. Berlin had no trouble finding them 80 years ago. He'd have even less now.

I'm told that Danny Elfman [wikipedia.org] also resorts to technological substitutes for musical training. But I find his work predictable and repetitive, so never mind.

My take

[SocialEngineer]

As a composer and instrumentalist, I love Rosegarden. I haven't had a chance to produce any major works in it yet, though; I'm still familiarizing myself with it. Regardless, the power of it is incredible.

Only problem is it can be a bit of a hassle to get working. Other than that, I love it.

Most of my recent pieces I have done in Steinberg Cubasis VST (Creative Edition), just because I can use the Sampletank2 Free VST instrument with it (in Windows). If you'd like to hear some of my stuff, you'll have to visit my site and find em' (sorry, gotta save bandwidth, so lazy people aren't just downloading because they have phat pipe :)).

Re:Midi?

[bleaknik]

Anvil Studio [anvilstudio.com] was one of my favorite editors... no less than three years ago when I last used it.

You may wish to investigate FInale, although I believe that will cost you a pretty penny these days.

Try LilyPond

[Michael Duggan]

I have had much the same problem myself. As for me, I use LilyPond [lilypond.org]. Technically, it is a music typesetting program, but has MIDI output capability, primarily for proofing scores. Whenever my wife or I need an accompaniment, I type in the score, and produce MIDI files for voice, accompaniment, and both.

Like TeX, LilyPond uses text input rather than a GUI (although GUIs exist which output in LilyPond format). It is a little awkward at first, but with practice I (and several others) have found that inputting scores is much faster via this method.

Re:Midi?

[mabinogi]

MIDI has something to do with Music, but nothing to do with Notation.
It does not describe music as notes, but as events, and has no direct representation of most score notations.

Some (most) Notation editors may well have export to MIDI files, and will probably allow playback via a MIDI device.
Also, most MIDI sequencing software will probably have some sort of notation view for entry. But that still doesn't change the fact that MIDI is not the answer, software that allows entry of Notation, and playback by some (any) means is what he's asking for.

He most probably wants a notation program, like Finale, Sibelius, or Harmony Assistant / Melody Assistant (There's OSS ones too, but I'm not familiar with them) as MIDI sequencers like Cakewalk, Cubase and Logic tend to have fairly poor notation entry capabilities, and you have to make a tradeoff between accurate playback, or correct notation.

linux-sound.org

[zerblat]

Since nobody has mentioned it yet, the best place to find music and sound related software for Linux based systems is Dave Phillips's site linux-sound.org [linux-sound.org]. It lists, among other things, lots of notation software [linux-sound.org] and helpful tools for musicians [linux-sound.org].

learn solfege

[hanwen]

There are some packages for dealing with music (in the sense of notes), like RoseGarden and LilyPond (which I wrote, incidentally). You could use them to enter the score, and then play it back to you over MIDI.

However, I think that improving your solfege skills directly a much better investment of your time, since you won't have to muck around with producing notation. It's something you can practice with a piano, but there is also software. If you run linux you can consider GNU Solfege [solfege.org]. It's got a lot of theoretical stuff that's not useful for a beginning singer, but there are also a lot of practical excercises IIRC.