Interesting use of technology

New Software Processor Can Transcribe Music From Any Performance

Spanish telecommunications engineers have devised a new method to generate sheet music based on the sounds of individual notes, which it can identify regardless of musician, instrument, and venue.

The research team, from the University of Jaen in Jaen, Spain, describes an automated system that determines the spectral pattern of an instrument's musical notes. The pattern is used to create a harmonic dictionary, which is paired with a pattern algorithm. The system then determines which note is which, and converts the information into a readable format. Given a WAV file of a recording, the software can produce a MIDI transcription.

Automatic music transcription could help musicologists analyze sound samples, recover musical content and separate varying audio sources, according to Julio José Carabias, co-author of the paper and a researcher from the Department of Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Jaen.