Hello:

I am looking for a solution that would allow a user to specify a range in a piece of music (say from measure 2 note 1 to measure 4 note 2 based on the sheet music), and have that snippet of music be extracted from a recording of this piece automatically. The application of this is to help music student learn a new piece, when he/she needs to practice some special spots many times. It will be nice to listen and play with that snippet each time.

I have looked at various options, didn't find anything that's close, until I saw Melodyne. With pitch recognition technology from live recording, I can imagine we derive the notes from the sheet music for the range specified, and try to do pattern matching to find those notes with Melodyne. I realize this is not an intended usage of the tool, but it seems possible with the technology it has.

My question to you all experts are: 1. Is Melodye the right tool for my problem? 2. If so, can I get any help on how to make it work? 3. If not, do you have any other suggestions I should investigate?

It seems to be a simple problem, yet I haven't found any technology that can link sheet music with a live music recording note by note.

Your help and insight will be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Jin

Hello nenriver,

welcome to our forum. Melodyne editor can extract MIDI from a polyphonic recording. If you import the MIDI file to some notation software, you should be able to print out the corresponding sheet music (which you can then compare to the original version, if this is what you want to do). The quality of the notation obviously depends on the accuracy the music was played with. If there are too many deviations, especially timing-wise, you might need to edit (e.g. quantize) the recording until you get a MIDI file that converts to a legible notation. Also, Melodyne's DNA technology is intended for and works best with single polyphonic instruments. There could be some limitations with more complex audio and full mixes.

Anyway, I recommend that you download the Melodyne trial and test it with your files.