Music Transcription of Wav files in Java [closed]

Answer 1

I am not an expert in that area but once I was playing a little bit with Xuggler (java ffmpeg wrapper). This library was able to extract lots of interesting data from the media file, allows file transcoding and many other cool features. Here is the link: http://www.xuggle.com/xuggler/

Answer 2

I am by no means an expert in this area, so I apologise in advance if this is all rubbish.

To get the notes from the file, I think you need to do an FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) on the WAV file, but with only like 10ms of sound at a time. Then you find the highest peak on the FFT for that time frame, and move on to the next "frame" of 10ms, or whatever. You do the FFT again, and if the highest peak is a different frequency to the previous peak, then it will say it's a new note. To see how long the notes are, count the number of peaks within a certain threshold of each other and multiply them by the time you are using for each frame (10ms, etc)

I will say again, I am not expert and there are probably other ways of doing it.

That aside, I hope this helps... even a little.

Answer 3

There's a very good open source sound editor called Audacity. Yes it's written in C++ but you may find the answers that you're looking for in its source code. Translating C++ code to Java is not that hard.

Answer 4

What you want to do is currently impossible. The scope of what you described is beyond anything current professional music programs can do, and they have literally hundreds of man-years of programmers' time invested.

You might achieve something if you radically cut your requirements.

• to find the pitch of sound, use FFT; this is the easiest part; you will have to restrict yourself to single notes here, you will not be able to cleanly read chords.

• you will not be able to discover what the time signature or speed (bpm) of the tune - your only chance is to include some kind of metronome in your application and force the player to adhere to the beat. If you want to support the swing time, it must also be configured by the player.

• When making midi, quantitize all the notes (=move their starts and endings to the nearest 1/4, 1/8 or 1/16 of measure)

• use a ready typesetting system to create the score; the musictex might work for you; generating a tex file will be much easier than doing the drawing for yourself; if I were you, I would ignore some of the rules of typesetting music (I would certainly drop the beams; there are to many rules concerning them)

If you restrict yourself to single melody, choose to ignore most of the music typesetting, make the piano player use your own metronome and limit his rhytmic choices, you might succeed.

Answer 5

I had the same idea in mind and tried out a very simple but incomplete solution. As fdreger's post pointed out, even professional software isn't actually able to perform this task correctly. (I tried some demo-versions of IntelliScore, AudioScore and some other software and none of these seemed to be particularly efficient when working with polyphonic music)

But if you want to try out on yourself, I used the source code found here : http://www.psychicorigami.com/2009/01/17/a-5k-java-guitar-tuner/ that helped me to find out how to determine the frequency. (FFT will be more accurate, but a bunch more complex).

To display the notes on screen, I used the abc4j library that can be found here : http://code.google.com/p/abc4j/

But, as pointed out above, it works only with monophonic music (one single voice).

Good Luck!