Friday, December 23, 2011

Miyaesi - an automated music transcriber

For last few months I was unable to write a blog post due to various reasons. May be because of my laziness on writing blog post. But I felt to write a post as my last post in this year, about our final year project which was completed couple of months back.

What is music transcription?
Music transcription is generating the music notation sheet out of a given input music recording. Following diagram shows the process of music transcription.

There are two basic types of music transcriptions.
  • Monophonic music transcription - In polyphonic music there can be only one instrument played at any given instance within the music recording. Monophonic music transcription is transcribing a monophonic music recording.
  • Polyphonic music transcription - In polyphonic music there can be several instruments played at any given instance in music recording. Polyphonic music transcription is transcribing a polyphonic music recording.
This automatic music transcription became and important topic in research field for many decades, due to the complexity of the methodologies and the technologies related to this domain. As final year students we were asked to handle this problem and try out a solution which address these complex issues. So we defined our objective for our final year project as research and develop a system which
  • Identifies notes
  • Identifies Instruments
and ultimately generating the notation sheet corresponding to a given monophonic music recording. "Miyaesi - an automatic music transcriber" became alive as a solution for above mentions issues, as a result of the immense effort taken by our team members for about a year.


Main features of Miyaesi are
  • Generating music notes out of music recording.

  • Detecting dominant instruments in each notes.

  • Creating a playable MIDI file.

  • Voice removal from music recordings.

  • Generating a printable notation sheet.

  • Estimation of a key signature.

  • Notes and MIDI file editing facilities.

  • Playing original and Midi files with notes displaying notes simultaneously.

Out of these features the most important feature is the instrument identification. Even though there are some research publications available on instrument classification area there are no good implementations for that. Miyaesi gain the advantage with this unique feature among other music transcribers.

Miyaesi is an opensource project where any one who is interested can contribute to the project. You can download Miyeasi and try its unique features.