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Researchers’ AI aligns sheet music with MIDI audio

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Re: Researchers’ AI aligns sheet music with MIDI audio

#21

Intuitively (to me), it feels like a clever variation of something like Needleman-Wunsch could pull this off without using machine learning (as long as you have the right encodings). Can someone enlighten me?

The sheet music is input as an image, which is not the right encoding for comparison with MIDI, so you need some kind of image recognition in the pipeline. I do think that they could replace the recurrent part of their network by dynamic programming and only use machine learning for feature extraction.

Re: Researchers’ AI aligns sheet music with MIDI audio

#23
post #15

Does this really need AI? Couldn't you just take the maximum of the fourier transform of the rendering multiplied with the audio? Maybe across multiple dimensions.

This is one of variants of an area called "score following" and it's really hard. I remember about 10-15 years ago there was this craze in start-up land which led to many corpses of start-ups who thought solving semantic music problems would be easy with FFTs. But forgot to talk to an actual MIR (music information retrieval) or Musicologist. I remember a friend of mine working for one about 15 years ago and when she describe their deal I was like "have you talked to a real music person? Because that is only going to get you a tiny part of the way there". Nope. And sure enough, dead in the water a couple of years later. I'm studying music cognition right now in a cross discipline masters (music, comp sci) and it is crazy complicated.

In a nutshell: the human brain has an amazing ability to separate a garbage pail mush of audio into meaningful streams that we perceive as different event streams. This enabled us to do things like notice (as my prof says) the difference in white noise between the nearby river and the rustle in the leaves from something else, like an approaching animal. Score following requires doing this to separate the aggregate noise into different instruments and into voices within that instrument, suitable for note by note analysis. This, it turns out, is a wicked hard problem.

Re: Researchers’ AI aligns sheet music with MIDI audio

#24
post #15

Does this really need AI? Couldn't you just take the maximum of the fourier transform of the rendering multiplied with the audio? Maybe across multiple dimensions.

This kind of problem has been extensively studied for years and it turns out that it is not that easy. The fundamental is not the strongest harmonic, the harmonics don't line up, what happens when you play multiple notes at the same time, etc. It is a big stinking mess.

And that's before even separating out by instrument! It's really quite incredible what goes on between the ear and the brain for this kind of thing.

Re: Researchers’ AI aligns sheet music with MIDI audio

#25
post #15

Does this really need AI? Couldn't you just take the maximum of the fourier transform of the rendering multiplied with the audio? Maybe across multiple dimensions.

This is one of variants of an area called "score following" and it's really hard. I remember about 10-15 years ago there was this craze in start-up land which led to many corpses of start-ups who thought solving semantic music problems would be easy with FFTs. But forgot to talk to an actual MIR (music information retrieval) or Musicologist. I remember a friend of mine working for one about 15 years ago and when she…

That makes sense when you're dealing with raw audio and need to disentangle it. But here we can work in the other direction to using the structure of the sheet to find the right spot in the mess on the other side.

I'm sure there are further difficulties, just saying that your answer isn't entirely satisfying.

Re: Researchers’ AI aligns sheet music with MIDI audio

#26
post #15

Does this really need AI? Couldn't you just take the maximum of the fourier transform of the rendering multiplied with the audio? Maybe across multiple dimensions.

This kind of problem has been extensively studied for years and it turns out that it is not that easy. The fundamental is not the strongest harmonic, the harmonics don't line up, what happens when you play multiple notes at the same time, etc. It is a big stinking mess.

There's a game called Rocksmith that has been on the market for many years that basically does this in real time on live guitar playing with far more than enough accuracy to make the game fun.

And that is doing it basically per-note! This task (aligning sheet music with MIDI) would allow for global optimization approaches which should be far easier and more likely to work.

Re: Researchers’ AI aligns sheet music with MIDI audio

#27

Intuitively (to me), it feels like a clever variation of something like Needleman-Wunsch could pull this off without using machine learning (as long as you have the right encodings). Can someone enlighten me?

Sheet music is a sequence of images. Maybe you thought sheet music was more like a text file?

I should have been more clear. This is what I meant be "correct encodings". I would be surprised (but am welcome to being wrong) if a large amount of sheet music hadn't been encoded somehow.

Re: Researchers’ AI aligns sheet music with MIDI audio

#28
post #15

Does this really need AI? Couldn't you just take the maximum of the fourier transform of the rendering multiplied with the audio? Maybe across multiple dimensions.

This kind of problem has been extensively studied for years and it turns out that it is not that easy. The fundamental is not the strongest harmonic, the harmonics don't line up, what happens when you play multiple notes at the same time, etc. It is a big stinking mess.

I'm no expert, but isn't that just autocorrelation? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocorrelation)

Autocorrelation is the algorithm used for Radar (at least, that's what my professors told me). When radar bounces off of another object, there are different "echos" of that radar (ex: an object was 10 miles away and 20 miles away: the 20-mile object will take 2x longer to come back). Its messy and everything.

The radar input is very messy, full of reflections, echos, and more. But autocorrelation takes all of that information, and tells you where the objects were.

Re: Researchers’ AI aligns sheet music with MIDI audio

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sheet music is a sequence of images. Maybe you thought sheet music was more like a text file?

I should have been more clear. This is what I meant be "correct encodings". I would be surprised (but am welcome to being wrong) if a large amount of sheet music hadn't been encoded somehow.

“Digitized” just means PDF, at best.

Re: Researchers’ AI aligns sheet music with MIDI audio

#30
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What information isn't captured in the MIDI but is captured in the electronic sheet music?

It's more the other way around. The MIDI has extra information that obfuscates the original sheet music. Most commonly, timing variation which can be intentional and quite large, but also other kinds of variation and even mistakes. Additionally, the system described in the article works on scanned paper sheet music, not electronic sheet music, so you also have to factor in OCR issues. All things considered it would b…

technically, that would be a case of the MIDI data having noise in it, not extra information.
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