Hello Robbie,  Yes, it is tantalizing, isn't it?  Play a few notes
on the synth keyboard and voila!

Sadly, my experience is that it's more than just a database
consideration.  Not insoluble, I expect, but it may be much more
complex than you might imagine.

Way back in the age of the dinosaurs, say about 20 years ago, I was
sure my Apple II+ could do just about anything, given enough effort.
For heaven's sake -- it had been boosted from 48 kb to 64 kb RAM!

Olin Tillotson and I decided that it would be a grand idea to take
Barlow and Morganstern in hand, along with another book (for which
I can't at the moment remember the title) which converted the themes
to sequences of up and down pitches rather than the actual transposed
notation.  That is, a sequence such as C E A C would translate to U
(up C-E), U (E-A), D (down A-C) or UUD.., etc.  (Maybe you could call
this the derivative?)  I think we used an asterisk if a note were
repeated.  This had the advantage of being just about as unique but,
more importantly, didn't require nearly the effort or musical
experience to do a transposition.

It actually worked out fairly well and we even made a presentation at
the time to an MBSI convention which included the (then) pizzazz of
a computer demonstration.  (And the realization that a borrowed Apple
clone was not _quite_ like an Apple II+.)

Alas, we eventually abandoned the project for a couple of reasons
other than the limited capacity of the computer and its disc drives.
(It needed a minimum of two floppies to use the database program.)

The first and most obvious reason was the tremendous amount of work
required for error-free data entry (reduced considerably, I admit,
through synth keyboard entry) but, most importantly of all, and this
really stands out with musical box arrangements, is the problem of
sorting out different, but similar, arrangements of the same tune.
Which notes belong to the tune and which have been added by the
arranger?

For a simple example, take the first couple of bars of the hymn,
"Amazing Grace."  Really a simple tune and what could be easier?
WRONG!  If you do a search on the title you'll come up with more than
one tune, which is a problem but beside the point.  Worse, you'll come
up with different arrangements (note sequences) for the same tune.
The current popular version includes something line seven notes in the
first two bars.  The standard version includes four.  Does U*UDDU look
much like UU*?  Same tune!  (In B&M notation we have GCCEDCE vs GCEE.)

Many a time it can be quite difficult to know which notes belong to the
basic tune and which belong to the arrangement or decorations to the
tune.

Just thought I'd make you aware of a very basic frustration in data
entry and analysis you may not have considered.

Cheers!

Jim Heyworth