Hi.  Many people seem to be asking about transcribing music.  My
requirements are different.  I have some recordings of piano which are
on old cassette tape.  They are listenable but clearly are suffering
from age and indeed the original recording.  I believe that I could get
a basic wav to MIDI conversion but my hope was to effectively capture
all the dynamics of the recording:

 - frequency
 - relative amplitude and decay of notes
 - variable speed

i.e., all the original elements of the performance.  Then to pass
this MIDI file through a high quality piano sampler.  I would not get
the original performance recorded but I might get something close to
the original performance had it been played on a different instrument.
Are we anywhere close to that yet?

Howard Bryant

 [ If you believe the player piano adverts of the 'teens and 'twenties,
 [ we are _there_ already!  The pneumatic reproducing piano captures
 [ all the performance elements in your list.  -- Robbie

 [ Howard, A few years back I got quite interested in this problem
 [ and did a lot of reading on the subject.  Doing this job right
 [ seems to be an AI (artificial intellegence) problem.  Strict digital
 [ filters do not understand where the energy comes from.  It can be
 [ from the fundamental of one note, or harmonics from another.
 [ "Hearing" where a  note is released is very hard because the
 [ harmonics of other notes which are being struck during the decay
 [ of the note you are interested in confuse the interpretation of the
 [ filter output.
 [
 [ I had three performances that I wanted to have converted to MIDI.
 [ An MMD subscriber came to my rescue for the project.  He took audio
 [ copies of the performances and (for a fee) created MIDI scores for
 [ me by listening to the performances and hand playing them on a
 [ touch sensitive MIDI keyboard.  Of course the results weren't
 [ identical to the original because of the HUMAN interpretation
 [ of the original material, but his interpretation of what he heard
 [ was terrific so it solved the problem nicely for the three pieces
 [ in question.
 [
 [ I'm very interested to hear if there's an automated solution to
 [ this problem.  Nearly ten years have passed since I solved this
 [ problem for myself 'by hand'.   Good luck!   -- Jody