Computers and music have been linked since the earliest days of the mainframe, when giant machines controlled primitive synthesizers. Recently, however, a significant advancement has taken place in the field of computer music with the development of software that can not only transcribe polyphonic music in real time, but can also play back complex harmonies alongside human performers. For instance, at the annual Music Information Retrieval Exchange (MIREX) competition, Christopher Raphael of Indiana University demonstrated a system that can understand live music well enough to accompany a musician.
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Raphael started playing an oboe quartet written by Mozart, and his electronic accompaniment chimed in playing the other three instruments. When Raphael slowed down his performance, the computer “musicians” followed right along with him without missing a beat, even when he added a trill for emphasis.
“Technology is changing our sense of what music can be,” Raphael says. “The effect is profound.” The new software was not easy to develop, however. Raphael compares it to the slow progress in effective speech recognition. “There’s been a veritable army of people who’ve worked on speech recognition for several decades, and [the problem] still remains open,” he says. “Any time you deal with real data, there is a huge amount of variation that you have to understand.”
Raphael’s program works by analyzing the waveforms emitted by musical instruments. It has been relatively straightforward for computers to accurately identify a single note being played, but when harmonies enter the picture, it becomes a far more difficult problem. A program written by Daniel Ellis of Columbia University uses machine learning techniques to “teach” computers how to understand music by feeding it 92 recordings along with their musical scores. Gradually, the software begins learning the rules of music (such as how an E is often played with an A, but rarely with an A sharp) and over time it becomes more adept at discerning the notes from the music. Raphael’s program doesn’t have to go through this complex process because it only has to follow a single performer, but future iterations may be able to follow along with a whole group.
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i dont see how this would cause a problem with the riaa ?
if we are talking about aiff to midi converter the only fear i can think of is you could rip a cd and automate the re generation of the original sheet music ok maybe that could be a concern because you dont need to pay for the original sheet music and/or the original copyright holder could no longer have the ability to limit how many copies of the notes are out there (even if all licensed users follow copyrights and dont leak a copy like movie critics do for screeners)
yeah really. are we just putting “RIAA’s nightmare” on random articles now?
“RIAA’S BIGGEST PROBLEM 66% OF TEENS ARE SEXUALLY ACTIVE”
“RIAA’S MOST CONCERNING THREAT LOGITEC RELEASES NEW GAMING MOUSE!”