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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Transcribing MIDI Files to Notation |
  
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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Transcribing MIDI Files to Notation |
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When you import a MIDI file, Notation Player transcribes the musical performance in the MIDI file to music notation. The data stored in the MIDI file is basically a recording of what notes (pitches) are played at what exact times by various instruments (in tracks).
A good way to understand transcription is to think of the MIDI performance as a piano roll used on player pianos that were popular in the late 1800's and early 1900's. The holes in the piano roll determine what notes are played at what times. If you unroll the piano roll horizontally, you will observe that the holes mark the beginning and ending times of played notes. The vertical position of the holes determine the pitch of the notes.
Here is an example of a piano roll:
Basically, the above piano roll is all that Notation Player is given when it must transcribe a MIDI file, to notation. Notation Player is able to cleverly transcribe the above piano roll information into notation. This example happens to be the Bach Minuet file, minuet.mid, that is installed in the C:\Program Files\Notation\Songs directory. The result of the transcription looks like this:
Notation Player must make many decisions about how to transcribe any given MIDI performance to notation. These decisions are similar to those that a trained musician would make when he or she hears music and writes down the notes on paper. (Very few musicians have this special training in "music dictation".)
Some decisions about how to transcribe the music are closely related to the style of the music. Notation Player does not attempt to determine what the style of music is, in order to make the appropriate decisions in transcribing the MIDI performance to notation. Instead, Notation Player lets you make a few simple choices about how to transcribe the music.
In particular, you can instruct Notation Player to:
 | Choose one or the other of Standard versus Swing style in determining how to display rhythms such as illustrated here: |
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| Detect and display split upper and lower voices as opposed to single voice, as illustrated here: |
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| Remove overlapping notes in order to reduce the number of ties, as illustrated here: |
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| Remove rests smaller than some size you specify, such as a quarter rest, as illustrated here: |
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| Detect grace notes, trills, and tremolos. |
The options described above are offered in the Transcription Options dialog described in the next topic. Notation Player offers you the opportunity to specify the transcription options in several circumstances:
| As you import a MIDI file, click the Transcription Options button in the File Open dialog box. |
| As you download a MIDI file from the Internet, click the Transcription Options button in the File Save As dialog box. |
| With the Re-Transcribe command in the Score menu. |
About Quantization
If you have used other music notation programs with a transcription feature, that feature very likely includes an option for specifying the "quantization level". Such an option tells the program to round note duration values and attack times to the nearest, say, thirty-second note, or sixteenth note. You may wonder why such an option is missing in Notation Player. The reason is that Notation Player has a better way of determining note durations and attack times than simply rounding to some nearest value. Such quantization only works well for fairly simple rhythms. Notes with long values tend to be "over-enthusiastically" notated with extra dotted values and ties. Separate notes with short values and small differences in attack times may be incorrectly collapsed into chords. Notation Player does a much better job at transcribing rhythms than notation programs that use a simple quantization approach. Notation Player analyzes the rhythmic context of each note to determine what quantization level to apply to the note.