Choral geekery

Almost half the Pink Singers are in Munich as this post is written, singing at Various Voices in Munich. We wish them much fun. They are singing a selection from our rep for MixTape – and mark my word!– tickets are going quick for our summer concert. With all the lowest-price tickets gone already, get yours ASAP!!


In the meantime, some of us are left in London without a rehearsal this week. Sunny, one of our geeky Sopranos, took the opportunity of a gap in the schedule coinciding with her work 24h “hackathon“** to attempt to write some software to tell her when she is singing amiss to the Pinkies score.
Here was the aim:

  • Take a PDF of Pink Singers music
  • Write a programme to turn it into a MIDI
  • Singalong to the backing track and record that singing as a MIDI
  • Compare those MIDIs and output where the singing is amiss


It turns out that the following is true:

  • There is software out there that will do some of this for you, but that’s no fun. Start from scratch to learn things!
  • It’s really hard to turn a PDF of sheet music into an accurate MIDI
  • Sheet music and MIDI can be represented as MusicXML, which can be read by all sorts of software, like Sibelius and other cheaper software
  • It’s even harder to turn a vocal recording into an accurate MIDI, if you aren’t an operatically trained singer 🙁 :
Three Blind Mice Vocal Recording into MIDI

However, we got something working:

Read the PDF
Friendly interface
Note comparison code
Compared output

So, Sunny will be using her new software to make sure that Rainy Days and Mondays and other top tunes are spit-spot for our June 16th Concert.
In the meantime, we wish the Pinkies in Muenchen Viel Gluck!!
**hackathon – 24h to write computer code as quick as you can

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