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 🙁 :
However, we got something working:
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