[sdiy] Simple MIDI idea for DIY analog synths

[Scott Gravenhorst]

I have a friend who was interested in this who thought that the software
was somehow capable of extracting not only melody lines but also could
configure instrumentation as well.  Clearly, at least the instrumentation
part is not possible.  I had read somewhere that if the parts are well
placed enough in the stereo field, some phase technique was used to
"isolate" individual parts so that pitch and note on/off times could be
determined.  My friend tried it out on a piece of music I had done that had
4 or 5 parts.  I never heard the output, but when I asked him about what
happened, he only shook his had and made a rather disgusted smile.  I
imagine it works like those boxes that are designed to strip out vocals
from stereo mixes of recorded songs for use in a sort of karaoke way. 
Judging from the look he gave me, I would not bother with this.

Rainer Buchty <buchty at cs.tum.edu> wrote:
>> Recently, I noticed some software on the 'net claiming to convert mp3
>> files to MIDI files.
>
>Where that idea has popped up e.g. on Usenet from time to time (and was
>always turned down for obvious reasons), it's remarkable that this is the
>second time within this week that I read about that issue.
>
>So how exactly would be any mix separated into distinct tracks? Did I miss
>a recent accomplishment in audio analysis so that software is now not only
>able to tell the frequency mix for each sample point, but also distinguish
>instruments?
>
>For a human it's (more or less) easy to listen to a song and pick out the
>individual lines like bass, melody, second melody, string pad playing
>chords etc. But I wasn't aware that they meanwhile taught that kind of
>recognition to computers.
>
>If somebody has information on that, I'd be more than glad to get a link
>or citation... But until then I'm still convinced that it's not possible
>(yet).
>
>Rainer
>

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