Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Direct Note Access



When first I read Gizmodo hailing this as the "Photoshop of Music", I was a little skeptical. But after watching the video with the bearded German, Peter Neubäcker, a former guitar maker turned programmer, I'm convinced it will have huge repercussions on the music scene. It basically gives you midi like control over recorded samples. Maybe there are other products that can do this, but this is the first I've been told. Very cool.

2 comments:

poser p said...

Yeah, this is definitely new stuff. The interesting uses for it (from my point of view) are messing with drum loop samples, even if the "tracking" isn't perfect (actually, it's those imperfections that would make it interesting). Quoting from the MIT Technology Review:

'Nor is the software quite the equivalent of a human ear, able to distinguish actual instruments from one another. Like an audio idiot savant, it can tease individual notes out of a complicated six-note chord. But feed it a recording in which two instruments are playing the same note--say, the trumpet and piano on an old Ellington record--and it will treat them as a single entity, rather than distinguishing their separate voices.'

I wonder if it could also recognize different voices in a conversation. Another interesting flaw:

'Neubäcker is quick to admit that the software isn't perfect. It works well with clean, unprocessed instruments, such as acoustic guitar or piano. It will work on a heavily distorted electric guitar but may, for example, read some high-pitched harmonics as separate notes.'

I'd actually like graphical control over all of the harmonics in the waveform (without using filters) so I could shift them around. If it could automap them to a midi keyboard in real time... Now that would be very fun indeed. I'll have to look into getting this.

David said...

This rocks my socks.