So I found this company that analyzes songs and shows music visually in pretty much the same way we do (functionally at least). Really fascinating, definitely worth checking out.
This takes voice input, and determines the chords that would fit it and records it along and plays back. Pretty similar to things we're thinking of. (essential auto accompaniment that's very user friendly)
Find your way to OZ- music
This is an awesome Chrome music experiment that has a note input interface similar to what we're looking at...
Here are some sites explaining the kind of music terminology we'll be using if you all want a refresher/want to learn something:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_symbols (use this is a glossary, there's a lot more here than we'll need)
http://datadragon.com/education/reading/
http://www.musicawareness.com/basics.html (a little more advanced theory)
http://www.wikihow.com/Read-Music (this has a bit more information than you may need and is kind of wordy, but a good all around explanation on how music is put together, some of this will be real important when we start to program how to turn a visualization into sheet music)
I like the easy visual layout, and how you can choose the scale you want to use, which forces you to sound good. It also has the set rhythm which you can't really stray from.
I'm thinking Logic is the best software out there for musicians who want to record actual notes and turn them into sheet music, though it's accuracy isn't always great. Here's an idealized usage of it:
For this one, he does an indepth tutorial of what I was trying to do, check it at 5:30:
Sibelius is a good example at looking at how to deal with rhythm input without any backing track.. flexitime tries to guess your tempo.. or if you try to play with sibelius's metronome, you have to preset what kind of notes you want it to put in so that it's more accurate... (note: it's using MIDI so you don't need to worry about pitch detection) start watching at about 1 minute, but he actually inputs notes at 3:25 or so (to a click):
So how to input audio information to sibelius with pitch you ask? Audio Score Ultimate 7 is the plug in you need to buy: http://www.sibelius.com/products/audioscore/ultimate.html
http://www.neuratron.com/audioscore2.htm
Sibelius's competitor, Finale, only allows mic input from woodwind or brass instruments (which is definitely easier to figure out than voice)
hahah I can't believe no one posted this before but garage band on the iPad is a good reference of how to make music for non musicians in a somewhat musical way...
specifically the smart guitar functions to play riffs or chords, see like 20 seconds in:
A general overview of ipad garageband:
I have this on my iphone if anyone wants to try...
Those are the place I learn about FFT and basic knowledge like averages, minim lib is a cool interface into java
http://code.compartmental.net/tools/minim/manual-fft/
http://code.compartmental.net/2007/03/21/fft-averages/
http://code.compartmental.net/tools/minim/
Not quite in the direction we're going, but Sound Shapes (a game for PS Vita and PS3) shows how you can make music editing fun and relatively simple. It's a platformer where everything makes sounds and it's quite simple to make something that sounds relatively good.
So we visited Snibbe last week, and this app he developed for Bjork is an amazing interactive music program.
And Here's some of the stuff he did with Phillip Glass, also pretty amazing
If anyone has any interest, the guy who made these apps is in San Francisco and was interested in hearing about the project we're working on. He's definitely an interesting guy to hear speak, because he views the future of music as entirely interactive.
