Re: realtimeMIDI2LilyPond / realtimeMIDI2MusicXML

[Karlin High]

On 7/13/2016 4:44 AM, Jonathan Scholbach wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Does somebody have experiences with inputting voices via MIDI? I know
> that several programs exist with which you can enter music (to Finale-
> or Sibelius-output or to MusicXML) by step-recording. But is there a
> (good) program which allows you to record the music with your
> midi-keyboard and get a .ly-output?
> The main problem seems to be the rhythmic imprecision of humans playing
> the piano. Is there a program which deals with that? If there is no such
> program do you know attempts to write it?
>
> Thanks
>
> Jonathan
My favorite way to get MIDI into LilyPond is first making MIDI files and 
then converting them to LY files with the midi2ly script.

To make MIDI files for LilyPond, I use a program called SpeedyMIDI. ("An 
editor designed for choirs and singers to quickly generate MIDI files 
for rehearsal.")
http://sourceforge.net/projects/speedymidi/files/ Available for Windows 
and Linux; I use it on both. This program is mostly about pitches and 
durations. Note input is either by onscreen mouse keyboard, or a 
connected MIDI music keyboard. I use an M-Audio Keystation 49e.

SpeedyMIDI solves the imprecise note duration problem by having users 
input both - first hold the note, then press the spacebar to fill in as 
many cells in its spreadsheet-like MIDI grid as desired. (The cell size 
is adjustable from 1, a whole note, to 128th notes.) I also used the 
Bome MIDI Translator program to get MIDI messages for a key like C1 or 
C6 (unused for my work) and convert them to spacebar keystrokes. The 
result allows control of the SpeedyMIDI program with only the MIDI 
keyboard. (The Bome program is available at 
https://www.bome.com/products/miditranslator/overview/classic and works 
well for Windows, but so far I have not been able to get anything 
equivalent running on Linux.)

For vocal music, this setup is a near-perfect fit for my needs. Now if 
someone is trying to input a thing like Gottschalk's "The Banjo" for 
piano, I doubt it would work nearly as well, or maybe not at all.

My dream is to use LilyPond to make a hymnal edition. Of this one: 
https://www.hymnary.org/hymnal/CPHS1875 It's the oldest Mennonite hymnal 
in the English language, published in 1847 and last printed in 2015, 
never with notation but rather referencing the Philharmonia and Harmonia 
Sacra tunebooks. https://archive.org/details/philharmoniacollwenger 
https://archive.org/details/newharmoniasacra0funk (If you ever wondered 
how the Funk noteheads got into LilyPond, Joseph Funk the compiler of 
some of these is the man to thank or blame.) I want to combine the text 
and tunes to produce a hymnal with notation. The hymnal has around 172 
SATB vocal tunes, and towards the end it was taking about 20 minutes 
each to enter them into MIDI files. Earlier, I tried various Music OCR 
programs for this project - that sounded great! I already had page 
scans, and was hoping to get MIDI files from them. But nothing I found 
came even close to working.

Then, I used LilyPond's midi2ly script to convert the MIDI files to LY 
files.
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/usage/invoking-midi2ly

That got the pitches and durations into LilyPond. Now lots of layout and 
lyrics work remains. I read with interest the discussions about LaTeX 
and LilyPond; this project is going to be hundreds of pages long and I'm 
not sure how best to structure it yet.
--
Karlin High
Missouri, USA