Symbolic Music Processing Drop-In Clinic

[tomthe...@gmail.com]

There are a couple of unconference sessions that I already want to attend. But in the gaps, I'll be happy to help any conference delegates (especially Master's/PhD students) with an interest in symbolic music processing (e.g., working with staff notation, MIDI files, aligning to audio, MusicXML, kern, etc.) to find the high-quality online data resources. From my own experience I know it can take a long time to identify those resources whose symbolic encodings are actually worth using (i.e., because they are relatively error-free), so hopefully this will help researchers avoid wasting time and/or reinventing the wheel in terms of writing format converters.

Bring your machine with you, and I'll show you (1) where to find these resources, and (2) how to use existing tools to convert them to whatever format you desire!

Tom Collins

[tomthe...@gmail.com]

Matt McVicar via email to me:

I can't make it to the conference, but I'll say that I've had a lot of fun this year using GuitarPro tabs for building compositional models for guitar. GuitarPro files can be exported (somewhat) to MusicXML and contain playing positions (fret and string numbers), allowing us to compose playable tablature in a data-driven way. They can also be visualized and synthesized in GuitarPro (commercial, good quality) and TuxGuitar (open source, poor quality). There's a pretty good database of user-generated tabs (~150,000 or so) here:

http://www.gprotab.net/

Eric Humphrey also did some cool deep learning with these data too. I found the quality of these tabs to be extremely high-quality, especially if you spend a few minutes browsing the different versions of the song you want. Hope someone else manages to find other cool uses for this data source!

Matt

[tomthe...@gmail.com]

Thanks Matt. Consider it added to the remit of the Drop-In Clinic. I've worked with GuitarPro files before, saving them MusicXML and then doing further processing to get at the things I want.