Ask HN: Converting Music into Numbers/Letters?

2 pointsredmaverick3 comments

The sheet music style is too clunky. I need a way to convert sheet music into numbers or letters. I am trying to create AI to compose music and am looking alternatives for sheet music style notation.

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In theory you should be able to convert sheet music from a PDF to MIDI with something like this (I did a quick Google search)

https://www.musitek.com/smartscore-midi.html

Once you have a MIDI[1] file, you can do a lot of interesting things with your music, such as generating or modifying notes with random values for pitch, velocity etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI

Never realized how easy it was to manipulate a midi file. You can even convert a midi file to csv. Perfect. Thanks!

you can use abc notation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_notation

http://abc.sourceforge.net/

or vextab

http://www.vexflow.com/

http://www.vexflow.com/vextab/tutorial.html

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