I play by ear, and when I write tunes I normally save them by making a recording. This isn't ideal for sharing, though, especially with people who are more comfortable learning tunes from dots. I last had a go at this ten years ago, and decided to give it another try.
I was first curious whether AI advancements meant I didn't need to learn how to do this at all: could I just give my recording to a program and have it figure it out? I tried several things without success (each in Claude Opus 4.1, Gemini Pro 2.5, and GPT-5):
- Uploading an mp3 and asking for sheet music.
- Running
basic-pitch(open source pitch to midi converter), uploading the midi, and asking for sheet music. - Running
basic-pitch, thenmidi2lyto convert to LilyPond score format, uploading that, and asking it to clean it up
I ran these all on the tune I used last time since I had "ground truth" there. The one that came closest was the last in Claude, which got the melody mostly right but the rhythm way off:
It ought to look something like this:
The Duck Pond
Seems like automation isn't there yet, at least not the tools I tried. I decided to go ahead manually.
I started with a tune I wrote on vacation this summer, after Nora had a close call in a duck pond. I was still pretty shaken up, playing was helpful emotionally, and this tune came out. It only has four notes (she's four) and with the combination of range and specific notes I think it would land correctly for (Scottish) bagpipes. I started on paper:
Then I typed it into MuseScore:
Initially (as you can see on paper) I had the rhythm wrong, but it was hard for me to tell. The issue is that hearing a fiddle tune played robotically by the computer always sounds some amount of wrong, and the tricky thing is telling whether the issue is the quantization vs having written the wrong thing. A friend (hi Charlie!) and I played some tunes at a party and I got him to take a look, and after he said the issue was definitely in the writing I came back, gave this another chance, and am decently happy now.
Here's some playing it slowly, on mandolin (electric but not plugged
in) and piano, to give a sense of how I'm imagining it:
(mandolin, mp3)
(piano, mp3)
Truncated Piano
I had another go, on a tune I wrote about a year ago. I'd just gotten my new 73-key piano for gigs, and was excited to play it a lot. Again I started on paper:
This one has several mistakes, including that I wrote out twice as fast as it actually goes, and it doesn't actually use triplets. But overall it was much easier to get down than the previous one. Getting it into MuseScore went smoothly, partly because this one is simpler and partly because I'm starting to get the hang of the tool. Here are the dots:
Here's what it sounds like:
(mp3)
Polka No Bears
This was starting to get fun, so I did another. This is a tune I wrote last summer on vacation with my family in the Poconos. We saw a lot of bears, and even more evidence of bears, mostly of interactions with insufficiently secure trash containers. Again starting on paper:
I realized after writing it down that it felt too repetitive, and in fact I had often been playing it AAB without thinking about it. So this afternoon I added a third part to go in between the two parts I wrote before. This has had much less time to gel, and I'm not sure whether I'll still be happy with it in a few days.
And an audio version:
(mp3)
Highland Rd
In late Summer 2019 a marchy Englishy tune was bouncing around my head. I didn't end up doing anything with it other than whistling it into my phone, but now that I can write things up it seemed like a good time to get it out. Named after a Somerville street that is an unusually nice place for a walk.
No paper this time: I tried starting right in with the computer since this one seemed like it would be easy enough.
And an audio version:
(mp3)
I'm excited to share these; while a more prudent approach would be to hang onto ideas and save them up for Kickstarter commissions and gifts, most likely if I tried that they'd never get out.
Other tunes I'd like to transcribe at some point: Nora's Waltz, Julia's Waltz, Turkey Strumstick.