[Denemo-devel] Entering Pitches First

[Richard Shann]

It has occurred to me that the technology developed in Denemo for
transcribing from audio could be used for entering music by playing in
the pitches first and then adding the rhythm.
What I have in mind is that you could play the line of music through on
a MIDI keyboard and it would be represented by those little timing
markers for note on (and a similar one for note off) over the top of a
blank staff (or perhaps a staff filled with beats).
Then you could play in the rhythm and the notes would appear, rather
than the pitch-less notes as at present.

The problem this would avoid is getting lost while typing in the rhythm
- if you get distracted it is not always easy to find where you were
just looking at the rhythm you have entered. (The solution at present is
to play in the note pitches so far).

Of course, it raises the opposite problem, what to do when you make a
mistake playing in the music. At the moment when playing in the pitches
over the rhythm you just move the cursor back and continue playing. This
is easy to do since the music already looks like the music you are
transcribing up to the wrong note. You can easily see where to play
from.
When creating the pitches first you just have a series of timing markers
to represent each note. You can listen back to the playing and check it
is ok, but what if you leave a long pause or play a wrong note? I can
imagine using the present mechanism for selecting particular notes and
then closing up a pause by dragging the note-on marker until it appears
in the right part of the bar. And, of course, being able to replace
wrong notes.

Going beyond what we already have in terms of technology, it would be
possible to display the played-in pitches by writing the note names
under each timing marker, or (more elaborate, but still possible)
drawing the timing markers in their correct position on the staff. So
you would have rhythm-less pitches, the counterpart of the current
pitch-less durations.

Such a system would have the merit that while playing in the rhythm the
actual duration of the note played could be checked against your
suggested duration. Indeed for sufficiently simple music (and
sufficiently accurate playing) you could imagine just hitting the space
bar for Denemo to suggest the duration.
It would be possible to allow chord entry as well - the chord would
appear as (very) closely spaced notes and again I could imagine a range
of manual, semi-automated and automated detection systems for these. I
am not contemplating polyphonic input otherwise. Foot-pedal for slur
entry while playing pitches would be possible though.

Any comments would be most welcome!

Richard