Super Mario

I played around with some different programs that are designed to analyze .mp3 and .wav files, turning them into .midi files, which are basically simple instrument sounds programmed into the computer, often on several layers that reproduce different instruments. I used the program on a relatively simple song from my itunes library. The resulting midi file sounded alright, but it's definitely not accurate enough to capture everything that's going on. Overall you get a general sense of the song, but there are parts where the program didn't know what to do and made up something that wasn't there, or left it out all together. It might be interesting to use when turning ambient noise/sound effects into scores, but for now it's not doing me much good.

Instead of turning mp3s into midis, I just went onto freemidi.org and looked around for something that everyone would know, and found the theme to Super Mario. I found a second program that opens midi files and shows you their different layers as scores. You can get rid of layers you don't want, so I got rid of the percussion track and an annoying "coin" track. The program shows you what notes the computer has been programmed to play transposed over actual sheet music, so I took some general shapes from the lead track and let them influence how I arranged the rectangles when there weren't all three.

- Ian