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Midi import: Keep original pitch intervals

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tom11
Posted

I often export my own musical ideas from a daw into Sunfire.

But after import the melody sounds quite different to the original one​  although the original pitches fit into the detected harmonic context.

Of course I don't want static pitches  , the recognized figure should be transposed if the harmony gets transposed)

 

Should not Sunfire  only change the pitch interval if necessary?

Or at least an option to let synfire set all "chromatic" , "bypass", .. option to a figure,so that in the realization of the figure the absolute pitches are same as the original ones, as far as possible?

Often it is even desirable that the import sounds different, eg with 3rd party resources, to avoid plagiarism, but for your own stuff you will mostly want to get as close as possible to the original.

 

 

 

 

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andre
Mon, 2017-07-17 - 22:16 Permalink

so that in the realization of the figure the absolute pitches are same as the original ones, as far as possible

Well, since the Harmony parameter is estimated, this only gets "as far as possible". Therefore, even in theory, a lossless mapping from MIDI to Figure and back is hardly possible (this was the original goal, but after years of research, it became clear 100% was impossible to achieve).

If you turn off most of the voice leading features in Interpretation (there's a preset that is almost bypass), you'll get closer to the original. Mapping back to the same harmony might rebuild the original MIDI this way. But this comes at the cost of the Figure not adapting well to other harmony.

So what we have now is a balanced tradeoff between faithful reproduction and reusablility, with a little emphasis on reusability. Synfire is definitely not a MIDI file editor. MIDI import is rather intended for building and collecting phrases that you will use to create new music:

(http://users.cognitone.com/tutorial/import)

I routinely import everything as static first, then convert to dynamic Figures only those portions I want to change. If I wanted to replace all Harmony everywhere, the result would be extremely different anyway.