To solve this problem, researchers at Spotify’s Audio Intelligence Lab teamed up with our friends at Soundtrap to build Basic Pitch - a machine learning model that turns a variety of instrumental performances into MIDI. For other musicians, having to compose on a MIDI keyboard or manually assembling an entire MIDI score note by note, mouse click by mouse click, can be creatively constraining and tedious.

This is a real problem for musicians who primarily sing their ideas, but aren’t familiar with piano keyboards or complex music software. This is because live performances on real instruments are typically difficult for a computer to interpret: once a performance has been recorded, the individual notes that were played are tricky to separate and identify. Usually, musicians have to produce MIDI notes using some sort of computer interface, like a MIDI keyboard, or by typing the notes into their software by hand. While MIDI is used by nearly all modern musicians, creating compositions from scratch with MIDI can be a challenge. Did a note sound weird in that chord you played? Change it with a click. MIDI acts like sheet music for computers - it describes what notes are played and when - in a format that’s easy to edit. Most of this computer-based music uses a digital standard called MIDI (pronounced “MID-ee”). Basic Pitch is not your average MIDI converterįor the past 40 years, musicians have been using computers to compose, produce, and perform music, everywhere from bedrooms to concert halls.

It was built for artists and producers who want an easy way to turn their recorded ideas into MIDI, a standard for representing notes used in digital music production. Unlike similar ML models, Basic Pitch is not only versatile and accurate, but also fast and computationally lightweight. Drop a recording of almost any instrument, including your voice, then get back a MIDI version, just like that. Basic Pitch uses machine learning to transcribe the musical notes in a recording. Introducing Basic Pitch, Spotify’s free open source tool for converting audio into MIDI.

Spotify to mpe