Author Topic: Melodic Range Spectrogram with a Melodia layer - note values?  (Read 4443 times)

ikeshut

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I am a new user of Sonic Visualiser, which I have been mainly using to work out transcriptions of songs into standard musical notation.  I have found a combination of a Melodic Range Spectrogram with a Melodia layer really helpful by showing a representation of the melodic line and enabling me to approximate notation of the melody.  The Melodia layer effectively highlights the vocal melody amongst what can sometimes be a quite busy-looking spectrogram.  There is, however, one annoyance associated with using this combination.  With just the Melodic Range Spectrogram by itself, wherever the pointer is situated on the spectrogram the pitch of the note closest to that point is identified.  However, when the Melodia layer is added, (as far as I can tell) that is no longer possible.  The pointer gives a value in Hertz, but not the music notation value.  I realise I could convert the Hertz value, but this would be fairly tedious and time-consuming, so what I tend to do is keep my eye on the spot and alternate between the spectrogram plus Melodia and the spectrogram only (where I’m able to read the note value).   So, my question is this: Is there any way, with the Melodia layer in place, that the note value (equivalent to the pointer position) can be shown?
« Last Edit: January 25, 2015, 18:48:43 by ikeshut »

cannam

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Re: Melodic Range Spectrogram with a Melodia layer - note values?
« Reply #1 on: January 27, 2015, 09:24:11 »
Hi -- first off, I am fairly sure the answer is "no", at least with the current Sonic Visualiser release and the existing Melodia plugin.

What is actually happening here is that Melodia produces a series of values that happen to have the unit Hz, and when you mouse close to one of those, the value associated with the nearest point is printed. Sonic Visualiser is just printing out the value and unit that the plugin gave it, it isn't actually interpreting it in any way.

That said, this would be quite easy to improve in the code. Sonic Visualiser does have special handling in some places for known units such as Hz -- for example when calculating the vertical auto-align alignment between pitch and spectrogram layers. So it could be enhanced so as to do this conversion as well and show you both results.

So this is a great suggestion, I have made a note and hopefully might be able to include this in the next release, but I'm afraid for now the answer is that this isn't supported yet.

ikeshut

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Re: Melodic Range Spectrogram with a Melodia layer - note values?
« Reply #2 on: January 27, 2015, 12:37:06 »
Thank you for that.  The more I do this it seems my brain is being trained to more easily follow the contours of the melody.  It's great to have audio and visuals happening at the same time.  I'm finding I'm starting to more easily pick out the melody within the spectrogram and just use Melodia occasionally as a 'second opinion'.  This is a great tool.