Audio - midi conversion with melodic natural sounds - birds etc

Anyone done this?

As bird song is a repetitive melody and most animal calls are repetitive, you could probably make a whole song based on those naturally occurring rhythms etc right? Been done?

I might try today and see what happens.

I had the same idea millions yrs ago and i forgot about it. Thnx for reminding me ;)

Messiaen did this I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Messiaen#Birdsong_and_the_1960s

Cool, thanks. I thought it would be well interesting to see what pitch/potentially scale that bird song tends to fall into in general.

It's probably just really melodious major scale stuff right?

I don't actually have the knowledge to identify the scale actually. I suppose you can't because it tends to be simply short phrases right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yme2L92zwg0

Yeah after watching that I think I'm actually very wrong..it's quite minory right.

Yeah, I'd say the Ableton convert to midi melody doesn't actually work as well as you'd want it to. I tried cleaning up samples I've personally taken and reasmpling them to make the melodies, perhaps, easier to detect for the software, but that didn't really help much either. I think i'd need really melodious clean and clear samples for it to work well. Or perhaps a lot of bird song is less tonal and thus won't be identified. Ah well, I tried.

try melodyne by celemony. works better than ableton

  On 8/10/2015 at 1:54 PM, Polytrix said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yme2L92zwg0

 

Yeah after watching that I think I'm actually very wrong..it's quite minory right.

this is f. boring! i can't remember hearing any bird that sounded this boring

Good idea! Sounds like something from the animal music experiments that happen from time to time (stuff like motion tracking fish and translating their movement and position into control signals).

Cool. I'll try melodyne.

Yeah, my idea is to try and recreate a dawn chorus with actual bird song audio - midi conversions. A fun experiment for now that might turn into something.

Holy crap on a stick, melodyne looks amazing...exactly what I need as it looks like it auto maps the audio to pitch on a piano roll and thus I know what's going on pitch wise without doing ineffective conversion with Ableton. Will try the trial.

birds wouldn't be singing in keys invented by humans. although maybe some birds which are good at mimicry would learn western keys from hearing human music. would be interesting to see if some research has been done into this.

anyway, maybe with melodyne you could tune it to the closest western scale. birdsong is actually pretty high in pitch - some frequencies go above human hearing. it might work better if you slowed the audio down to half speed and tried to find the notes that way? also if there are lots of background noises in the recording it could mess up the pitch tracking.

Melodyne is working like an absolute charm for this! THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

My Dad is an avid birdwatcher so I have access to CDs with really well recorded samples so I could potentially get loads of midi clips from the most melodic of those. Currently this is working nicely:

http://www.birdforum.net/opus/index.php?title=Leach%27s_Storm_Petrel&diff=prev&oldid=69300

Play button right at the bottom of the page

  On 8/10/2015 at 4:20 PM, xox said:

try melodyne by celemony. works better than ableton

this x 10, Melodyne is one of the most overlooked and powerful experimental sound manipulating tools around.

in melodyne a really fast way of seeing how your idea would sound is to snap to scale and and move the entire note grid up or down a few semitones. This will automatically force it to go to the scale you have setup in scale doctor. Its a little confusing but produces immediate results

edit: I think you can get really useable results with *just* manipulating the audio, but if you can get an audio---> midi conversion to sound like a genuine bird song that would be cool too

Looking forward to hearing this!

somehow these assholes geniuses figures out how to do it with a wind up squeeze music box

Haha, I can't promise anything too great! But simply converting to midi on a decent section of audio gets good results almost every time using Melodyne. I haven't actually forced it into any scales yet as you describe as I simply wanted to hear what it would be like over the top of the original audio with say a grand piano patch playing back the midi. I ripped a dawn chorus sample from a youtube video and there was too much simultaneous sound for it to recognise all the discrete sequences so I suppose that was asking a bit much. I actually like the fact that birdsong isn't working via a set scale...there are some very odd melodies I could lift directly and turn into IDM stuff probably.

I think I'll try this too. I got Melodyne forever ago so it should be cake. I've never predominently used bird sounds, or tried to get melodies from them, so good idea!

Though as far as just bird sounds, I use them ALL THE TIME in my stuff. It sounds a lot like synthesis, so why not?

https://soundcloud.com/evoava/frenetic-hash

Lots of bird sounds in here. Though instead they were sliced and transposed in various ways. Just saying, if it sounds like a bird, it probably is, this track probably has the most bird sounds I've ever used in one. The most obvious uses start after 1:00 or so, and especially around 2:30 and on.

  On 8/10/2015 at 11:48 PM, Polytrix said:

Haha, I can't promise anything too great! But simply converting to midi on a decent section of audio gets good results almost every time using Melodyne. I haven't actually forced it into any scales yet as you describe as I simply wanted to hear what it would be like over the top of the original audio with say a grand piano patch playing back the midi. I ripped a dawn chorus sample from a youtube video and there was too much simultaneous sound for it to recognise all the discrete sequences so I suppose that was asking a bit much. I actually like the fact that birdsong isn't working via a set scale...there are some very odd melodies I could lift directly and turn into IDM stuff probably.

id be curious if a piano result would sound anything like an actual bird call, worth a try though. I think an instrument with a legato style of playing would translate better, like some kind of wind instrument or it might be interesting to convert it to human voice using something like Vocaloid. The problem is that you're going to do some midi manipulation, like making sure the note lengths extend past the next note (so they slide)

Yeah, the piano patch doesn't really make it sound bird like. Equally though, if I extract the nicest melodies of the most common birds calling in a dawn chorus and play all those melodies at the same time using the piano patch it could create really interesting overlapping melodies. I'd like to try that...in my mind it'd sound beautiful but in reality it might just be very plinky plonky boring.

I was actually thinking why don't I use the actual original sample and then create melodies using the audio sliced to midi...but I'm not sure if that makes sense.

More fun to perhaps recreate it right?

Fuck, I had a track on soundcloud from almost 3 years ago, but I had to delete it due to space...

BUT

Here is a track that I did around 2002~2003, where the base of the track is birdcall stuffs that I recorded in the apartment with my laptop mic.:

http://udac.bandcamp.com/track/ep02-03-birdso

Good memories, man...

  On 8/11/2015 at 9:25 AM, peace 7 said:

Fuck, I had a track on soundcloud from almost 3 years ago, but I had to delete it due to space...

 

BUT

 

Here is a track that I did around 2002~2003, where the base of the track is birdcall stuffs that I recorded in the apartment with my laptop mic.:

http://udac.bandcamp.com/track/ep02-03-birdso

 

Good memories, man...

Okay, obviously my track is literally sampling animals and not MIDI'fying them, but uh... Sorry for that.

While I'm here apologizing, here's a track around the same era that I made with mostly cat meows:

http://udac.bandcamp.com/track/ep03-02-jagalga

  On 8/11/2015 at 9:38 AM, peace 7 said:

 

  On 8/11/2015 at 9:25 AM, peace 7 said:

Fuck, I had a track on soundcloud from almost 3 years ago, but I had to delete it due to space...

 

BUT

 

Here is a track that I did around 2002~2003, where the base of the track is birdcall stuffs that I recorded in the apartment with my laptop mic.:

http://udac.bandcamp.com/track/ep02-03-birdso

 

Good memories, man...

 

Okay, obviously my track is literally sampling animals and not MIDI'fying them, but uh... Sorry for that.

 

While I'm here apologizing, here's a track around the same era that I made with mostly cat meows:

http://udac.bandcamp.com/track/ep03-02-jagalga

 

Dude, fantastic. Will check out later.

I really enjoyed the cat sounds based track the most dude. I find it so cool that you are in Tokyo. I was teaching English in Korea for a year and feel like such an idiot for not getting out there :( Can you link me to some native Japanese instruments? I was thinking of using a weird sound for the midi samples and it would be cool to use something Japanese...if that's possible I really don't know though!

Llalalalalala

Thanks!

As for instruments... Koto, shamisen, taiko...

Traditional Japanese instruments and vibez in context to kick ass:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EWhpZF2a4TM