Assignment 5 Midi sequencing

 

Goal

To read a simple musical score and to create a MIDI rendition of it.

Tasks

  1. Look at the score of "New York Blues", and understand the main musical notations in use. The key signature is for C major – no sharps or flats; the time signature is 6/4 which means 6 quarter notes per measure. Note that the time signature only appears in the first measure, but is in force for the whole piece. The tempo is dotted half note = 72, which means that there are 72 of these per minute. You can ignore the little numbers above and below the staff – they are piano fingerings. The arcs are slurs, not ties, which means that the notes the arc covers should be played legato, or with no break between the notes. The only really tricky part is the second line where the bass staff jumps to the treble clef and back to the bass clef. This is because there would be too many ledger lines above the bass staff which would collide with the treble clef. Take note of the fermata on the last two chords and the last note. This means that the tempo slows down to make a more dramatic finish. You can insert tempo markings into the piece at this point to reduce the number of beats per minute.
  2. Use the MIDI sequencer Rosegarden to create a MIDI rendition of the piece. You will need to get used to the methods of the sequencer before you attempt to put anything in. Use this MIDI file of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" to help you.
  3. First of all, use two tracks: one for the treble staff, and one for the bass staff. This means that eventually you can have each played by different instruments. Then use the piano roll, or matrix editor, to input the notes with the pencil tool. Before you put it in, make sure you know how many quarter notes the duration is, although you can extend or shorten them later. The piece only contains quarters, half notes, dotted half notes, and dotted whole notes.
  4. Play the piece as you put the notes in, making sure it sounds ‘right’ and no notes have incorrect pitches. It is useful to use a simple piano sound for these purposes.
  5. When you are done, export the file in MIDI format (File/Export/Export MIDI file).
  6. Then try playing each track with a different instrument. Find a combination you like and export that file.
  7. Then add a simple percussion accompaniment by creating drum hits using the editor on a new track which plays back through channel 10. The duration of these notes does not matter – just the start time is important, so a short note like a 1/16th is fine. Save this third file and submit the three MIDI files.
  8. Use the notation editor to get as close as possivble to the look of the original. Try to add the slurs, the fermatas, and the clef change in the correct place. If possible, add the dynamic markings (mp, f, cresc. etc.) as text entries. Save your piece as a rosegarden file. Submit this file.

Resources

The Rosegarden sequencer runs as is. The home page for it is www.rosegardenmusic.com, which includes a useful tutorial as well as other goodies. It needs a soft synthesizer, and it will run nicely with the GM sound font in FluidSynth. You need to hook it all up before your start with the jack subsystem. Here's how:

  1. Login to music1 or music2.
  2. In a terminal window start the jack server with 'qjackctl&'. On it's window, click 'Start'. This will start jack in the background. Makwe sure that the steup is correct. The method should be jackstart, and the number of input and output channels should not be 0.
  3. Start FluidSynth by typing 'qsynth&'. Load a GM sound set by clicking on Setup, then the Soundfonts tab and navigate to /usr/lib/soundfonts. Any of the three sets there should work.
  4. Start Rosegarden by typting rosegarden&.
  5. Click on the "Manage MIDI" icon that looks like a little keyboard with a green overlay on its righthand part. Make sure that the soft synthesizer is selected for the General MIDI device. The Connection column should say something like "129:0 Synth input port (8078:0) (write)".
  6. To complete setup, click connections in the jack control panel. The popup dialog box has listings for various devices and how they connect together. Expand the qsynth entry in the left hand window, and the alsa-pcm entry in the right. Make sure that the qsynth outputs are connected to the alsa-pcm inputs. If not, then connect them by selecting the qsynth and hold and drag it to the alsa-pcm input.
  7. Now create your tracks. When you use the pencil tool in the matrix editor the note should sound. If it doesn't, send me some e-mail.

Deliverables

The 3 .MID files you create, and the .rg file.

Due Date

April 24th. .