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It's typically handwritten because computers aren't very good at transcribing music. You can use it to search for music: http://www.musipedia.org/melodic_contour.html

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Sure, but I'd love to be able to, say, input a midi file and get Parsons codes for all the tracks.

Oh, that would be pretty easy. MIDI's not a difficult format to parse, and I'm sure there are libraries already written that would just dump out lists of note events, or something.

It depends, MIDI files can be complicated. I don't think it's easy to programmatically isolate the melody in the general case.

Ah, yes, that's true. Finding the melody, tracing it across different instruments and such, could be difficult, and that depends on how the music is structured.

I should've said that a naive version of it would be easy (like a channel-wise, instrument-wise, or track-wise code).

Agreed, it'd be easy if the melodies are already isolated. It'd be an interesting challenge to isolate them out of a combined track!

It's probably not impossible - this guy[0] has made a midi-to-text converter, which i've been trying to use to make some simple tracks. With moderate success, but that's more my lack of practice and musical knowledge.

edit: i forgot to mention that it's a completely different format - but it shows what's needed for such a parser.

[0]http://www.archduke.org/midi/

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