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Comment by cevn | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance - is it possible to make this work for chords (ie play a piano and have it transcribe)? Or does that already exist somewhere and I didn't know? Because I would love to have something like that - play piano, and have an application transcribe what you're playing, perhaps automatically detecting key and meter.

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What you've described is a Very Hard problem. :) Dozens of researchers around the world are trying to tackle it, with varying results.

Piano is actually one of the easier instruments to automatically transcribe, in part because the notes decay in a predictable way and there's (generally!) no vibrato or changes in tone once a note has been struck. Unlike, say, a clarinet or a guitar, where pitches can be bent after the initial note onset.

Context: I run Soundslice (http://www.soundslice.com/), an interactive sheet-music site, and I've investigated this deeply over the last few years.

If you have a MIDI keyboard, you can plug it into your computer and use a scorewriter app like Finale or Sibelius to do this.

recent discussion of Chordify, youtab et al

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8203196#up_8204455

If you pick thru this conference, there's a huge amount of info on the DSP involved: http://www.ismir.net/proceedings/index.php?&table_name=paper...

It would probably be easier to write a program to transcribe your piano playing from a silent video aimed at the keyboard, than from an audio recording.

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