10: Basic Pitch

What if you could create a guitar solo just by humming it? That’s Basic Pitch, a new open source project from Spotify’s Audio Intelligence Lab. Basic Pitch is a neural network that can analyze the recording of almost any instrument (including your voice) and then transcribe the notes that it detects into MIDI, the standard file format used for musical notation. It’s like speech-to-text, except it’s turning musical performances — whatever you hum, strum, pluck, peck, or tinkle — into a digital score you can edit on your computer.

Hear host Dave Zolotusky talk with Spotify researcher Rachel Bittner about what makes detecting musical notes an interesting machine learning problem. You’ll learn about how musicians use audio-to-MIDI converters to make music, the subtleties of pitch tracking, and why you want your model to capture the main pitch events in the audio as well as all the “wiggly stuff”. Plus, a live demo of the model in action and all the “Hot Cross Buns” you can handle.

Listen to the end of the episode to hear "Virgo", the single that artist-producer Bad Snacks composed using Basic Pitch.🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻

Basic Pitch is open source software that musicians can use online for free and that ML developers and researchers can tinker with and contribute to.

• Can you play an instrument or hum a tune? Try it yourself at BasicPitch.io
• Contribute on GitHub in the Python repo or the TypeScript repo
• Soundtrap is Spotify’s collaborative, online digital audio workstation (DAW) for musicians, podcasters, and audio producers
• Read more on the Spotify Engineering blog: Meet Basic Pitch: Spotify’s Open Source Audio-to-MIDI Converter
• Listen to a track composed using Basic Pitch: “Virgo” by Bad Snacks on Spotify
• Watch the making-of video on her YouTube channel: Spotify Made an Audio to MIDI Converter (?!?) - Basic Pitch Overview
• Listen to “Op37 Maximum Shimmer” and other demo tracks composed by the Spotify developers who made Basic Pitch

Want more open source goodness from Spotify’s Audio Intelligence Lab? Listen to Ep.06: Bits of Math at Scale to learn about Pedalboard, a Python library for applying studio-quality audio effects at scale.

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

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