Do you want to use your analog instrument as a MIDI controller but don't want to pay for an expensive MIDI Pickup?
Have you ever been struck in a great moment of Inspiration and recorded a great new idea for a song or a hot new lick, but now can't remember what notes you played?
Are you a Music Teacher who needs an easier way to write down a practice sequence for your student?
Or, are you a music Copyist who is looking for a simpler alternative to playing an audio recording of a song over and over to pick out the notes and write them down?
Electronic Equipment and computer software have been available for many years to record music in the form of a MIDI file so it could later be automatically converted into notation, played back using the sounds in your sound card or MIDI-enabled musical instruments, edited in a sequencer, or used on Web pages as a space-saving alternative to audio files. The catch is that the music has to be entered by hand or "played in" on a MIDI-enabled instrument, so you have to know how to play the song in order to create the MIDI file.
A few products have been recently developed that will allow you to sing or play a non-MIDI instrument, determine the notes you played, and write them to a MIDI file or control another instrument. The catch here, of course, is that these products can only recognize songs containing a single instrument or played monophonically -- one note at a time. That's fine if you sing solo or play a solo on an instrument such as a flute or horn.
However, most prerecorded WAVE, MP3, and WMA music contains several instruments playing polyphonically. Attempts have been made over the last 25 years to create an automatic music recognition system that recognizes multi-instrument polyphonic audio files.
