Scorpiano -- A System for Automatic Music Transcription for Monophonic Piano Music

TL;DR

Scorpiano is an automatic system for transcribing simple monophonic piano melodies into music notation using digital signal processing, aiming to assist musicians regardless of skill level.

Contribution

It introduces a digital signal processing-based system for automatic transcription of monophonic piano music, achieving results comparable to neural network approaches.

Findings

Good transcription accuracy for simple melodies

Comparable performance to neural network systems

Effective integration of multiple audio processing techniques

Abstract

Music transcription is the process of transcribing music audio into music notation. It is a field in which the machines still cannot beat human performance. The main motivation for automatic music transcription is to make it possible for anyone playing a musical instrument, to be able to generate the music notes for a piece of music quickly and accurately. It does not matter if the person is a beginner and simply struggles to find the music score by searching, or an expert who heard a live jazz improvisation and would like to reproduce it without losing time doing manual transcription. We propose Scorpiano -- a system that can automatically generate a music score for simple monophonic piano melody tracks using digital signal processing. The system integrates multiple digital audio processing methods: notes onset detection, tempo estimation, beat detection, pitch detection and finally generation of the music score. The system has proven to give good results for simple piano melodies, comparable to commercially available neural network based systems.