Disklavier

Unfortunately, converting the sound of a performance (WAV) to the
instructions describing how to produce that performance (MIDI) is a very
difficult task, and there is no software currently available that can do
the job in a fully-automatic way and produce results that sound good.
Your recordings are especially problematic since they have singing over
the piano, and that is bound to confuse most tools.

Zenph Studios (http://www.zenph.com) has been producing MIDI files from
the great piano recordings of Art Tatum, Glenn Gould et al. using a
proprietary process that likely involves using software tools to do the
initial analysis, producing a rough musical template which is then
iteratively refined by skilled musicians who constantly compare the
reconstruction with the original recording.  This is very time-consuming
but currently the only way to achieve accurate-sounding results.

If you have deep pockets, you might be able to hire Zenph to work on
your private recordings.  The only other solution yielding worthwhile
results would be to have a pianist record hand-played MIDI files for
your Disklavier that sound sufficiently like your mother's playing.

Mark Fontana


On Mon, 2010-11-08 at 05:07 +0000, joegugs2 wrote:

> I am trying to convert songs of my deceased mother playing the piano
> and singing from 1975 into a midi song file that will play on my
> Disklavier e3 piano. I digitized her songs from cassette tapes
> into .wav and .mp3 song files. AmazingMidi and Intelliscore have
> produced unusable midi files that are not even close to the original.
> Any suggestions would be most appreciated as it is my dream to have my
> mom playing my piano for me again. Joe