Enhancement: MIDI Output with encoded fingerings

[Cool-Joe]

Because MusicXML is nice for further editing, printing oder PDF output, but not ideal (and sometimes tricky or buggy) for automatic reading e.g. in player applications. The idea is to provide an option to output the notes to a standard MIDI file with encoded fingerings. Music21 can output MIDI easily, however I do not know which features it supports. Fingerings could be stored as text events or (what I would prefer) just use the channel information: You could easily store the fingering (1 - 10) as MIDI channel information (1 - 16), what would be ideal for further processing.

[PRamoneda]

Hi! I am Pedro master student at MTG (Barcelona).

Do you have some idea of how to implement this enhancement?

Maybe extending the functionality of music21 midi classes? https://github.com/cuthbertLab/music21/blob/7498a6ee3ec2592a097ac243d6042da3b85e8b3d/music21/converter/subConverters.py#L1019 https://github.com/cuthbertLab/music21/blob/7498a6ee3ec2592a097ac243d6042da3b85e8b3d/music21/pitch.py#L2447

[marcomusy]

Hola Pedro, to be perfectly honest I wouldn't know how to do it... maybe you can get help from the maintainers of music21, if they are interested in such a feature. On the pianoplayer side it's surely far from perfect (especially for chords) and will need some improvements as soon as i find the spare time to do it :)

[Cool-Joe]

Maybe extending the functionality of music21 midi classes?

IMHO extending music21 isn't necessary as it already can output MIDI data. Instead the encoding of key fingerings as channel information would have to be implemented inside pianoplayer.

[PRamoneda]

ok yeah, I understand that. However, it's needed to create the fingers with the same duration (and then, the same resolution) as the music21 generated midi. Well, I think I can do that from pianoplayer! I will try to implement it in the following weeks :D

[PRamoneda]

what is beam?

[marcomusy]

it's the staff. Typically beam=0 is the right hand and beam=1 the left.

[PRamoneda]

Ok thank you so much @marcomusy! And a last question in the reader class. What is the purpose of sfasam variable. here a direct link https://github.com/marcomusy/pianoplayer/blob/735ce50f89fa27896e373264ae2488c56b579687/pianoplayer/scorereader.py#L84

I understand the meaning but not the purpose :)

[marcomusy]

the idea here is that notes in chords are never played really simultaneously, so the time of each note in the same chords is slightly modified to make them happen in a rapid sequence with time difference 0.05.

[MaximeHoude]

I'm late to the party, I can not really help, but I also agree with OP, this enhancement will be a great addition to the projet: it's exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks!