I have experimenting with transfering sheet music into scratch. Only the first staff is done, and then I have just done the G-clef staff, but allready I am having synch problems. Everything is rigged to start at the click of the stage, but whether the synching will be ok or not is very random, and the most common is not.
Oh, and if you use any difficult music terms in your replies please explain what they mean. I don't really know how to read notes but what I have learned in the last few days playing with scratch. For example, I am still a bit confused to as whether I have done it in the right octave even though I did manage to figure out where the g-clef and the f-clef staffs are in relation to the middle c. I found a Youtube video of the song I am trying to transcribe into scratch, (Angels by Robbie Williams) and the melody kind of fits but the tone is wrong... On top of that I think something I have not quite grasped yet is wrong due to the four sharp symbols on the staff that I don't fully understand the meaning of. It seems to be that some notes on the staff should be raised half an octave, but I got confused as the only explanations I found were in a forum and not very pedagogical...
Oh, and while I am at it. Synching does seem to a be a general problem with scratch. I tried to do a countdown timer with cool sprites but the bad synching made it impossible... Sometimes I also find that I need to put wait tags where they logicially shouldn't be needed to have the scripts do their stuff in the right order...
Offline
Hi AlveKatt,
You might want to have a look at some of my musical projects, which also transcribe sheet music, and are synchronized using broadcasts:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Jens/62023 (a simple fugue for two voices)
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Jens/32331 (a musical round for four voices)
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Jens/65645 (a fully orchestrated song)
also, I've investigated into automatic music composition using broadcasts to synchronize music, too:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Jens/28881 (a very simple symphonic music composer)
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Jens/30478 (a rhythm and blues project)
I really love musical projects, so you'll find even more in my stuff. If you have any specific questions, just keep asking!
Offline
Oooh. Thanks! I was thinking about making game called Piano hero. Basically exactly like Guitar hero, but with a piano in Scratch and you have eight or six keys on your keyboard instead of a guitar controller.
First I need to learn to read the sheets though. So my first question if you have the time, what does the four sharp signs at the start of the staff entail?
I looked at your Menuet project. Thanks! I put variables for an octave of notes around the middle C and a low and high variable at 12 and -12 respectively though, thought it was easier to keep track of than the individual scratch note numbers. I also used the division math block to keep track of beats. I just put 1/8 notes and breaks in [blocks] (( 1 </> 8 )) [/blocks] and 1/16 in [blocks] (( 1 </> 16 )) [/blocks] and so on.
By the way. Where on the sheet do you find the tempo?
Thank you!
Offline
AlveKatt, you might also want to look at my music projects:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/kevin_karplus/2160
(polyphonic_piano_with_arrows)
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/kevin_karplus/3185
(one_sprite_composer)
The 4 sharps would be F-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp, and D-sharp. What they mean on the staff is that every note that appears as an F, C, G, or D should be "sharped" (raised a half tone). You would get that for a piece in the key of E-major or C#-minor.
Tempo is not always written on sheet music, but often occurs at the beginning in a format like (quarter note)=120. The note chosen indicates the beat unit and the number is how many beats per minute. Luckily, the scratch team did use the standard convention (beats per minute) for tempo, so you don't need to translate anything.
Offline
Thanks!
That composer thing is really impressive. I need to figure it out. Only school starts on monday, which means that you probably wont see any updates or new stuff from me until the next school break in february... Aaargh! I would keep doing Scratch during school if I could handle it, but I can't, especially with the university course that's included. I don't really have the ability to sit, say, just half an hour with scratch. If I get started I sit at least five hours... Even if I thought that I sat just half an hour... Once I sat down with Scratch during summer break and looked at the clock. 23:00. It's summer break, I can sit until 2 in the morning, I thought. When It felt like I had sat about three hours I looked at the clock, and it was 7:30 in the morning.
My sense of time is lousy...
Offline
Ah. So if a half note is 120 beats per minute, a whole note is 60? A quarter note would be 240?
There is no note on the piece I was trying o transpose (is that the right word?). It has a whole rest though. Would that mean 1 beat per minute, 30 beats or maybe 15?
Offline
You can choose what note corresponds to a beat.
In conventional music notation, there is often a time signature, consisting of one number over another. (4 4 time and 3 4 time are the most common). The top number says how many beats there are to a measure (the space between two vertical bars) and the bottom numbers says how many beats to a whole note. So 3/4 time is 3 quarter notes to a measure, with one beat for each quarter note.
There is sometimes also a notion of weak and strong beats, so 6/8 time can be thought of as either 6 1/8th notes per measure, or two beats, each of duration 3/8 (a dotted-quarter note).
Offline
I thought you had misunderstood my question, now I suddenly realized why the song played so much faster than it was supposed to. I thought there was one beat per measure, and I didn't realize at first that this was what you tried to explain to me. Does that mean that 60BPM, that I think was the default in scratch, is some kind of standard?
I am still curious about what that full break next to the claves mean though.
Thanks!
Offline
60 bpm is certainly *not* a standard speed in music, something between 90 and 140 would be more more adequate.
I assume the Scratch developers chose 60 bpm because it 'translates' to the standard note lengt of 1 sec in previous versions of Scratch. If you look at musical projects created with versions of Scratch that did not yet have the tempo global, you'll notice that the 'old' blocks (with n secs in them) are not shown as red blocks, but are in fact 'translated' to the new tempo model introduced in versin 1.2(.1). Therefore - I guess - they chose the standard tempo of 60 bpm.
For your own new musical projects look at the top of your sheet music you want to transcribe, usually it says something like '120 bpm' or - in classical score - 'MM 144' (for Mälzel's Metronome, but essentially the same thing). If an Italian adjective is given instead of a numerical tempo, you might want to check out a metronome like chalkmarrow's http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/chalkmarrow/69573 to find out which bpm-value corresponds to that.
Offline