With my brother and his kids in town we did some thrift store shopping to pass the time and explore the Tower District

At the Neighborhood Thrift I came across an old Panasonic Tape Recorder that was in decent shape for $10. It came with the power cord and dictation microphone, so I purchased it and we enjoyed the rest of the afternoon with Mexican food and general silliness.

I had a chance to try it out and the tape was playing double speed, but otherwise worked fine.

Looking at the mechanism the pinch roller wasn’t contacting the capstan.

It was a quick fix to retension the spring and get the play speed back to normal.

Now that the tape recorder is working, I had a chance to hear some old recordings including audition tapes as well as recordings from Orchestra trips to Europe.

Audra and I also had a chance to test the dictation microphone with a Father/Daughter duet singing ROSÉ and Bruno Mars’ APT.

Always fun to give old stuff new life and share the experience of playing with audio.

Looking at the short improvisation from a few weeks back, I decided to use a tool to convert audio to MIDI. Why? Well this would be my first step in starting to orchestrate the basic melody of the improvisation and take what was a brief moment in time and grow it into a fully formed musical concept.

Traditionally this would be done by transcription of the melody as well as defining the chord and song structure. This is still the best and most thorough method because human thought is going into each note as well as the relationships between the notes to the structure and theme.

But this is 2025… we can just let computers do all that hard stuff for us right? As much as I would love to have transcription skills of a 19th century music scribe, alas my abilities are highly underdeveloped.

Turning to our robot overlords, I did a quick google search and one of the first tools to come up was:

https://tuneonmusic.com/music-tools/midi-converter

This is a free to use, browser client side, conversion of audio to midi using Google Magenta. A few minutes of crunching was all it took to convert the audio file into the following MIDI file:

Improvisation 20250305.MIDDownload

The results are not pleasant to listen to, but the basics of the notes are mostly there, the general rhythm, and the structure. This is a rough equivalent of if I were to go and hammer on a MIDI controller keyboard for a few minutes, but instead it’s gleaned from a (crappy) recording on a real piano.

The next steps would be to start to map this to a BPM, time signature, key signature, and song structure. Fixing bad notes comes next as well as chord harmonization and playback through MIDI instruments to look at timbre of sounds that fit those voicings.

Looking forward to spending more time on this and happy for now to have the rough transcription knocked out in a few minutes.