
Parsons code - trampi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsons_code
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b2ttb
Wrote a quick perl script that implements the functionality of the wikipedia
image:

[https://pastebin.com/dhD5b90C](https://pastebin.com/dhD5b90C)

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rhizome
Kinda reminds me of the notation scheme someone was trying to implement for DJ
scratching 15 or so years ago.

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lbotos
I remembered when I first learned that and how mind blowing it was to help
learn complex scratches. I dug it up. Turntablist Transcription Method, TTM:
[http://www.studioscratches.com/scratchy-100-ttm-
turntablist-...](http://www.studioscratches.com/scratchy-100-ttm-turntablist-
transcription-method-explained/)

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b6
I'm very interested in music but never took a class or learned notation or
theory. This appeals to me because it has always irked me that people would
write down songs like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Happy Birthday as if they
start on certain notes. They don't. They start on whatever frequency you want.
The frequencies and lengths afterward are relative to the first _whatever-you-
want-to-call-it_.

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peterburkimsher
I wrote about Parsons Code a few weeks ago in my Chord Progressions dataset
documentation!

[https://peterburk.github.io/chordProgressions/index.html](https://peterburk.github.io/chordProgressions/index.html)

There are only 81 possible Parsons Codes for a 4-chord song.

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defertoreptar
So that's the name of what I spent hours doing while trying to solve that
sunken ship puzzle on The Witness.

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Hextinium
I have been mentally trying to devise a scheme for doing this for years
because I hear music as the position of the notes moving relatively. From this
I dance to the relative notions but I have had difficult writing it out, this
is perfect!

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elsurudo
Cool – I sometimes used a notation like this (the visual form of this) myself
to (attempt to) remember melodies I heard on the radio... before Shazam
existed

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jaredandrews
I would be interested in hearing more about this technology being used in
practice. Are these codes primarily "hand written" by an individual listener
or are they encoded by computers?

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allenz
It's typically handwritten because computers aren't very good at transcribing
music. You can use it to search for music:
[http://www.musipedia.org/melodic_contour.html](http://www.musipedia.org/melodic_contour.html)

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murftown
Sure, but I'd love to be able to, say, input a midi file and get Parsons codes
for all the tracks.

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khedoros1
Oh, that would be pretty easy. MIDI's not a difficult format to parse, and I'm
sure there are libraries already written that would just dump out lists of
note events, or something.

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allenz
It depends, MIDI files can be complicated. I don't think it's easy to
programmatically isolate the melody in the general case.

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khedoros1
Ah, yes, that's true. Finding the melody, tracing it across different
instruments and such, could be difficult, and that depends on how the music is
structured.

I should've said that a naive version of it would be easy (like a channel-
wise, instrument-wise, or track-wise code).

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murftown
Agreed, it'd be easy if the melodies are already isolated. It'd be an
interesting challenge to isolate them out of a combined track!

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abakker
Doesn't mention time signatures, purposely ignores key, but also doesn't
represent note interval. How exactly does this facilitate search?

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TylerE
Exactly for those reasons.

Most people can't pick out intervals by ear, but they can manage "higher"
"lower" or "the same".

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megamindbrian2
There should be a babeljs converter for this.

