
Ask HN: Converting Music into Numbers/Letters? - redmaverick
The sheet music style is too clunky. I need a way to convert sheet music into numbers or letters. I am trying to create AI to compose music and am looking alternatives for sheet music style notation.
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bishop74
In theory you should be able to convert sheet music from a PDF to MIDI with
something like this (I did a quick Google search)

[https://www.musitek.com/smartscore-
midi.html](https://www.musitek.com/smartscore-midi.html)

Once you have a MIDI[1] file, you can do a lot of interesting things with your
music, such as generating or modifying notes with random values for pitch,
velocity etc.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI)

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redmaverick
Never realized how easy it was to manipulate a midi file. You can even convert
a midi file to csv. Perfect. Thanks!

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billconan
you can use abc notation

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_notation)

[http://abc.sourceforge.net/](http://abc.sourceforge.net/)

or vextab

[http://www.vexflow.com/](http://www.vexflow.com/)

[http://www.vexflow.com/vextab/tutorial.html](http://www.vexflow.com/vextab/tutorial.html)

