Earlier in 2017, I wrote an acoustic rock song about homelessness. Specifically, it was about the streets of Cambridge and was a nod to the charity Jimmy’s Cambridge (donate now) for which we, as The TyrannoChorus, are choir in residence this year and raising funds and awareness for the night shelter.
Anyway, the song Bridges (Crossed and Burned) is online – SoundCloud and BandCamp, but I wanted to try and transcribe the melody and then arrange some harmony parts (SATB) for the choir. Not my strong point, to be honest, and I was hoping to find a shortcut. If I could record me singing the melody then perhaps I could use a file converter to turn the raw sound file into MIDI and so automate the first step and get the tune down as a score that I could then add harmonies to and flag with the guitar chords over which our pianist might ad lib the accompaniment. Too ambitious?
Well, I tried a wav to midi converter…and the results were interesting, to say the least. To my ear the result bears no resemblance to the tune I sang and is more akin to some kind of early twentieth century, dawn of jazz, classical avant garde crossover…have a listen. It’s quite entertaining:
And, here’s what the resulting MIDI file displayed as a score in my MIDI editor looks like:
I reckon if we are going to get to sing this before the end of the year, I somehow have to bribe, blackmail, or otherwise persuade our pianist Tim to take on arranging it…but that incurs the bigger assumption that our choir leader, Siobhan, likes the song and wants us to sing it in the first place…