Major Breakthrough: Music's 'DNA' Decoded

[nabraxas]

Peter Neubäcker, the German music software engineer responsible for the popular pitch correction Melodyne, has created a program called Direct Note Access (DNA) that can dissect a chord into individual notes so that the chord can be re-formed into something new. For music producers who use computers -- which is just about all of them -- this constitutes a major game changer whose implications for the future of music are deep and widespread.

For example, Direct Note Access will make it possible to create an entire album's worth of guitar playing with a single chord, because it can re-form it into any other chord. Or, with the single click, a chord can be toggled between modes -- major, minor, dorian, mixolydian and so on -- in addition to transposing between keys. A string quartet can be recorded once, using a single microphone, and then a producer will be able to adapt what they played to another song long after they have left the studio. All of this is made possible by Direct Note Access' ability to separate a chord into individual notes (as depicted by the image above).

We've been fascinated by Neubäcker's Direct Note Access technology since hearing about it in April, and have pressed Celemony for more information about how it works. The company responded with a video that depicts Neubäcker demonstrating its powers in a clear, understandable way.

Neubäcker's work on Direct Note Access began when a Melodyne user in Los Angeles complained that a marimbaphone solo he'd recorded contained a wrong note, but that the instrument had already left the studio, so there was no way to re-record it without incurring significant expense.

Peter_neubaecker_03 By inputting the specific notes he was trying to isolate into the software, Neubäcker (pictured to the right) was able to associate each note's harmonics to its fundamental frequency, giving him a way to tease the mixed-together notes in the marimbaphone solo away from each other. Then he pitch-shifted the offending note to where it should be and sent the user back a sound file with the corrected marimbaphone.

The next step was to teach the software how to recognize notes without being told what they were beforehand. This was readily accomplished with the processing power of today's computers, and Celemony's Direct Note Access software started to take shape.

In what could be the most impressive demonstration I've seen in 11 years of covering digital music technology, Neubäcker records himself playing the guitar, uses DNA to separate the chords into six individual notes, and then plays them using a keyboard, all in a matter of about a minute.

While Melodyne enabled anyone to sing in tune, Direct Note Access' effect will likely be far more widespread. Any one of us will technically be able to create a guitar-based song by strumming all of the open strings on a guitar then editing the resulting chord to play whatever we want. Talk about your democratizing technology.

Celemony's Direct Note Access will likely lead to a revolution in how music is made, although purists are likely to scoff at yet another technology that downgrades the importance of virtuosic talent. Others will surely see this as a natural progression in the ongoing musical fusion of human and machine.

Direct Note Access is slated for a fall release. Here's what the program's interface looks like (the blobs represent individual notes that have been isolated from chords):

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/08/major-breakthro.html

[chilli]

I've been reading about this in Future Music magazine, hope it's good and can't wait until it's available, it will open up huge possibilities when working with sampled vinyl.

[Genesis]

That is insane. If it does what I am think it does then WOW! It is some what sad that music is going completely digital but then again in the 60's guitar pedals were the latest greatest thing. Gotta move with the times...

Gen

[mu!]

This looks really damn cool, but i can see it bein really abused to rip off a bands/artists sound

[Hagakure]

amazing technology. i have heard of software for songwriting that tailors tunes to be as popular as possible. not sure how well it works or how much its used. really popular tunes still need to be slightly original. just not too much.

also i heard about some software that you put all of a composers works into it and it calculates the patterns behind it and pumps more out.

the dude who created the software had a series of concerts of music that was like it was from Bach and people got really offended by it.

[apothecary]

also i heard about some software that you put all of a composers works into it and it calculates the patterns behind it and pumps more out.

I actually did a subject on this last semester (well, you can apply the same techniques to anything that can be statistically correlated, music is just one of the things we covered). Pretty interesting stuff too, maybe combining these two pieces of software would make the music you can produce by this method even more realistic sounding.

[ThunderIdeal]

it can dissect a recordign of a chord. i'm not sure how many producers will find it all that useful.