VoiceComposer (tentative title)

Group Members

Alan Huang, cesium@mit.edu
Di Liu, liudi@mit.edu
Daniel Gray, haiiro@mit.edu
TA: Juho Kim, juhokim@mit.edu

Problem Statement

Composing software is often expensive or highly complicated
Composing may be inaccessible to users who haven't studied music for years
- lack of ability to recognize notation
- don't know how to play the right instruments
The majority of people listen to music though, and naturally know what sounds good to them
- linguists note that music springs up everywhere language does
Even for experienced users, if a person comes up with an idea for a song, without an easy way to "jot it down" they may well forget their tune.
- budding artists or writers can draw sketches or write notes in the margins of their papers when an idea hits, but we aren't taught musical notation at a young age.
Even for experienced users, the mouse and keyboard aren't natural tools for musical input, so that it takes a long time to write down music. Users can buy MIDI input devices, but this requires learning to use it and lacks portability.

Target Users

People who want to try their hand at composing or remixing, but haven't bought/don't want to have to learn complicated composer programs to do so (main target)
More experienced users who want an easy way to record and play with ideas when it wouldn't be worth it to bring out/they don't have access to all their usual equipment.

Proposed Solution

Voices have a pretty good range, and are a natural way for people to produce music. The technology in autotune could be used to convert voices to various instruments (not just pure tones). After this technical step, the challenge would be to create an intuitive and simple interface for editing. We want to create something that works on smart phones, for convenience and by analogy to the popular autotune app. In short our primary goals are:

Fast Voice-to-MIDI
Easy to record a melody whenever you need to
Uncluttered UI that allows basic editing (cut, copy, move, etc. sections of music)
Allow note twiddling without learning musical notation (raise/lower, shorten/lengthen a tone)
Ability to manipulate separate tracks of music (overdub, change instrument, transpose, balance, etc.)
Convenience