~ Rendering MIDI Using Arbitrary Tone Scales - Revisited

Tarsos can be used to render MIDI files to audio (WAV) files using arbitrary tone scales. This functionallity can be used to (automatically) verify tone scale extraction from audio files. Since I could not find a dataset with audio and corresponding tone scales creating one using MIDI seemed a good idea.

MIDI files can be found in spades (for example on piano-midi.de or kunstderfuge.com), tone scales on the other hand are harder to find. Luckily there is one massive source, the Scala Tone Scale Archive: A large collection of over 3700 tone scales.

Using Scala tone scale files and a midi files a Tone Scale – Audio dataset can be generated. The quality of the audio depends on the (software) synthesizer and the SoundFont used. Tarsos currently uses the Gervill synthesizer. Gervill is a pure Java software synthesizer with support for 24bit SoundFonts and the MIDI tuning standard.

How To Render MIDI Using Arbitrary Tone Scales with Tarsos

A recent version of the JRE needs to be installed on your system if you want to use Tarsos. Tarsos itself can be downloaded in the form of the MIDI and Scala to Wav – JAR Package.

To test the program you can use a MIDI file and a Scala file and drag and drop those on the graphical interface.

The result should sound like this:

To summarize: by rendering audio with MIDI and Scala tone scale files a dataset with tone scale – audio information can be generated and tone scale extraction algorithms can be tested on the fly.

Code, Java, Computational musicology, and HoGent

MidiToWav.jar, MIDI_file.mid, and persian.scl.txt