Tutorial: How to make Google Translate beatbox

Thanks to the listen button on Google Translate, you can listen to a computer pronounce foreign languages.

What’s even more awesome about this button is, that with the right sequence of letters, you can turn it into a beatboxing machine. Here’s how:

1. Go to translate.google.com
2. Enter this text into the box:pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk
3. Change “From” language to German. important.
4. Press the speaker icon.
5. Sit back and enjoy

Want to visualize your music? Try Synthesia!

A long time ago, I covered MuseScore, an application that can typeset your music as well as play it back.

And now, for something completely similar…

Originally developed as a game to train people how to play piano, Synthesia is equally adept at playing back your music. Instead of a bunch of notes on five-line staves, Synthesia uses a Guitar-Hero-esque approach, by translating notes in a MIDI file into colorful falling bars that strike a keyboard. The advantage of this visualization is that everyone, including non-musicians, can understand what’s going on in the music.

Take a look at the videos below:

Coming soon! Musical dissection

Musical dissection, as I call it, will soon be a new set of blog posts on Thought Box. Each post will focus on a piece from Classical literature (sorry, pop music fans, I’m not too big on that stuff).

Basically, I will find a piece of music anywhere from the Baroque to the Contemporary literature time span. There will be a background on the piece, background on the composer, a Youtube video of a performance, and a measure-by-measure analysis.

Now you may be questioning, “what gave you the idea to do this?”

If you could play any instrument, what would you play?

“If you could play any instrument, what would you play?”

Good question!

Well, as of right now, the instruments I do know how to play are piano and violin. If I could play any instrument…

…ok, I’m going to tweak this question.

If I could play any instruments, I would play every single instrument in the orchestra! Yes! And here’s why:

1. I can’t make up my mind on a single instrument.
2. Each instrument has its own unique qualities, and dare I say, personalities. For example, the flute is flirtatious while the double bass is lively and energetic, and the timpani are extremely ambitious.
3. If I could play every single instrument in the orchestra, what I would do is take an orchestral piece, learn every part on every instrument, make 20 or so recordings (depending on the number of parts), each recording with me playing a different instrument or part, and stitch all the recordings together in Audacity! Then, I could burn it to a CD and sell it and call it “the only orchestra in the world with one and only one person.” Imagine how much money that would make me!
4. I could substitute for any missing players.
5. Learning how to play all the instruments would be a great life challenge/project. It would also cost me a lot of money for those instruments, but imagine, I’ll have an entire mini-symphony sitting in my room!
6. This would be a great thing to mention if I had to state a unique talent that I have.
7. I could go to the music store and try out all the instruments, instead of just the electric pianos.
8. 20X instruments learned = 20,000% better chance of making it into a professional orchestra. 20K PERCENT!
9. After learning percussion instruments, I could make music with anything. Ever heard of that group STOMP?

Happy 200th Birthday, Chopin!

Today, we celebrate the birthday of a historic composer, Frederic Chopin. Chopin was born in 1810 in Poland, and later moved to France. He was the poet of the piano, writing pieces with greater emotional depth than ever seen before. Although he rarely performed in public, his pieces show his virtuosic talent as a composer and a performer. He died in 1849, and his heart was put in a special container and now resides at a church.

For Chopin’s 200th birthday, I have listed some of my favorite pieces by him. Chopin wrote almost exclusively for the piano, and he admitted that he could not write for any other instrument.

MuseScore: A free music notation program that’s actually good

I’ve been looking for a music notation program forever that’s free, powerful, and isn’t a demo, and I finally found it.

I got the MuseScore application through a newsletter from Mac OS X freeware. It’s quite a big program though, but 100 megabytes later, I finally got to open the application for the first time. At first glance, it was much simpler than other similar programs I had tried previously. There were only a few toolbars for note input, playback, and editing, but that’s all I really needed. I knew this was an app that I would actually keep and use.

Entering notes in MuseScore is a piece of cake, and there are so many ways to do it. Just select a note value in note input mode and move the mouse to where you want the note to be. Or, you can type in notes with the keyboard (A-B-C-D-E-F-G) and move them with the Up or Down arrow. Inputting chords was also easy; just press Shift + (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) and it will build a chord. MuseScore will even fill in rests for me so that I didn’t have to! I especially appreciated the many ways that I could enter and edit notes, whether it be with mouse input, keyboard input, MIDI input, or a combination of the three.

Slurring and ties were also easy to accomplish in MuseScore. I just had to press “S” or “+”, respectively, and it would automatically form a slur. Then, to change the start and end positions, I just did Shift+Right or Shift+Left. Ties were done automatically just by pressing the “+” key.

MuseScore is also very intelligent. It follows the standard rules of music notation. It knows when to beam up, beam down, and how to break the beams of notes. 1st-and-2nd endings, dynamics, articulation, fingering, and grace notes are a walk in the park in MuseScore. However, there are still a few difficulties with voicing, where there are two or more voices in a single staff. MuseScore supports up to four voices per staff, but it can take a while to learn to input with voicing, and MuseScore still has a few bugs to address before voicing gets really simple.

One of the most useful features in the program is the playback. Unlike other programs, you can specify how you’d like the music to be played back, be it at a soft or loud, fast or slow, reverberant or not; it’s your choice. The playback tool is great for checking accurate note input, which brings me to one other point: when entering notes, MuseScore cannot tell the difference between E-flat and D-sharp, that is, no matter how you enter E-flat or D-sharp, MuseScore will recognize it as E-flat. However, there is a script pre-installed called Pitch Spell that tries to guess which one of the enharmonic notes it is.

Along with piano music, MuseScore also handles chamber music, violin music, symphony scores, and even kazoo music, although I haven’t tried them yet.

Other features in MuseScore include:

• Cross-beam notation (see figure at right):
• Automatic note head positioning in a staff
• Highlighting out-of-range tones (which apparently doesn’t work all the time)
• Plug-ins to create chord charts, color notes, insert note names, etc.
• Page and text style editing
• Export as PDF, PNG, SVG, MusicXML and many other formats
• …and pretty much anything you can write on real music notation paper, including triplets, line breaks, and so much more!

A few things don’t quite work yet:

• Voicing has a few bugs, including chord note positioning
• Arpeggiando positioning
• Slurring across multiple lines
• Beaming with triplets
• Mixed meter/key signature

I give MuseScore an 8.5/10 and highly recommend it to anyone who has been looking for a free yet powerful music notation program. Download at http://musescore.org.