Hi all. Just wanted to throw this out in case anyone has any helpful thoughts. I am somewhat new to Dorico and REALLY loving it, can’t believe I struggled on that other program for so long.
But here is what I am wanting to do for a teaching project i am working on: I want to create a piano part that would visually react to midi input. Say it is a melody, I would like each notehead of the melody to change from black to a bright color at the moment I play the note. So as I play each of say the 4 quarter notes in the bar, each note “lights up” at the moment I play it. It’s a complex problem, I realize. But even if the incoming midi note acted as a trigger to advance the visual to the next beat, that would be enough for me to do what I want. The main challenge is how to build a score that can react intelligently to incoming midi data. I am trying to determine if there is any way to do it without rolling up my sleeves and coding it from scratch, ug!
Appreciate any thoughts or comments! Thank you!
I don’t think that’s possible in Dorico, at least not until scripting with Lua gets more advanced. But one other possibility might be Max, from cycling74.com. There is an external library for Max called Bach which implements some notation capabilities (it seems to be modeled on Ircam’s OpenMusic software).
That’s a fantastic lead, thank you so much!
This is a really cool idea… Not sure how I would use it—maybe I’m narrow-minded? Haha—but still, it’s a cool idea!
The “easiest” way I can think to achieve this is to take turns coloring each melody note red, let’s say, one at a time and exporting an image of each state, and then animating the score afterwards to match a recording.
I think this is the way. You could export as SVG, keeping your graphic slice dimensions the same each time.
Alternatively, you could just use screen-capture software to capture Dorico while it does playback. The melody wouldn’t light up, but the green line would still scroll.
Inspired by Romanos and Dan, here is a simple Max patch that uses a midi keyboard to highlight notes in the first phrase of Mary Had a Little Lamb, using images from Dorico (for a long piece this could get pretty labor-intensive).
It doesn’t care what note you play, every midi note just advances the phrase by one note; but you could program it to look for the correct note if you like.
If you’re interested you can download a demo of Max from cycling74.com; after the trial period it lets you use the software but you can’t edit.
Max-midi-demo.zip (287.9 KB)
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