If you are coming at things from the other direction, aiming to notate something you’ve already performed and recorded as MIDI data, the computer’s lack of innate human empathy and understanding can create other complications. It will lack the ‘feel’ – the pushing and pulling against the beat, the dynamic fluctuations, the performance nuances – that a musician would introduce if performing the exact same music. You can hear this for yourself: If you were to take a printed score and use Cubase’s Score Editor to slavishly copy-in each note, and using the intended instrumentation for each part, the resulting performance will hit all of the correct notes, but will also sound mechanical and soulless. Ultimately it falls to the performer to decipher the composer’s intended meaning, as computers – modern advanced AI aside – are not the best at interpreting things that are so… well… human. But music notation is a much more interpretive form of script, and whilst it is perfectly capable of defining a specific pitch without any ambiguity, the timing, feel, fingering, dynamics and so-on can be much more open to interpretation. When writing a spoken language such as English there is not much room for ambiguity in how you represent each word – you either spell a word correctly so that it can be understood, or you dot’n, and it ins’t. Unfortunately, things are rarely as straightforward as they may appear! “Fabulous!” we all thought back in 1989 when we witnessed our improvised keyboard noodles being instantly converted into notation, “No more spending hours with pen and expensive manuscript paper writing out parts for ‘the talent’ to perform”. Cubase has been able to convert MIDI recordings into such notation, as well as allow the user to enter music in notated form that can then be played as MIDI notes, ever since the very first version.

Printed music, notation, scoring, ‘the dots’ – call it what you will, this method of representing music in a visual form has existed for hundreds of years, and remains the principal written language of music.

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