humusic
Open transcriber
Vol. I · No. 1 — Transcription
humusic listens to a monophonic line — sung, played, or hummed — and sets it in common notation. Pitch is resolved to the cent, quantized against your tempo, engraved with proper ties and beams, and handed back as MusicXML.
Runs entirely on your device · No upload · No account
What the machine does
Record straight from the microphone with start and stop under your control. Echo cancellation, noise suppression and auto-gain are held off deliberately — each one distorts the periodicity that pitch detection depends on.
The YIN autocorrelation estimator resolves fundamental frequency and rejects the octave errors that spectral peak-picking is prone to. Deviation is reported live, in cents, while you play.
Audio is divided against a grid of twelfths of a beat derived from the tempo you set, so rhythm is measured rather than guessed. Twelve divides by both four and three, which is what lets a sixteenth and a triplet be measured exactly on the same grid. Each beat is then read as straight or as a triplet according to where the notes in it actually fell.
Repeated units are consolidated into idiomatic durations — dotted halves, quarters, tied values across barlines — then set with beams, rests and accidentals in the way a copyist would write them. The clef is yours to set — treble by default, bass when the line calls for it, or read automatically from the range you played so a bass line lands on a bass staff rather than strung below a treble one on ledger lines.
Hear the transcription rather than the recording — as a piano, a plucked guitar, a saxophone or a plain synth. What sounds is the engraved model, so a wrong note is audible as a wrong note instead of having to be read off the staff. Every voice is synthesised on the spot; nothing is downloaded, and the page still runs with no network at all.
One file, MusicXML 4.0, built from the same model that drew the page. The exported score and the printed score cannot disagree.
Every stage runs on your own device. No recording is uploaded, and no account stands between you and the score.
Three movements
I
Give the transcriber a beats-per-minute figure. Everything downstream — the analysis grid, the bar lines, the note values — is measured against it, so this single number decides how your rhythm is read. Leave the metronome on and it counts that tempo while you record, so the pulse you play against is the one the grid is measuring.
II
Press record and perform one voice at a time: a melody, a bass line, a hummed idea. The pitch monitor shows what is being heard, in cents, as it is heard.
III
Stop, and the score is engraved on the page. Export MusicXML and open it in the notation software you already use — nothing is locked in.
Why it exists
Notation is a skill that takes years to learn, and good ideas disappear in the gap.
humusic began as a frustration: musical ideas vanish because most people cannot write them down fast enough to keep them. Whether you have decades of training or only ever hum in the shower, the thing you just played deserves to exist on paper.
The transcriber is the bridge between hearing music and writing it — professional-quality notation, without the years of study that usually stand in front of it.
Correspondence
Whether you want early access, a collaboration, or you see where this is going and want to back it — write. Everything reaches me directly.
Thank you.
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