Noteflight’s New Autocomplete Features Finish Your Compositions For You
Online music writing application Noteflight has introduced new autocomplete features which make it possible to compose half a song then let a computer automatically polish off the melody for you. Using the program, idle experimenters and virtuosos suffering from writer’s block can submit snippets of tunes and musical phrases, and watch as a PC puts on the finishing touches.
The application is powered by musical search index Peachnote’s archive of over 60,000 scores and 630,000 sheets, culled from the Petrucci Music Library. Once fed a fragment of a tune, it searches its archive for similar musical combinations then quickly spits out a finished suggestion based on analysis of how near-identical ditties in its database evolve. Able to suggest multiple alternatives, users can further quickly scroll through results and ignore less catchy-sounding solutions before arriving at a preferred combination of notes.
Perhaps most intriguingly, melody data can also be filtered by century, from the 1600s to modern-day era, letting budding composers specifically engineer auto-generated suggestions to arrive at a preferred acoustic style. From baroque to contemporary, simply clicking appropriate selections on the drop-down menu allows users to achieve widely nuanced results. Allowing for a minimum of work on songwriters’ part, the software quickly completes custom musical phrases, fills in gaps in compositions and creates complex sequences on-command.
Granted, its statistically-generated jingles aren’t likely to be adopted by the average orchestra or fuel many commercial creations in the immediate. But educators may find it a helpful teaching tool and idle tinkerers a fun curiosity that helps get their creative juices flowing. Still in the experimental phase, autocomplete options are expected to be added to the service’s roster of fully-supported features soon.