Converting Drums to Keyboard: Can it be Done?

[Vanush]

Hello,

Is it possible to 'convert' the sound of a drum to a keyboard
instrument, e.g. using signal processing techniques. Measure the pitch
of a snare drum, and attempt to recreate it in MATLAB? I don't think
it's possible, since a (snare) drum doesn't have a fundamental
frequency, does it? My goal is to play a drum pattern on a keyboard
but still keeping the sense of the drum sound.

 

[MATLABdude]

A snare drum doesn't have a single frequency, nor does the distribution of frequencies stay the same during the course of the drum beat. Nevertheless, you can still digitally sample and reproduce the sound, otherwise your MP3s and CDs wouldn't work!

I don't know a whole lot about audio processing, but I found the following when I googled for pitch shifting in MATLAB:
http://www.dspdimension.com/admin/time-pitch-overview/

To avoid having to implement these and to just see their impact, you can probably just find an MP3 or WAV file of drumming and run it through Audacity (it's got various effects built-in).

If you've ever used a synthesizer, you can drum out patterns by pressing keys corresponding to various samples of drum hits (e.g. one Tom hit, a different Tom, and then a high hat). MATLAB allows you to import, play back (and probably compose) audio files, so you could probably use these to generate yourself a drum pattern, if you wanted to do that in MATLAB.

 

[MATLABdude]

Just thought I'd share this: Michael Jackson's Thriller done in Mario Paint Composer (there's a whole bunch of similar Mario paint stuff on YouTube):


Someone made a free PC port of it, but there are definitely more serious MIDI composer programs out there.