Bach - Cello Suite No. 1 in G major - Prelude - Ableton Live visualization

Mstislav Rostropovich's recording of a Bach classic, as annotated by me using Ableton Live.
Read more about this piece: www.ethanhein....
I wrote about this visualization method in the Journal of the American Musicological Society: www.ethanhein.c...
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[@WilliamThomas2040]

Very cool to see it this way, thank you for posting!

[@juntatsuoka3072]

Great work. Just wondering, did you try CONVERT to MIDI on Ableton before downloading the MIDI file ?

[@EthanHein]

I have done a lot of audio to MIDI conversion in Ableton. It's just not a mature technology. The algorithm struggles to tell the difference between harmonics and distinct notes, and it interprets expressive pitch and time discrepancies too literally. You have to do a lot of manual cleanup of the MIDI output. For a short passage, a few measures, maybe that's worth the effort, but for an entire piece it isn't. Meanwhile, the MIDI is right there on the web, downloading it and dropping it into Live takes all of five seconds.