How does the Ableton Drum-To-MIDI function work?

Question

I can't seem to find any information regarding the process that Ableton uses to efficiently detect atonal percussion and convert it into MIDI. I assume feature extraction and onset detection algorithms are executed, but I'm intrigued as to what algorithms. I am particularly interesting how its efficiency is maintained for a beatboxed input.

Cheers

At a simple level, a set of bandpass filters can be used to differentiate between a small handful of drums. When a level reaches above a certain threshold for a filter (or group of filters), then call it a hit. They're likely using additional techniques though, differentiating on timbre, timing, and possibly other characteristics. — Brad, May 26 '14 at 14:58

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 25 '14 at 19:42

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Your guesses are as good as everyone else's - although they look plausible. The reality is that the way this feature is implemented in Ableton is a trade secret and likely to remain that way.

answered May 25 '14 at 19:42

marko

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 02 '14 at 14:05

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If I'm not mistaken Ableton licenses technology from https://www.zplane.de/ for these things.

answered Jun 02 '14 at 14:05

Mattijs

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 01 '16 at 22:57

I don't exactly know how the software assigns the different drum sounds, but the chapter in the live manual Convert Drums to New MIDI Track says that it can only detect kick, snare and hi-hat. An important thing is that they are identified by the transient Markers. For a good result you should manually check and adjust them. The transient Markers look like the warp Markers, but are grey.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 07 '18 at 17:38

compared to a kick and a snare for example, a beatboxed input is likely to have less difference between the individual sounds and therefore likely to be harder for Ableton to individually extract the seperate sounds (depends on the beatboxer). In any case, some combination of frequency and amplitude - more specifically(Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release) as well as perhaps the different overtone combinations that account for differences in timbre are going to be the characteristics that would have to be evaluated in order to separate the kick snare and hihat .

Before this feature existed I used gates and hi/low pass filters to accomplish a similar task. So perhaps Ableton's solution is not as complicated as we might imagine.

How does the Ableton Drum-To-MIDI function work?

4 Answers4