piano-fingering

Automatic piano fingering generator. Find and show the best fingers to use to play a score.

GUI Usage:

python main.py

• press Import Score
• press GENERATE (a file output.xml is written)
• press Musescore to visualise the annotated score
• press 3D Player to show the animation (closing it with Esc will quit the application)

Command line usage:

python pianofing.py test_invention4.xml # any midi, krn, lilipond or xml files

The program output is a fingering-annotated xml file which can be read with free software like Musescore:

musescore output.xml

If VPython is installed click on "3D Player" for a visualization (right-click drag to move the scene, middle-click drag to zoom). You will see the both hands playing but hear the right hand notes only. Chords are rendered as a rapid sequence of notes.

Required imports:

• music21, [http://web.mit.edu/music21] (to install in linux: sudo pip install –upgrade music21)

Optional:

• visual, from [http://vpython.org/index.html] (to install in linux: sudo apt-get install python-visual)
• musescore, [https://musescore.org]

How does it work:

The algorithm minimizes the fingers speed needed to play a sequence of notes or chords by searching through feasible combinations of fingerings. At every note the hand position is assumed to be at rest (this can be improved in the future). Some weights can also be tuned. For example thumb is assumed to be 10% faster than index finger (variable in Hand.weights). Similarly thumb is slower when hitting a black key by 50% (in Hand.bfactor).

Limitations

The limitation of this method is that some specific fingering combinations, which are very unlikely in the first place, are excluded from the search (e.g. the 3rd finger crossing the 4th). Hand are considered independent from each other. Repeated notes for which pianists often change finger will be assigned the same finger as this choice minimises fingers speed globally. The last nine notes of the score are not correctly fingered (to be fixed).

Tested on Ubuntu 15.04, Python 2.7.9, music21 3.1.0, visual 1.8.2.

Parameters you can change:

• your hand size ('XXS' to 'XXL') which sets the max distance between thumb and pinkie (e.g. 'S' = 17.2 cm)
• the beam number associated to the right hand is nr.0 (nr.1 for left hand). If not so, you need to manually change it in main.py (PianoGUI.RightHandBeam)
• depth of combinatorial search (from 3 up to 9 notes ahead of the currently playing note, default is 'auto' which selects this value based on the duration of the notes to be played)
• usable fingers (disabled players can exclude fingers in the list Hand.usable_fingers)
• weights for individual fingers (in Hand.weights)
• step of notes: you can skip the prediction of the next note at the price of precision (default in Hand.fstep is 2, which is a reasonable trade-off that speeds up the algorithm by a factor 2)