MusikMesse trade show takes place every year in the Messe Frankfurt complex, Frankfurt am Main. The show collects vendors and distributors of musical instruments, equipment, software, books etc. from all over the world.

MusikMesse is an outstanding event in the world of music industry, and every participating company strives for presenting its latest achievements and technologies. Visitors have the unique chance not only to look at the exhibits, but also to touch them with their own hands as well as to ask questions and talk directly to vendors.

To the utmost this principle is noticeable in the music software part of the exhibition. At the majority of stands software developers were available themselves, and visitors were able to now the news and plans at first hand. The joint stand of Widisoft and Midimaster was not an exception.

Our flagship product - WIDI Recognition System - attracted a lot of the public's attention. Besides demonstrating recent WIDI 3.3 we also announced upcoming WIDI version featuring many useful additions and improvements.

Many questions were devoted to recognition prospects of different music styles and complex music pieces. How many voices can handle WIDI? Which instruments can be transcribed? How well vocals can be converted to score? Is it possible to use WIDI for recognizing distorted guitar?
In the response we demonstrated how good such compositions can be transcribed with WIDI. We have prepared some typical pieces of different style, containing vocal parts, distorted electro guitar, strings and keyboards. We selected appropriate piece from our library for the guest and showed how it was being automatically recognized. Of course, WIDI algorithms focus on recognition of pitched sounds, and different types of sound processing (distortion) as well as special performer's techniques (vibrato) partially break tonal structure of sounds, increasing recognition error rate.

After showing the automatically transcribed composition, we explained what advantages could give using TrueTone Editor (built in WIDI Professional) to enhance the recognition result. Visual comparison of the actual spectrogram to the recognized notes made it possible to substantially improve the composition during the time the visitor was looking at the monitor. We were happy to see how people were changing their mind about the possibility of Audio To MIDI conversion after our demonstrations.

We also were very glad to meet people who already knew about our products and were already our users. They were first of all asking about our future plans - what new features would contain the future version and what recognition algorithms would be developed. We showed next pre-beta WIDI, featuring tonality determination algorithm, tonality mask for Equalizer, precise onset detection, score viewer in the TrueTone Editor, and useful small points such as cursor with harmonic marks, note captions, batch processing and many others. Unfortunately, we were not able to show everything because there are some more things that are still in development. For example, new rhythm recognition algorithm is under construction, and precise beat placement would allow better considering of performance tempo nuances.
Besides universal audio to midi recognition algorithms, which we develop for many years, many people ask about specialized algorithms purposed for extraction of particular qualities of the music performances. Such algorithm may perform quite better compared to the general algorithms. Many visitors asked us about drum recognition, and we certainly plan to add this feature to the one of the upcoming WIDI versions. Many questions were posed as well about recognition of unusual music scales and pitch bends (for example, violin music). Harmonic analysis, tempo detection, rhythmic structure determination was also in the field of visitor's interest.

It rarely happened when exhibitors had a calm minute to visit other stands and to talk to colleagues, or simply to play wonderful music instruments, such as that electric piano.
Music instrument halls made a great impression. We had seen guitars made by companies from all over the world, percussion instruments, brass, bayans and accordions, synthesizers and grand pianos... You could stare at them infinitely even if you did not know how to play them, they were just beautiful. Many participants not only exhibited goods, but tried to create a bright performance demonstrating the best qualities of their products. Many shows and demonstrations took place regularly, and famous musicians were playing at the stands. The styles were different - sound amplifier vendors gravitated to rock, producers of stage equipment preferred pop music, folk music was often played where guitars and percussion were exhibited. Certainly, the musicians made their best to take most of the equipment they used.

We hope to meet our users again at the MusikMesse 2009.