Avid has announced the release of an update to its music notation software.
Incorporating a sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) model, Sibelius now auto-completes chord symbols above the stave as users click through bars and notes of their score. By analyzing the surrounding music for harmonic context, Sibelius can add suggested chord symbols to music of all textures—from full polyphonic sections to simple one-line melodies—speeding up chord notation workflows.
“Until now, entering chord symbols and chord diagrams into Sibelius—even assisted by a plugin—has been a manual process,” explains Sam Butler, Director of Product Management, Avid. “Our new AI-driven feature makes it quick and easy to add chord symbols to existing music, while giving the user complete flexibility to manage the process. It’s like having an interactive session with a harmony professor at your fingertips.”
Users can ask Sibelius to input chord symbols either at the start of each bar or after each note. If the harmony is ambiguous, or if users disagree with a suggested chord symbol, Sibelius can instantaneously present other plausible chord suggestions with a simple click.
Where Sibelius detects multiple chord symbol possibilities, it indicates the number of suggestions and displays a “confidence score” for each. Users can simply scroll through the plausible possibilities before making their choice.
The local AI model driving the chord symbol suggestion has been specially trained from several public datasets, using music by Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, with smaller sets by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Max Reger.
The update is available—across Windows, Mac, iPhone, and iPad—to all Sibelius users with a current subscription or Software Updates + Support Plan on their perpetual license, with the new chord symbol feature available on all desktop platforms.
More information: Avid
