Image to MIDI

Image2MIDI is a tool which takes a picture of any kind and turns it into a set of musical tracks with notes, contained in a MIDI file.

You upload an image, click "generate", and a MIDI file will be available to download.

At the moment it's restricted to images of type JPEG/JPG and PNG, and the size of the image must be less than 3Mb, but other than that any type of image should work - photograph, cartoon, drawing, maybe even a screenshot of text.

Some images will work better than others, and some will need different settings enabled (see below for more information on that).

It is not permitted to upload illegal, obscene or offensive images - users found doing this will be banned, and, if appropriate, reported to the authorities.

The MIDI file will be available for download as a .mid file. To play it you will need some MIDI software, such as a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). On a Mac, you should be able to open the file in Garageband (or Logic Pro if you have it). On other machines you may need to install some appropriate software - there are many DAWs available, some of them free to use.

A MIDI file contains only abstract notes and timings, it doesn't contain any instruments or means of creating sounds - you have to choose what sounds you want, by assigning instruments to the channels in the MIDI file, within your DAW software.

No, it's definitely not AI! The software splits the image up into rows and columns, producing many cells. For each row, you get one track in the MIDI file. For each column, the software decides whether or not to create a new note. If it creates a note, the pitch of the note will relate to the colour and brightness of that cell in the image - so a brighter cell will give a higher note.

The end result is a series of tracks (as many rows as you have configured) and enough notes to fill the space dictated by the number of columns you choose. Each column is half a beat, so if you choose 120 columns, that's 60 beats, or 15 bars in 4/4 time.

The software can't generate more columns or rows than there are pixels in the image, so if you set either of these too high then you'll get an error message when you submit.

We don't recommend setting too many rows, as this will become unwieldy in your DAW, and also the tracks won't work as well together - remember you need to assign instruments to each one. The default of 8 is usually plenty.

The rows set how many tracks will be in the output. The columns set how long the piece of music will be.

The min pitch and max pitch settings set the range of notes that will be created. 0 is a very low note, and 127 is very high, so you may want to restrict the generated notes to a more commonly used range.

The note chance threshold sets how bright a "cell" in the image needs to be to produce a note. If your image is dark, you may need to set this quite low to generate any notes at all. If you find big gaps in your music with no notes, try reducing this setting. If you have too many notes, try increasing it.

Scale and Key are randomly generated by default - these refer to the muscial notes that will be produced. If you wish to set them explicitly, you can do this here - or leave them as RANDOM.

Noise creates a more "staccato" effect, producing shorter notes and more gaps between notes. this is pure personal preference as to what type of output you prefer - without noise, the notes will tend towards a legato style.

This is a visual representation of the notes that have been produced in the MIDI file. You can see the number of tracks and the density and pitch of the notes which are in them. It's a quick way to assess if you have the right settings, without having to playback the MIDI file, and it shows which areas of the image were used to generate which parts of the track.

No - uploaded images are only held in memory for as long as it takes to generate the output. We don't store your images anywhere on disk. The generated MIDI file and 'notes' images are stored temporarily and deleted after a short period of time. If you want to keep the 'notes' image, you can download it by right-clicking in your browser.