What was deemed impossible has now been accomplished.  A new piece of software can modify the individual notes of a recorded chord.  Peter Neubäcker, a former German guitar maker turned programmer, has unveiled the software called Direct Note Access.  His company, Celemony Software,  demonstrated the capabilites of the program last month.  Users of the program will, for the first time, be able to analyze the digitized sounds of guitar or piano chords, or even multi-instrument recordings, and then extract and modify individual notes.

Previous to this piece of software, studio engineers, with the help of programs like Melodyne, also from Celemony Software and Auto-Tune , were able to change their pitch and edit individual notes in polyphonic audio material.  But teasing apart notes recorded simultaneously, as in a six-string guitar chord, has never before been practical.

"In terms of sound processing, this is kind of the holy grail," says Michael Bierylo, a guitarist and professor of computer music at Boston's Berklee College of Music. "It's something everyone more or less thought we couldn't do."

With existing programs, chords are treated as single sonic entities, and if one note is changed, all others will be changed as well.  Direct Note Access seems to have overcome that limitation by using spectrum analysis to display the sound's frequencies.  The notes of a chord are displayed graphically and can be moved up or down to change their pitch or back and forth to change their timing.  Musicians and studio engineers will now be able to sculpt sound as never before.

Like Melodyne and Auto-Tune before it, Direct Note Access is likely to find its way quickly into studios' of all sizes.  It will be released comercially this Autumn as a plug-in compatible with most major audio-recording software packages. The stand-alone version will be released some time later.