Hum to MIDI

How to hum a melody into MIDI

Tap the button and hum after the four ticks: two bars of 4/4 at 123 BPM, 3.9 seconds, the ticks still going quietly underneath. Free, no account, no limit on takes, nothing to install; it works the same in a laptop browser. The notes play back straight away and show as a piano roll, each named where it sits. Then pick the key: any of the twelve, in the mode you hummed (minor stays minor), the one you hummed in preselected. Then the BPM from 60 to 200, Melody or Bass, and the timing. Every change plays again. Just this MIDI saves the line on screen as one .mid file; Download the pack saves everything as a ZIP. On an iPhone or iPad both open the share sheet: Files, AirDrop, a message to yourself. On Android and on a laptop they land in Downloads.

The pack holds ten MIDI files and ten WAV files: the melody and the bass, each in five timings, plus a README that lists every file's notes. The melody's middle note lands between C4 and B4, around middle C; the bass's between C2 and B2, two octaves lower. A new key moves every note by the same number of semitones, the shorter way round, so each interval stays the one you hummed. The WAVs are a plain dry synth at your BPM, 44.1 kHz, 16-bit, mono, exactly two bars long, so they loop the moment they land on a track. The ZIP is made on the phone in a second or two.

Quantized, as hummed, and three rhythms

As hummed keeps your timing, a little early here, late there. Quantized moves every start and end to the nearest 16th, which at 123 BPM is 122 milliseconds. Straight puts the notes on 8ths and holds each one until the next starts: a clean legato line for a bass or a lead. Syncopated takes the straight line and pulls every note that lands on beat 2, 3 or 4 a 16th early, the push house and pop grooves lean on. Simplified keeps one note per beat, the one that fills most of that beat, joins repeats and leaves an empty beat empty: a riff for one finger.

How to hum so the notes come out right

Hum on a syllable with a consonant, "da" or "doo", not a closed "mmm": the reader splits two notes of the same pitch by the dip in level between them, and a consonant makes that dip. Hold each note steady; vibrato is rounded away anyway, and a slide between two notes can leave a stray one in the middle. Start right on the first beat after the ticks. Keep the phone 20 to 30 cm from your mouth in a quiet room; no headphones needed, the ticks are pitchless noise the reader ignores. Whistling works too, up to about 2,000 Hz. A very low hum is the hardest case: if one note comes out an octave off, hum a few notes higher, the bass register moves it back down.

Voice to MIDI: what the reader does with your hum

It measures the pitch of your voice every 10 milliseconds with the YIN algorithm (de Cheveigné and Kawahara, 2002), from 60 to 2,000 Hz, and turns steady stretches into notes. Then it cleans up: anything shorter than 70 milliseconds is dropped as a breath or a click, every note goes to the nearest semitone, only one note sounds at a time, and a note that lands an octave away from the notes around it, the commonest misreading of a low voice, is folded back. Every note gets velocity 100: a hum has no touch worth keeping. The key is a guess from how long you held each note, matched against the Krumhansl–Kessler key profiles (1982); no note is pushed into the scale.

What it doesn't do: chords (one voice is one note at a time), pitch bend or vibrato in the file, a file you already recorded, or more than two bars. A real leap of more than eight semitones away from the notes around it gets folded like an octave slip; move that note back in your DAW. The BPM you pick changes how fast the files play, not where the notes sit in the bar.

Which apps open the MIDI file

Any app that reads Standard MIDI Files: GarageBand on iPhone, iPad and Mac, Logic Pro, Ableton Live, FL Studio, Cubase, Pro Tools, Reaper, Bitwig, BandLab, and MuseScore, which shows it as sheet music. On a laptop, drag the .mid onto a track and load an instrument; in FL Studio, drop it on the playlist or use File, Import, MIDI file. The file carries your BPM and 4/4, starts on bar one, the melody on channel 1 and the bass on channel 2, 480 ticks per quarter note, so a quantized line sits exactly on the grid. Middle C is MIDI note 60 in every app, but they name it differently: C3 in Ableton Live, Logic Pro and Cubase, C4 in MuseScore and most piano books, C5 in FL Studio. That's why the roll shows names without octave numbers.

On an iPhone, save the file to Files from the share sheet, then open GarageBand, tap the loop browser and choose Files: the MIDI comes in as a software instrument region. GarageBand itself has no command to turn a recorded hum into MIDI (as of 2026), so hum here and take the file there.

Hum to MIDI in your DAW

Several DAWs can read a recorded hum themselves. They all want what this page wants: one voice, dry, close to the mic, recorded to a click. The commands, as of 2026:

The difference from this page is the cleanup. A DAW hands you every wobble as a note, unquantized, at the pitch you sang, and you tidy it in the piano roll. Here the blips, the octave slips and the overlaps are gone before you see it, and the key, the register and five timings are already done.

Hum to MIDI, audio to MIDI and real-time voice to MIDI

Three kinds of tool answer three different jobs. A hum reader like this page or Ableton's Convert Melody follows one pitch at a time; a solo hum is about as easy as transcription gets, because there is only ever one note to find. An audio to MIDI converter takes a recording you already have, an MP3, a WAV or a voice memo, and tries to pull out every note, chords included: Spotify's open-source Basic Pitch (Bittner and others, 2022) runs in the browser, Melodyne does it on a laptop. On a full mix every instrument bleeds into every other, so expect extra notes to delete; on a solo voice they do well. A real-time voice to MIDI plugin such as Vochlea's Dubler 2 or imitone turns your voice into MIDI while you sing, like playing a keyboard with your throat; both run next to your DAW on a laptop and both are paid (as of 2026).

For an idea in your head, the hum reader is the quickest of the three: no file, no plugin, no cleanup. For a voice memo you already have or a phrase longer than two bars, use a converter that takes a file; this page only listens live.

Is this autotune?

No, though it lands next to it. Autotune (Auto-Tune is Antares' product; the word now means any pitch correction) pulls a recorded voice onto the nearest notes and keeps the voice. This page keeps no voice: it writes the notes you meant as MIDI, each on its semitone, and an instrument plays them clean. Your hum comes back perfectly in tune, but as a synth or a bass, not as you. To correct a sung recording note by note you need a pitch corrector next to your DAW (Auto-Tune, Melodyne, Logic's Flex Pitch, or Auburn Sounds' Graillon, which has a free edition); nothing on Brumm retunes a voice.

What a MIDI file is, and isn't

A MIDI file is a list of notes: which pitch, when it starts, how long it lasts and how hard it is played. It holds no sound and none of your voice, a two-bar hum is about 200 bytes, and the app that opens it decides what it sounds like: a piano, an 808, a string section. That's why the pack has both. The WAVs are audio to drop in as they are; the MIDI is the part you change, move to another key or give to another instrument.

Or skip the DAW

Your two bars go into Brumm, in time, inside a club track with a beat and a bass. No account, no upload: the melody travels inside the link itself. The app downloads the whole idea as MIDI too, a track for every layer, beat and bass included. Or hear the same hum as a bassline, an acid line, a synth lead, a pluck or a bell.

Your voice stays on your phone: the tool reads it in the browser and keeps nothing. How the site counts visits.