Problem 1686. Generate a melodic contour string matrix
Parsons code is a surprisingly effective way to identify music by its melodic motion. That is, with each successive note, does the pitch go up, down, or stay the same. No effort is made to capture the length of the interval between notes. The result is a lossy but useful "thumbprint" of a musical piece.
You will be given a string in Parsons code. By convention, the first note is denoted by *. Each note thereafter is either "u" for up, "d" for down, or "r" for repeat. The expected output is a string matrix showing the tune's contour. It can contain only space, star, dash, forward slash, and backward slash (ASCII values 32, 42, 45, 47, and 92 respectively). The output matrix should be the smallest possible bounding box that can contain all the nonspace characters. That is, there should be no empty rows or columns.
Examples:
str = '*rrr' melody = '*-*-*-*'
str = '*du' melody = ['* *' ' \ / ' ' * ']
The "Happy Birthday" song! str = '*rududdrudud' melody = [' * * ' ' / \ / \ ' '*-* * * * * ' ' \ / \ / \ ' ' *-* * *']
Solution Stats
Problem Comments
-
5 Comments
The last 3 tests are incorrect.
Dimensions of matrices being concatenated are not consistent.
I admit they look wrong, but the actual text in the MATLAB code runs properly. I just re-scored some answers and they worked fine. It must be some kind of HTML display problem. I'll check into it.
Solution Comments
Show commentsGroup

Matrix Manipulation I
- 16 Problems
- 98 Finishers
- Remove the air bubbles
- Remove NaN ?
- N-Dimensional Array Slice
- Back to basics 21 - Matrix replicating
- Back to basics 23 - Triangular matrix
- Make an awesome ramp for a tiny motorcycle stuntman
- Flip the main diagonal of a matrix
- surrounded matrix
- Some Assembly Required
- Set some matrix elements to zero
- Matrix with different incremental runs
- Removing rows from a matrix is easy - but what about inserting rows?
- Rotate input square matrix 90 degrees CCW without rot90
- Permute diagonal and antidiagonal
- Operate on matrices of unequal, yet similar, size
- Reverse the elements of an array
Problem Recent Solvers58
Problem Tags
Community Treasure Hunt
Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!
Start Hunting!