Recreating Notes in an audio file using Programming

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Hey guys,

I have this question about creating an application that would map the melodies in a music audio file to notes such as (C,D,E,...).

The problem is like this, mostly when you learn to play a certain musical instrument you are expected to hear a certain song or tune and you try to play that song on your instrument.

To achieve this you need to train your ears to recognize the notes being played; but this takes hours of practice and patience.
What i am looking for is how can one write a program that would take a recorded audio file and produce the notes being played in the file accordingly.

Here is what i am thinking
1.one can take samples of the audio
2.Compute the FFT of the signal
3.Perform time Vs frequency analysis so that we can know which note was played at a particular time
4.And finally convert the frequencies to musical notes representation.

So how can one do this using C# or is there a better approach to achieving this; if you can direct me to links which might be helpful i will be most grateful!

cheers

heleiance

Posted 7-Mar-11 19:57pm

helawae

Updated 7-Mar-11 21:11pm

Dalek Dave

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Dalek Dave 8-Mar-11 3:11am

Edited for Grammar and Readability.
(Also, a good question!)

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 1 · 2011-03-07T20:19:00

This is quite a difficult project, because usually the spectrum of the voice of real-life instrument is full of noise and main tone if floating. So, it will not be just "frequency analysis", it will be real image recognition task, pretty hard to solve. I'm familiar with existing musical applications doing that: the quality of recognition is quite poor in all products I know (my very modest musical hearing is orders of magnitude better :-)). One of the biggest problems is the fast change in spectrum in comparably short periods of time.

There are a number of good works on separate components like FFT (which in not the hardest part), such as this: http://www.extremeoptimization.com/solutions/FastFourierTransformsFft.aspx[^]. I also know a short CodeProject article: How to implement the FFT algorithm[^].

So idea is generally good, but — no offence — I'm quite a bit skeptical about your prospect to make a big success.

—SA