Recognising tone of the audio

Question

I have a guitar and I need my pc to be able to tell what note is being played, recognizing the tone. Is it possible to do it in python, also is it possible with pygame? Being able of doing it in pygame would be very helpful.

Answer 1

To recognize the frequency of an audio signal, you would use the FFT (fast Fourier transform) algorithm. As far as I can tell, PyGame has no means to record audio, nor does it support the FFT transform.

First, you need to capture the raw sampled data from the sound card; this kind of data is called PCM (Pulse Code Modulation). The simplest way to capture audio in Python is using the PyAudio library (Python bindings to PortAudio). GStreamer can also do it, it's probably an overkill for your purposes. Capturing 16-bit samples at a rate of 48000 Hz is pretty typical and probably the best a normal sound card will give you.

Once you have raw PCM audio data, you can use the fftpack module from the scipy library to run the samples through the FFT transform. This will give you a frequency distribution of the analysed audio signal, i.e., how strong is the signal in certain frequency bands. Then, it's a matter of finding the frequency that has the strongest signal.

You might need some additional filtering to avoid harmonic frequencies I am not sure.