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I'm a beginner with absolutely no experience in signal processing, but it has been a long-term goal of mine to do something that mixes music (a hobby of mine) and computer science (my "expertise"). I've been thinking of doing a project that involves learning notes from music, but I don't know where to begin.

For one, there doesn't seem to be a name for this problem. However, it doesn't seem to be a solved problem. I've searched terms including "Audio recognition," "note recognition," "chord recognition," but I've only come up with this paper: "Automatic Chord Recognition from Audio Using an HMM with Supervised Learning" by Lee and stanley. It seems to have some good references to processing and even a pointer to a dataset I could potentially use, but one paper doesn't seem to be enough for a good understanding. Alternatively, I could skip the processing part entirely but I can't find data sets using terms like "audio signal data set"

Signal processing seems to be a pretty broad field. To save time, I want to pick up a book more oriented towards my project. Are there any books like this? I've found this: http://www.dspguide.com/ch1/3.htm but I want to know if this is relevant before I jump into this 34 chapter book. Are they any other search terms I can use such as "audio feature extraction" to get me closer to the ML part of the problem?

Finally, to cut down on work, I want to use libraries for the signal processing part. One library I found for Python is Pyo but are they any other alternatives for Python that people have used?

Basically, I'm a little overwhelmed by how much I don't know and I would greatly appreciate a pointer in the right direction. Even google search words would help.

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  • $\begingroup$ Could you please elaborate on what you mean by "learning notes from music"? What is your input and what is your output? There's surely a lot more relevant literature about what you want to do than you think... Are you talking about transcribing an audio recording into a score? $\endgroup$
    – pichenettes
    Oct 20, 2014 at 20:59
  • $\begingroup$ Maybe you could start with pitch estimation $\endgroup$
    – Aaron
    Oct 20, 2014 at 21:02
  • $\begingroup$ There's a major research conference every year on the music recognition problems you mention: music-ir.org/mirex/wiki/MIREX_HOME . Tons of papers and proceedings. $\endgroup$
    – hotpaw2
    Oct 20, 2014 at 22:31
  • $\begingroup$ pichenettes - Yeah transcribing an audio recording into a score is exactly. Aaron - I can take a look into pitch estimation hotpaw - I'll definitely take a look at MIREX, that looks very promising, thanks! $\endgroup$
    – Lycus
    Oct 20, 2014 at 22:42
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    $\begingroup$ It should be a bit outdated by today's standards, but it has a "from scratch" pedagogical approach: "Signal processing methods for music transcription" Klapuri / Davy (ed.) Then move on to MIREX evaluation mini papers for the latest methods $\endgroup$
    – pichenettes
    Oct 21, 2014 at 7:06

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The Lyons book is gold for someone in your situation. Have patience with the topic of audio DSP -- the more time you spend trying to learn it, the less you will know that you know. :)

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If you're an absolute beginner, I recommend you start with a practical example (that you can see/hear). This will give you some "hands-on" experience before diving into papers.

I highly recommend libROSA (and the introduction ipython notebook (all free software)) to quickly get some intuition about pitch-estimation (using chroma features), beat-detection (for rhythm and timing of notes) etc.

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The field of taking audio of music and returning the notes which were played is known as Automated/Automatic Music Transcription. There are some subproblems like F0 estimation and note tracking, and its part of the bigger field of Music Information Retrieval.

A recent review of methods from 2016 is B.S Gowrishankar, Nagappa U. Bhajantri: An exhaustive review of automatic music transcription techniques

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