ECE 791 Project Proposal Project Title: Developing and Evaluating a Tool for Converting MP3 Audio Files to Staff Music Project Team: Salvatore DeVito and Scott Doe ECE Faculty Advisor: Professor Richard Messner Courses Involved: ECE 633, ECE 634, and ECE 714 Current Date: October 28th, 2013 Project Completion Date: May 2013

Introduction Staff music: series of five lines and four spaces that maps a musical note to its corresponding frequency Staff music, A.K.A. sheet music, is used to help musicians read and write music Staff music is an extremely useful tool for musicians to learn how to play any song, and uses the A-440 pitch standard in the United States for ubiquity

Project Motivation To learn a song, one can try to listen to the song and learn it “by ear,” which can be very difficult and take a long time, especially if the song is complex and lengthy The alternative to this method is obtaining the sheet music and reading it to memorize the notes; unfortunately, sheet music is often expensive and/or difficult to find In addition, sheet music is often not available anywhere at all for any given song

Project concept Having some type of tool to transcribe a song onto a staff would be extremely convenient if it were quick, cheap, readily available and worked for any song A user-friendly application capable of this would revolutionize the music industry because it would allow anyone to be able to learn any song desired

design Objectives Develop an application to read the audio content from an MP3 file and transcribe it onto a staff Why? The MP3 file format is the most commonly used format for digital music Staff music is the most common form of readable music Have it work for any type of song that is played by a piano Piano is a very common instrument used by musicians around the world Piano covers a very wide range of audible frequencies and is a good starter for development

Design implementation Implementation of the project will be split into four main stages: Stage 1 – Single Tone Identification Stage 2 – Multi-Tone (Chord) Identification Stage 3 – Dynamic Sheet Music Transcription Stage 4 – GUI (Graphical User Interface) Development

Stage 1 – Single tone Identification Capture waveforms of every octave of the A note (one at a time) with an oscilloscope and digital keyboard Write code with MATLAB to sample the data and identify the notes via an FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) Record audio files of the same notes with the same digital keyboard Write code with MATLAB to sample the audio files and identify the notes via an FFT Compare the two separate identifications by normalizing each; check/revise for increased accuracy (NOTE: This summer, our team completed Stage 1 through the SURF Program at UNH)

Stage 2 – MulTi-tone Identification Record audio files of several different chords with the digital keyboard Write code with MATLAB to sample the audio files and use Fourier Decomposition to separate the chords into single tones and identify each individual tone Revise code as necessary to improve accuracy

Stage 3 – Dynamic Sheet music transcription Observe the frequency content of an MP3 file over time on a spectrogram Find a way with MATLAB to accurately identify the tones over time (dynamically) Map the correctly-identified tones onto a staff considering note duration, tempo, key, etc.

Stage 3 visualization

Stage 4 – GUI Development Design a user-friendly GUI in MATLAB Can upload/transcribe an audio file, view output of sheet music, and save sheet music as an image to view later Add any extra features the team thinks of throughout the design implementation process

Project Timeline

Budget Our project currently only requires the use of MATLAB, thus no budget is necessary because it is provided by UNH Stage 3 may require additional software for a spectrogram that will output usable data for MATLAB; this may add to our budget but is TBD $$$

Works Cited http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Piano_staff.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/C_triad.svg/9 0px-C_triad.svg.png http://www.360wlo.com/2011/07/music-theory-staff.html