1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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)

8. 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

9. 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.

10. Stage 3 visualization

11. 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

12. Project Timeline

13. 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
$$$

14. Works Cited
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