Detecting the fundamental frequency?

Question

There's this tech-festival in IIT-Bombay, India, where they're having an event called "Artbots" where we're supposed to design artbots with artistic abilities. I had an idea about a musical robot which takes a song as input, detects the notes in the song and plays it back on a piano. I need some method which will help me compute the pitches of the notes of the song. Any idea/suggestion on how to go about it?

Answer 1

This is fairly tricky. You have to have software that can both parse out non-melodic frequencies (like drums for instance) and be able to distinguish different instruments (i.e. knowing that the bass, keys, vocals, and horns are all separate instruments. I don't really know how to go about this, but thought to give my two cents in case it helps you in any way. Ableton has a built in feature that translates audio to MIDI. Also, there's an app called Capo on the Mac app store that works pretty well in doing this.

Best of luck!