Fingering Helper

A standard action shot. The fingering is displayed alongside the waveform, with the appropriate note playing from speakers.
MP3 selection page

Inspiration

Andrea gave me the idea.

What it does

Plays songs and displays fingerings alongside. Can also change the key of a song being played

How I built it

Tkinter for the frontend, numpy for signal processing

Challenges I ran into

Pitch detection is hard! There are many academic papers written on the topic. The approach I took is simple (basic filters, a Fourier Transform, and some simple postprocessing), which limits its utility. The class of mp3 files it works for require: 1) Very little environmental noise. 2) Notes are played uniformly and have a small stop between the next note (slurred notes are not supported). A significant time was spent experimenting with filters and thresholds in order to get a reliable pitch detector, even with these requirements.

These limitations can be ameliorated with a more robust pitch detection algorithm, such as these:

There were also various frontend challenges that I had to deal with - I'm not very proficient in frontend.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I had little signal processing background going into this, so I'm really happy with managing to get up to speed quickly enough to build a reliable pitch detector, despite how simple the set of mp3s it works on are.

What I learned

I learned a solid amount about music pitches (I knew essentially nothing beforehand), and had to shake off some rust on frontend stuff. I also learned about how hard pitch detection is!