• About Me
  • Résumé
  • Software
    • Classification of Galaxy Morphologies Using Support Vector Machines (2014)
    • Realtime Topic Analysis of Twitter Streams (2014)
    • Hadoop Cluster, Wikipedia, and Six Degrees of Separation (2014)
    • Creative Key (2012)
    • Tone Generator with Speech Recognition iOS App (2012)
  • Hardware
    • Virtual Reality With Haptics Integration (2014)
    • LC3b 5-Stage Pipeline Processor (2011)
    • Wireless Glove-Controlled Electric Mountainboard (2011)
    • Wireless PS2-Controlled Electric Mountainboard (2010)
    • Multi-Touch Screen (2009)
Andres Guzman-Ballen

Creative Key

I created this app in my spare time because I believe a musician can be trained to eventually be able to play the same note as they hear in their head by constantly using a device like a tuner that tells you the note when you sing it. The human voice is the instrument we are most familiar with, the one that has the highest chance of playing what a user hears in their head. By singing what you hear in your head and then playing the notes on the instrument and using the app to know instantly what notes were sung, I believe it accelerates the process of seeing the musical instrument as an extension of yourself, a window to your mind that allows outsiders to hear what is going on in your head. It felt great singing the first 11 notes of 'Round Midnight after the introduction and then playing the notes on my tenor saxophone! It was no longer about guessing. 

The app is able to determine the name of the pitch that is being sung by applying a Hamming filter to the incoming audio signal, calculating the autocorrelation using a 512-point FFT, and then using a median filter. The code for the application is on my GitHub account and here is a video of the application in action:
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