Blog Post #2

Hello, and welcome to the second blog post of my senior project! In this post, we will go over the foundational research for my project and my literature review.

First, I started my research on Google Scholar and Hindawi, both great sources for finding quality research papers in your field. In my case, I was looking into various pre-existing chord recognition programs and the methodologies used in those programs. One paper I came across, titled “Transfer Learning for Audio Waveform to Guitar Chord Spectrograms Using the Convolution Neural Network,” presented an interesting methodology. In this paper, they created a method for detecting chord sequences and notes from audio recordings of solo guitar performances using a Constant-Q-Transform (CQT) over the commonly used Short-time Fourier transform (STFT). The paper incorporates multiple datasets to make the model generalize better and also detects the beat of the audio. However, it only works for audios with just a guitar and no other instruments, meaning it does not work if any other instruments are playing simultaneously.

I plan to adopt the paper’s usage of SQT over STFT in my program in order to achieve a higher accuracy of chord detection. Additionally, I could potentially create a way to overcome the paper’s need for an isolated guitar audio to be inputted into the program by finding a way to isolate and separate the audio of the guitar from the rest of the audio file. So if someone were inputting a file of an entire song, my program could first separate the guitar from the rest of the song and then input the audio into my model.

My research has expanded my view on chord recognition and will greatly help my final project. Next week, I will start planning out my project, starting with my dataset and preprocessing. Stay tuned!