I have created a really basic FFT visualizer using a Teensy microcontroller, a display panel, and a pair of headphone jacks. I used kosme's FFT library for Arduino: https://github.com/kosme/arduinoFFT
Analog audio flows into the headphone input and to a junction where the microcontroller samples it. That junction is also connected to an audio out jack so that audio can be passed to some speakers.
This is all fine and good, but currently I'm only sampling the left audio channel. Any time music is stereo separated, the visualization cannot account for any sound on the right channel. I want to rectify this but I'm not sure whether I should start with hardware or software.
Is there a circuit I should build to mix the left and right audio channels? I figure I could do something like so:
But I'm pretty sure that my schematic is misguided. I included bias voltage to try and DC couple the audio signal so that it will properly ride over the diodes. Making sure that the output matches the input is important to me though.
Or maybe should this best be approached in software? Should I instead just be sampling both channels separately and then doing some math to combine them?
Combining the stereo channels of one end of the fork without combining the other two is very difficult. Working in software is much easier.
If you take two sets of samples, you've doubled the amount of math that the microcontroller needs to do.
But if you take readings from both pins and divide them by two, you can add them together and have one set of samples which represents the 'mono' signal.
Keep in mind that human ears have an uneven response to sound volumes, so a 'medium' volume reading on both pins, summed and halved, will result in a 'lower-medium' value. It's better to divide by 1.5 or 1.75 if you can spare the cycles for more complicated division.
I have a group of related questions regarding FFTW and audio analysis on Linux.
What is the easiest-to-use, most comprehensive audio library in Linux/Ubuntu that will allow me to decode any of a variety of audio formats (MP3, etc.) and acquire a buffer of raw 16-bit PCM values? gstreamer?
I intend on taking that raw buffer and feeding it to FFTW to acquire frequency-domain data (without complex information or phase information). I think I should use one of their "r2r" methods, probably the DHT. Is this correct?
It seems that FFTW's output frequency axis is discretized in linear increments that are based on the buffer length. It further seems that I can't change this discretization within FFTW so I must do it after the DHT. Instead of a linear frequency axis, I need an exponential axis that follows 2^(i/12). I think I'll have to take the DHT output and run it through some custom anti-aliasing function. Is there a Linux library to do such anti-aliasing? If not, would a basic cosine-based anti-aliasing function work?
Thanks.
This is an age old problem with FFTs and working with audio - ideally we want a log frequency scale for audio but the DFT/FFT has a linear scale. You will need to choose an FFT size that gives sufficient resolution at the low end of your frequency range, and then accumulate bins across the frequency range of interest to give yourself a pseudo-logarithmic representation. There are more complex schemes, but essentially it all boils down to the same thing.
I've seen libsndfile used all over the place:
http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/
It's LGPL too. It can read pretty much all the open source and lossless audio format you would care about. It doesn't do MP3, however, because of licensing costs.
This is as simple and less vague as I can make it, so please and try to help me out.
By this, meaning I want to:
1) Input an audio track (Anaglod)
2) Using the micro controllers ADC
convert it to a digital output
3) Then Have the
microcontollers/boards timer sample
the data at selected intervuls.
4) Tell the board to take the "Sampled
audio track" and now sample it at a
rate of 2B, ( B meaning the highest
frequency.
F= Frequency
F(Hz=1/s) E.x. 100Hz = 1000 (Cyc/sec)
F(s)= 1/(2f)
Example problem: 1000 hz = Highest
frequency 1/2(1000hz) = 1/2000 =
5x10(-3) sec/cyc or a sampling rate of
5ms
5) Spit it back at the boards ADC and
convert it back to analog, thus the
out-put is a perfect reconstruction of
the initial audio track.
Using Fourier Analysis i will determine the highest frequency at which I will sample the track at.
However in theory it sounds easy enough and straight forward, but what I need is to program this in C and utilize my msp430 chip/Experimenters board to sample the track.
Im going to be using Texas Instruments CCS and Octave for my programming and debugging. This is my board that I will be using.
Questions:
Is C the right language for this? Can I get any examples of how to sample the tack at nyquist frequency using C? What code in C will tell the board to utilize the ADC component? And any recommended information that is similar or that will help me on this project.
I don't fully understand what you want to do, but I'll answer your specific questions.
Yes, C is the right language for this.
You should probably look at application code on the Texas Instruments website to see how to interact with the ADC. You can start with the example code listed at the bottom of the page you linked to. It has C code that shows how to use the ADC.
Incidentally, an ADC only converts analog to digital. To go digital to analog, you need a DAC, which this board does not appear to have.
5) ADC doesnt do Digital-to-Analog Conversion, 'cause it's ADC, not DAC. But you may use PWM with Low-pass filter to output analog signal.
It is often a bad idea to sample signal at Nyquist frequency. This will cause lots of aliasing at high frequencies. For example signal with frequency F-deltaF, where deltaF as small, will look like F amplitude modulated by 2deltaF.
That's why CD sampling rate is 44.1 kSPS, not 30 kSPS (as twice 15 kHz -- higher frequency limit).
You have to sample the signal with a frequency that is twice as high as the highest frequency in your signal. Otherwise you get aliasing effects (distortion of the original signal). It is not possible to determine the highest frequency in your signal with fourier analysis because to perform an fft you have to convert your analog signal to digital values - with a conversion frequency (that you want to determine with the fft).
The highest frequency in your input signal is defined by the analog input filter that the signal must pass before analog to digital conversion.
I'm trying to do real time pitch detection of a users singing, but I'm running into alot of problems. I've tried lots of methods, including FFT (FFT Problem (Returns random results)) and autocorrelation (Autocorrelation pitch detection returns random results with mic input), but I can't seem to get any methods to give a good result. Can anyone suggest a method for real-time pitch tracking or how to improve on a method I already have? I can't seem to find any good C / C++ methods for real time pitch detection.
Thanks,
Niall.
Edit: Just to note, i've checked that the mic input data is correct, and that when using a sine wave the results are more or less the correct pitch.
Edit: Sorry this is late, but at the moment, im visualizing the autocolleration by taking the values out of the results array, and each index, and plotting the index on the X axis and the value on the Y axis (both are divided by 100000 or something, and im using OpenGL), plugging the data into a VST host and using VST plugins isn't an option to me. At the moment, it just looks like some random dots. Am i doing it correctly, or can you please point me torwards some code for doing it or help me understand how to visualize the raw audio data and autocorrelation data.
Taking a step back... To get this working you MUST figure out a way to plot intermediate steps of this process. What you're trying to do is not particularly hard, but it is error prone and fiddly. Clipping, windowing, bad wiring, aliasing, DC offsets, reading the wrong channels, the weird FFT frequency axis, impedance mismatches, frame size errors... who knows. But if you can plot the raw data, and then plot the FFT, all will become clear.
I found several open source implementations of real-time pitch tracking
dywapitchtrack uses a wavelet-based algorithm
"Realtime C# Pitch Tracker" uses a modified autocorrelation approach now removed from Codeplex - try searching on GitHub
aubio (mentioned by piem; several algorithms are available)
There are also some pitch trackers out there which might not be designed for real-time, but may be usable that way for all I know, and could also be useful as a reference to compare your real-time tracker to:
Praat is an open source package sometimes used for pitch extraction by linguists and you can find the algorithm documented at http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/praat.html
Snack and WaveSurfer also contain a pitch extractor
I know this answer isn't going to make everyone happy but here goes.
This stuff is hard, very hard. Firstly go read as many tutorials as you can find on FFT, Autocorrelation, Wavelets. Although I'm still struggling with DSP I did get some insights from the following.
https://www.coursera.org/course/audio the course isn't running at the moment but the videos are still available.
http://miracle.otago.ac.nz/tartini/papers/Philip_McLeod_PhD.pdf thesis about the development of a pitch recognition algorithm.
http://dsp.stackexchange.com a whole site dedicated to digital signal processing.
If like me you didn't do enough maths to completely follow the tutorials don't give up as some of the diagrams and examples still helped me to understand what was going on.
Next is test data and testing. Write yourself a library that generates test files to use in checking your algorithm/s.
1) A super simple pure sine wave generator. So say you are looking at writing YAT(Yet Another Tuner) then use your sine generator to create a series of files around 440Hz say from 420-460Hz in varying increments and see how sensitive and accurate your code is. Can it resolve to within 5Hz, 1Hz, finer still?
2) Then upgrade your sine wave generator so that it adds a series of weaker harmonics to the signal.
3) Next are real world variations on harmonics. So whilst for most stringed instruments you'll see a series of harmonics as simple multiples of the fundamental frequency F0, for instruments like clarinets and flutes because of the way the air behaves in the chamber the even harmonics will be missing or very weak. And for some instruments F0 is missing but can be determined from the distribution of the other harmonics. F0 being what the human ear perceives as pitch.
4) Throw in some deliberate distortion by shifting the harmonic peak frequencies up and down in an irregular manner
The point being that if you are creating files with known results then its easier to verify that what you are building actually works, bugs aside of course.
There are also a number of "libraries" out there containing sound samples.
https://freesound.org from the Coursera series mentioned above.
http://theremin.music.uiowa.edu/MIS.html
Next be aware that your microphone is not perfect and unless you have spent thousands of dollars on it will have a fairly variable frequency response range. In particular if you are working with low notes then cheaper microphones, read the inbuilt ones in your PC or Phone, have significant rolloff starting at around 80-100Hz. For reasonably good external ones you might get down to 30-40Hz. Go find the data on your microphone.
You can also check what happens by playing the tone through speakers and then recording with you favourite microphone. But of course now we are talking about 2 sets of frequency response curves.
When it comes to performance there are a number of freely available libraries out there although do be aware of the various licensing models.
Above all don't give up after your first couple of tries. Best of luck.
Here's the C++ source code for an unusual two-stage algorithm that I devised which can do Realtime Pitch Detection on polyphonic MP3 files while being played on Windows. This free application (PitchScope Player, available on web) is frequently used to detect the notes of a guitar or saxophone solo upon a MP3 recording. The algorithm is designed to detect the most dominant pitch (a musical note) at any given moment in time within a MP3 music file. Note onsets are accurately inferred by a significant change in the most dominant pitch (a musical note) at any given moment during the MP3 recording.
When a single key is pressed upon a piano, what we hear is not just one frequency of sound vibration, but a composite of multiple sound vibrations occurring at different mathematically related frequencies. The elements of this composite of vibrations at differing frequencies are referred to as harmonics or partials. For instance, if we press the Middle C key on the piano, the individual frequencies of the composite's harmonics will start at 261.6 Hz as the fundamental frequency, 523 Hz would be the 2nd Harmonic, 785 Hz would be the 3rd Harmonic, 1046 Hz would be the 4th Harmonic, etc. The later harmonics are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, 261.6 Hz ( ex: 2 x 261.6 = 523, 3 x 261.6 = 785, 4 x 261.6 = 1046 ). Linked at the bottom, is a snapshot of the actual harmonics which occur during a polyphonic MP3 recording of a guitar solo.
Instead of a FFT, I use a modified DFT transform, with logarithmic frequency spacing, to first detect these possible harmonics by looking for frequencies with peak levels (see diagram below). Because of the way that I gather data for my modified Log DFT, I do NOT have to apply a Windowing Function to the signal, nor do add and overlap. And I have created the DFT so its frequency channels are logarithmically located in order to directly align with the frequencies where harmonics are created by the notes on a guitar, saxophone, etc.
Now being retired, I have decided to release the source code for my pitch detection engine within a free demonstration app called PitchScope Player. PitchScope Player is available on the web, and you could download the executable for Windows to see my algorithm at work on a mp3 file of your choosing. The below link to GitHub.com will lead you to my full source code where you can view how I detect the harmonics with a custom Logarithmic DFT transform, and then look for partials (harmonics) whose frequencies satisfy the correct integer relationship which defines a 'pitch'.
My Pitch Detection Algorithm is actually a two-stage process: a) First the ScalePitch is detected ('ScalePitch' has 12 possible pitch values: {E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#} ) b) and after ScalePitch is determined, then the Octave is calculated by examining all the harmonics for the 4 possible Octave-Candidate notes. The algorithm is designed to detect the most dominant pitch (a musical note) at any given moment in time within a polyphonic MP3 file. That usually corresponds to the notes of an instrumental solo. Those interested in the C++ source code for my Two-Stage Pitch Detection algorithm might want to start at the Estimate_ScalePitch() function within the SPitchCalc.cpp file at GitHub.com.
https://github.com/CreativeDetectors/PitchScope_Player
Below is the image of a Logarithmic DFT (created by my C++ software) for 3 seconds of a guitar solo on a polyphonic mp3 recording. It shows how the harmonics appear for individual notes on a guitar, while playing a solo. For each note on this Logarithmic DFT we can see its multiple harmonics extending vertically, because each harmonic will have the same time-width. After the Octave of the note is determined, then we know the frequency of the Fundamental.
I had a similar problem with microphone input on a project I did a few years back - turned out to be due to a DC offset.
Make sure you remove any bias before attempting FFT or whatever other method you are using.
It is also possible that you are running into headroom or clipping problems.
Graphs are the best way to diagnose most problems with audio.
Take a look at this sample application:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/audio-video/SoundCatcher.aspx
I realize the app is in C# and you need C++, and I realize this is .Net/Windows and you're on a mac... But I figured his FFT implementation might be a starting reference point. Try to compare your FFT implementation to his. (His is the iterative, breadth-first version of Cooley-Tukey's FFT). Are they similar?
Also, the "random" behavior you're describing might be because you're grabbing data returned by your sound card directly without assembling the values from the byte-array properly. Did you ask your sound card to sample 16 bit values, and then gave it a byte-array to store the values in? If so, remember that two consecutive bytes in the returned array make up one 16-bit audio sample.
Java code for a real-time real detector is available at http://code.google.com/p/freqazoid/.
It works fairly well on any computer running post-2008 real-time Java. The project has been dropped and could be picked up by any interested party. Contact me if you want further details.
Check out aubio, and open source library which includes several state-of-the-art methods for pitch tracking.
I have asked a similar question here:
C/C++/Obj-C Real-time algorithm to ascertain Note (not Pitch) from Vocal Input
EDIT:
Performous contains a C++ module for realtime pitch detection
Also Yin Pitch-Tracking algorithm
You could do real time pitch detection, be it of a singer's voice, with TarsosDSP
https://github.com/JorenSix/TarsosDSP
just in case anyone hasn't heard of it yet :-)
Can you adapt anything from instrument tuners? My delightfully compact guitar tuner is able to detect the pitch of the strings pretty well. I see this reference to a piano tuner which explains an algorithm to some extent.
Here are some open source libraries that implement pitch detection:
WORLD : speech analysis/synthesis toolkit. This is especially suitable if your source signal is voice.
aubio : audio feature extraction library. Implements many pitch detection algorithms.
Pitch detection : a collection of pitch detection algorithms implemented in C++.
dywapitchtrack : a high quality pitch detection algorithm.
YIN : another implementation of the YIN algorithm in a single C++ source file.
I'm working on an openGL project that involves a speaking cartoon face. My hope is to play the speech (encoded as mp3s) and animate its mouth using the audio data. I've never really worked with audio before so I'm not sure where to start, but some googling led me to believe my first step would be converting the mp3 to pcm.
I don't really anticipate the need for any Fourier transforms, though that could be nice. The mouth really just needs to move around when there's audio (I was thinking of basing it on volume).
Any tips on to implement something like this or pointers to resources would be much appreciated. Thanks!
-S
Whatever you do, you're going to need to decode the MP3s into PCM data first. There are a number of third-party libraries that can do this for you. Then, you'll need to analyze the PCM data and do some signal processing on it.
Automatically generating realistic lipsync data from audio is a very hard problem, and you're wise to not try to tackle it. I like your idea of simply basing it on the volume. One way you could compute the current volume is to use a rolling window of some size (e.g. 1/16 second), and compute the average power in the sound wave over that window. That is, at frame T, you compute the average power over frames [T-N, T], where N is the number of frames in your window.
Thanks to Parseval's theorem, we can easily compute the power in a wave without having to take the Fourier transform or anything complicated -- the average power is just the sum of the squares of the PCM values in the window, divided by the number of frames in the window. Then, you can convert the power into a decibel rating by dividing it by some base power (which can be 1 for simplicity), taking the logarithm, and multiplying by 10.