Detecting musical notes from a recording

Question

I am going to a project for my dissertation on computer science. It aims to introduce an application that allows the user to sing or whistle a melody in the microphone of a PC or smartphone and will determine which notes were played.

I need to first study the theory underlying such a program, and then implement it in matlab, java or c.

I already found a lot of information about Stackoverflow, but I'm a bit confused (regarding FFT, pitch, etc.). I would appreciate it if someone could tell me what I should study and what the implementation steps would be.

Answer 1

I do not think that this is possible as a thesis for one person if you try to do it all from scratch. But it can be feasible if you combine existing fragments together.

First, I will search for open source libraries and try them out as they are. This may impose some restrictions on what you can do. But this is wonderful, because all this is quite large. It might be advisable to integrate a quick and dirty solution first. For example, taking a recorded sound file and using the library to recognize sounds. Then add integration with other materials, fancy output, audio recording, etc.

I mean something like this: https://dsp.stackexchange.com/a/2462

There may not be much open material, as commercial interest in such things seems high.