I want to build a guitar tuner app for Iphone. My goal is to find the fundamental frequency of sound generated by a guitar string. I have used bits of code from aurioTouch sample provided by Apple to calculate frequency spectrum and I find the frequency with the highest amplitude . It works fine for pure sounds (the ones that have only one frequency) but for sounds from a guitar string it produces wrong results. I have read that this is because of the overtones generate by the guitar string that might have higher amplitudes than the fundamental one. How can I find the fundamental frequency so it works for guitar strings? Is there an open-source library in C/C++/Obj-C for sound analyzing (or signal processing)?
How to find the fundamental frequency of a guitar string sound?
8.6k views Asked by Mircea AtThere are 2 answers
Finding the musical pitches in a chord is far more difficult than estimating the pitch of one single string or note played at a time. The overtones for the multiple notes in a chord might all be overlapping and interleaving. And all the notes in common chords may themselves be at overtone frequencies for one or more non-existent lower pitched notes.
For single notes, autocorrelation is a common technique used by some guitar tuners. But with autocorrelation, you have to be aware of some potential octave uncertainty, as guitars may produce inharmonic and decaying overtones which thus don't exactly match from pitch period to pitch period. Cepstrum and Harmonic Product Spectrum are two other pitch estimation methods which may or may not have different problems, depending on the guitar and the note.
RAPT appears to be one published algorithm for more robust pitch estimation. YIN is another.
Also Objective C is a superset of ANSI C. So you can use any C DSP routines you find for pitch estimation within an Objective C app.
You can use the signal's autocorrelation, which is the inverse transform of the magnitude squared of the DFT. If you're sampling at 44100 samples/s, then a 82.4 Hz fundamental is about 535 samples, whereas 1479.98 Hz is about 30 samples. Look for the peak positive lag in that range (e.g. from 28 to 560). Make sure your window is at least two periods of the longest fundamental, which would be 1070 samples here. To the next power of two that's a 2048-sample buffer. For better frequency resolution and a less biased estimate, use a longer buffer, but not so long that the signal is no longer approximately stationary. Here's an example in Python:
Output:
The peak lag is 538, which is 44100/538 = 81.97 Hz. The first-pass acyclic DFT shows the fundamental at bin 61, which is 82.10 +/- 0.67 Hz. The 2nd pass uses a window length of 538*15 = 8070, so the DFT frequencies include the fundamental period and harmonics of the string. This enables an ubiased cyclic autocorrelation for an improved PSD estimate with less harmonic spreading (i.e. the correlation can wrap around the window periodically).
Edit: Updated to use Welch's method to estimate the autocorrelation. Overlapping the windows compensates for the Hamming window. I also calculate the tapered bias of the hamming window to unbias the autocorrelation.
Edit: Added a 2nd pass with cyclic correlation to clean up the power spectral density. This pass uses 3 non-overlapping, rectangular windows length 538*15 = 8070 (short enough to be nearly stationary). The bias for cyclic correlation is a constant, instead of the Hamming window's tapered bias.