# Chord Classification using Neural Networks

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I'm currently working on classifying chords from audio using neural networks. This post gives an overview of the project, how it works, and the (soon) showcases the final product.

This is a work in progress, and will be updated regularly.

## Goals

This projects aims to:

• Classify chords being played into a microphone live.
• Classify audio from a video hosted online and see the chords as the video is played.

I'm going to use neural networks for this, mainly because I want to develop a working knowledge of deep learning.

## Obtaining Training Data

In order to train a machine learning algorithm, I need training data, i.e. audio snippets labeled with the correct chord. I thought of 2 sources:

• Tape myself.
• Use youtube play along videos. These videos intended for people to play along with the video diplay the chords in real time. I can read this chord in order to correctly label the audio.

Here's an example of the type of video I'm referring to:

For details on how this works, see this post about youtube chord OCR, or see the code on github.

Using these two techniques, I obtained a several hours of labeled audio.

## Training a Classifier

Notes, and by extension chords, are directly related to the frequencies of a signal. Therefore, features are based on the Fourier transform of the signal. I use a short time Fourier transform of the incoming signal, keeping only frequencies that can be produced by a Ukulele. Detailed description and code is available in this ipython notebook.

First, I trained the classifier using chord only recordings and used cross validation to evaluate its performance, and then tested it on songs. I trained a support vector machine, and several different neural network architectures.

### SVM

Once the data is split into training and test sets. Using scikit learn, training the SVM is accomplished using:

svm = sklearn.svm.LinearSVC(C=1)
svm.fit(x_train, y_train)
print metrics.classification_report(y_test, pipe.predict(x_test))

"""precision    recall  f1-score   support
avg / total       0.95      0.95      0.95      1392"""


The SVM performs quite well. However, when tested on songs, performance was much poorer.

print metrics.classification_report(all_labels, all_predictions)
"""precision    recall  f1-score   support
avg / total       0.69      0.48      0.53       404"""


## Profiling

To normalize the signal:

# Divides the signal by the absolute value of it's highest peak.
# If there is no peak (all 0), return False
def normalize(signal, inplace = True):
min_v = min(signal)
max_v = max(signal)
peak = max(abs(min_v), abs(max_v))
if peak == 0:
return False
signal /= peak
return signal

# Divides the signal by the absolute value of it's highest peak.
# If there is no peak (all 0), return False
# If inplace, returns None
def normalize(signal, inplace = True):
max_norm = scipy.linalg.norm(signal, np.inf)
if max_norm == 0:
return False
else:
if inplace:
np.divide(signal, float(max_norm), signal)
else:
return np.divide(signal, float(max_norm))
return