Music Coach: Real-time Evaluation of Music Performance using Nokia N900

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the Music Coach application that runs on the Nokia N900 mobile phone platform. The application plays the role of a music coach which listens to the user’s musical performance and provides realtime feedback on both timing and pitch accuracy. It also utilizes the accelerometer in the mobile phone to detect and update tempo set by the musician during performance. Due to the limit on computational power, the main challenges of this project lie in real-time processing of audio input/output and visual feedback. Other challenges include light-weight accelerometer reading processing and accurate pitch recognition. We discuss these technical difficulties in detail and present our approaches to resolve these issues. Our final results show that the Music Coach application is both easy to use and helpful for entry-level musicians to improve their skills.