On chord recognition

Recognizing the chord that the user is playing on the master ukulele will likely be the most complicated part of the project. Our original idea was to use a DFT to identify the four dominant frequencies of the audio signal from the master ukulele, and determine the chord that way. While researching the feasibility of this approach, Nick came across this discussion of identifying guitar chords. It seems that this approach may turn out to be even more complicated than we initially thought, but it could still be doable.

Some alternative chord identification methods that we have been brainstorming are:

• Ditch the idea of a real ukulele as the master altogether, and use a guitar-hero style controller (lame, but fairly easy)
• Take sample audio signals from the chords of interest, and match the incoming audio signals with the stored audio signals (much less lame, but potentially more challenging)

In the next few days we will have to nail down exactly how we want to approach this problem. Stay tuned.