Becoming All the Instruments

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:52:23 +0530

In this post, I talk about a tool I’ve been making using very rudimentary math to convert humming or human whistles into musical notes, specifically MIDI notes.

First, I tried using Fourier transform over chunks of the audio, which is known as the STFT. I wanted to get straight or close to straight lines for each humming pattern or whistle. Since the note boundaries were not very clear the first step was to find those, preferably without using any neural networks or fancy math. I wanted to something simple that the human can supply.

Music on lavafroth

Becoming All the Instruments