Analyze “whistle” sound for pitch/note

Question

I am trying to build a system that will be able to process a record of someone whistling and output notes.

Can anyone recommend an open-source platform which I can use

Answer 1

I'm a fan of the FFT but for the monophonic and fairly pure sinusoidal tones of whistling, a zero-cross detector would do a far better job at determining the actual frequency at a much lower processing cost. Zero-cross detection is used in electronic frequency counters that measure the clock rate of whatever is being tested.

If you going to analyze anything other than pure sine wave tones, then FFT is definitely the way to go.

A very simple implementation of zero cross detection in Java on GitHub