HarmonEQ is the world’s first audio equalizer that is based on musical notes and harmony rather than abstract frequency. HarmonEQ won first place in the 2021 Audio Engineering Society (AES) Student Competition: MATLAB Plugin.
The basic premise of the plugin is that while frequency is an important attribute of music and audio, it is not how musicians think about the sounds that they are making. Other than the fact that the note A is often tuned to 440 Hz, there’s generally no need for a musician to know what the frequencies of the notes they play are. So then why are equalizers universally designed with frequency knobs and not note/chord controls?
Enter HarmonEQ. A harmonic equalizer that automatically generates EQ curves at the frequencies associated with those of the note or chord it is set to. Beyond that, there is also an automatic mode that analyzes the live audio input and adapts to the incoming audio by changing the note/chord setting as necessary.
Here is the demo video I made for the AES competition:
HarmonEQ is open source; the code and pre-compiled VST and AU versions of the plugin are available on GitHub and MathWorks File Exchange.