Access the numeric values of all pitches of what's playing out of speaker

[desolator144]

I'm not really even exaggerating because with the amount of people I've asked and places I've looked for an answer to this question, it's gotta be right up there with impossible.
How do I access the numeric values for all the pitches of whatever's playing out of the speakers? This screenshot from Windows Media Player kinda explains it all. Somehow it's getting the pitch information to continuosly generate that picture. I bet it just reads the info from the file but I need a program to do it with whatever is playing out of the speakers. If the sound card has a stereo mixer thingy built in, I bet I could read the data from that...if I knew how.

if you have the solution, it would be much appreciated

 

[TechGnome]

First off... nothing is impossible, it's just a matter of tme, effort and money.
How ever, odds are, you'll need some kind of component that can read frequencies (not pitch, that's different) and find out what the intensity levels are at each frequency. That's what that graph shows... a series of frequency channels and the amount of power at that frequency that is being pumped through. I have no idea if such a component already exists or not. But I'm positive it isn't impossible.

-tg

 

[desolator144]

hmm guess you're right. I figured with the amount of programs that have controls in them that have little bouncing bars that go along with the frequency of the song was an indication that there was some simple function like getsoundlvl(intFrequency) hmm wouldn't that be nice. but noooo Microsoft hates us all. There's probably a super easy way to read that info from a sound file but I've only seen like 3 programs ever do it in realtime for whatever's coming in the mic (or default recording channel) and it's starting to look like almost nobody knows how to do it I checked and there's no reference in all of MSDN to FFT or wavelet transforms so I guess it has to be homemade. I asked my VB teacher and he said there might be a way to get that info from the sound card directly but we didn't know how.