RF-Recorder: A Contactless Music Play Recording System Using COTS RFID

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a system called "RFRecorder" based on COTS RFID system which can inspect the string vibration and recognize the tone and tempo accurately. Our system can recover the music score played by some string instruments such as ukulele. Specifically, the string vibration influences the reflection of RF signal and causes a phase change. This change can be captured and analyzed to recover the frequency of the string vibration. In addition, the RFID tag is attached on the body of instrument but not on the string, which can not affect the music playing. Compared to the recorder, our system is immune to the environmental noise. Furthermore, it also can work on NLoS scenario. For single-string vibration, we use compressive sensing to recover the frequency duo to the low sampling rate of the COTS RFID. For multiple-string vibration, we recognize the music tone using machine learning method. We build a prototype and test the performance using guitar, ukulele and zither, which achieves 90%, 89%, 85% accuracy respectively.