picking up vibrations or ... ?

Using Arduino Project Guidance
1

I'm trying to figure out how best to do this. We'd like to light up a marimba (musical instrument) in such a way that the lights react to notes being played. I thought of using piezo vibration sensors with an Arduino (or several) but those might be way too sensitive pick up individual notes.

I need to pick up individual notes here, not a certain frequency range. And the reason I thought of vibration was because it's played with mallets, whacking each note. However, the whole instrument will vibrate with each whack and harmonics, so I'm not sure how best to do this.

Looking for suggestions here.

2

You can detect the vibration per note but that costs a lot of sensors , or you sample the sound and do a FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) to see the most important frequencies. e.g

Search for FFT on the forum. - http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,52037.0.html