Audio Recognition and Learning I'm a beginner with absolutely no experience in signal processing, but it has been a long-term goal of mine to do something that mixes music (a hobby of mine) and computer science (my "expertise").  I've been thinking of doing a project that involves learning notes from music, but I don't know where to begin.

For one, there doesn't seem to be a name for this problem. However, it doesn't seem to be a solved problem.  I've searched terms including "Audio recognition," "note recognition," "chord recognition," but I've only come up with this paper: "Automatic Chord Recognition from Audio Using an HMM with Supervised Learning" by Lee and stanley.  It seems to have some good references to processing and even a pointer to a dataset I could potentially use, but one paper doesn't seem to be enough for a good understanding.  Alternatively, I could skip the processing part entirely but I can't find data sets using terms like "audio signal data set"

Signal processing seems to be a pretty broad field. To save time, I want to pick up a book more oriented towards my project.  Are there any books like this?  I've found this:
http://www.dspguide.com/ch1/3.htm but I want to know if this is relevant before I jump into this 34 chapter book.  Are they any other search terms I can use such as "audio feature extraction" to get me closer to the ML part of the problem?

Finally, to cut down on work, I want to use libraries for the signal processing part.  One library I found for Python is Pyo but are they any other alternatives for Python that people have used?

Basically, I'm a little overwhelmed by how much I don't know and I would greatly appreciate a pointer in the right direction.  Even google search words would help.
The Lyons book is gold for someone in your situation.  Have patience with the topic of audio DSP -- the more time you spend trying to learn it, the less you will know that you know.  :)