It is quite straight-forward to use a Fourier transform to discover the energy contained at certain audio frequencies, but extracting musical structure from this data is terribly difficult, partly because of the perceptual ambiguities in the human hearing system, and partly because it is basically impossible to confidently separate the identity of the constituent instruments within the audio spectrum. What instrument emitted this or that harmonic at 1800hz? The answer is crucial to identifying the chords, and nobody really knows how to reliably and programatically determine that, on an arbitrary recording, just yet...