I’m writing a program that samples a music file in very short intervals (say every tenth of a second) in order to detect its pitch in a “continuous” fashion. The program applies the FFT 10 times a second to the data in my audio file, then produces frequency outputs.

Upon doing some research, I landed upon something called the short-time fourier transform, which sounds appealing, as it is described as exactly what I am doing. Wikipedia says “In practice, the procedure for computing STFTs is to divide a longer time signal into shorter segments of equal length and then compute the Fourier transform separately on each shorter segment.”

It seems as if the STFT is the same as just applying the FT over short periods of time. Is there anything else that differentiates the STFT from the FT? I know this seems like a dumb question.