I know nothing about the pitch when the recording was made, but that doesn't matter. What concerns me is the pitch I hear when the recording is played.
Upgrading a DAC clock is a fool’s errand.
- Thread starter Tam Lin
- Start date
I know nothing about the pitch when the recording was made, but that doesn't matter. What concerns me is the pitch I hear when the recording is played.
Then you are in the business of second guessing the artist. As you say, it can be your business but certainly won't be mine. Not at all.
Spoken like a tone-deaf moron. I am not second guessing anyone. As a musician, I sometimes like to play along with a recording and retuning my instruments to match the pitch of the playback each time is not fun.
So what you saying? As a painter I get to put lipstick on Mona Lisa and if anyone disagrees, call them tone blind? What you do is your business. Just don't say I was born with a defect because I don't follow you down the path of editorializing the art as created. For all you know, the talent may have a heart attack after hearing what you have done to the pitch.
I think most artists would appreciate another musician wanting to ‘sit in’ with them and would happily accept a small correction in pitch. Music always sounds better when all the instruments are in tune. The correction involved amounts to a few cents. A cent is an interval equal to one hundredth of a semitone. A semitone it the interval between any two adjacent notes in the equal-tempered scale. Numerically, the twelfth root of two.
Amir, just because you, the great, trained listener, can’t hear small differences in pitch, don't assume no one else can. Let me tell you about a real trained listener.
Many years ago, I was living in Berkeley, CA making harpsichords. It was around Christmas time when I got a call from KQED, the PBS station in San Francisco. They needed a harpsichord for a concert they were going to broadcast and could I help them out. (KQED got my name from KPFA, the Pacifica radio station in Berkeley, for whom I had recently made a harpsichord.) “When is the concert?” I asked. “Tonight.” was the reply.
I didn’t have an instrument in the shop so I disassembled my wife’s harpsichord and loaded it in the back of my VW Microbus and drove to the city. There was not sufficient time to tune the instrument properly before airtime so I gave it a quickie with a strobe tuner. Moments later, the choral director came in to warm up his singers. He sat down at the harpsichord and played two chords. “Very nice.” he said. “You used an electronic tuner, didn’t you?”
Now, I can tell the difference between a proper tuning and a strobotune quickie, but it takes me more than two chords. Unlike piano tuning, for which an electronic tuner is sufficient, harpsichords are tuned to a variety of different temperaments depending on the repertoire and the desires of the performer. I wonder if you even know what a temperament is. I’m sure you couldn't hear the difference. You can’t even recognize the difference between a bass viol and a cello. (There is a thread where a YouTube video featuring a double bass is discussed and you comment that it is a great sounding cello.)
This is not my first unpleasant encounter with you, but it is my last. Adios.
Amir, just because you, the great, trained listener, can’t hear small differences in pitch, don't assume no one else can. Let me tell you about a real trained listener.
Many years ago, I was living in Berkeley, CA making harpsichords. It was around Christmas time when I got a call from KQED, the PBS station in San Francisco. They needed a harpsichord for a concert they were going to broadcast and could I help them out. (KQED got my name from KPFA, the Pacifica radio station in Berkeley, for whom I had recently made a harpsichord.) “When is the concert?” I asked. “Tonight.” was the reply.
I didn’t have an instrument in the shop so I disassembled my wife’s harpsichord and loaded it in the back of my VW Microbus and drove to the city. There was not sufficient time to tune the instrument properly before airtime so I gave it a quickie with a strobe tuner. Moments later, the choral director came in to warm up his singers. He sat down at the harpsichord and played two chords. “Very nice.” he said. “You used an electronic tuner, didn’t you?”
Now, I can tell the difference between a proper tuning and a strobotune quickie, but it takes me more than two chords. Unlike piano tuning, for which an electronic tuner is sufficient, harpsichords are tuned to a variety of different temperaments depending on the repertoire and the desires of the performer. I wonder if you even know what a temperament is. I’m sure you couldn't hear the difference. You can’t even recognize the difference between a bass viol and a cello. (There is a thread where a YouTube video featuring a double bass is discussed and you comment that it is a great sounding cello.)
This is not my first unpleasant encounter with you, but it is my last. Adios.
You have an entire performance with multiple instruments playing and you manage to tune the pitch on all of the simultaneously? That is incredible ability.
As to having such excellent ears, you have not shown any example of a talent approving what you have done. I have worked for years with both record labels and studios. The most sensitive topic ever was in any way form or shape getting in the business of changing their art. As an example, some outfit set out to create a dynamic playlist where you could watch a DVD and it would automatically take out the offending scenes that were not child safe. They sued them out of existence even though there was clear utility there. So the notion you have that most musicians will like what you have done is grossly presumptuous and assumptive. They worked hard to create a single performance and are not in any mood whatsoever to get second guessed in the overall performance which they approved and delivered to us.
No, I am not a musician and have to constantly ask my wife that plays music what the instruments are. But you being musician does not at all translate into advocating that we sit there and mess with the pitch of every piece of music we listen to. You can do that but when I am not interested, you don't get to call me tone deaf. Or moron.
And you want to leave, leave. Heaven knows I am not there to keep people around that call others names in every post.
As to having such excellent ears, you have not shown any example of a talent approving what you have done. I have worked for years with both record labels and studios. The most sensitive topic ever was in any way form or shape getting in the business of changing their art. As an example, some outfit set out to create a dynamic playlist where you could watch a DVD and it would automatically take out the offending scenes that were not child safe. They sued them out of existence even though there was clear utility there. So the notion you have that most musicians will like what you have done is grossly presumptuous and assumptive. They worked hard to create a single performance and are not in any mood whatsoever to get second guessed in the overall performance which they approved and delivered to us.
No, I am not a musician and have to constantly ask my wife that plays music what the instruments are. But you being musician does not at all translate into advocating that we sit there and mess with the pitch of every piece of music we listen to. You can do that but when I am not interested, you don't get to call me tone deaf. Or moron.
And you want to leave, leave. Heaven knows I am not there to keep people around that call others names in every post.
While I do not appreciate Tam Lin's tone at all. Studies have shown that human perception of pitch and time actually trump Fourier Uncertainty. The subjects that did it consistently were musicians. Now to put this in proper perspective "ordinary" people did this too, just not as well.
Food for thought.
Food for thought.
Yeh, that article has been making the round since publication. Alas, its thesis is wrong. The hearing system is not FFT. It does not wait to gather samples and then decide the frequency content as FFT would. It hears and act on audio as it arrives using a parallel set of resonant systems. As such it is not subject to what rules time vs frequency resolution in fourier transforms.
Amir,
Can you expand on your argument that the article's thesis is wrong? As I read it, it appears to say exactly what you said - that the human auditory system isn't FFT based. The problem appears to lie more in peoples' interpretation of the results.
Can you expand on your argument that the article's thesis is wrong? As I read it, it appears to say exactly what you said - that the human auditory system isn't FFT based. The problem appears to lie more in peoples' interpretation of the results.
We can start with the heading: "Human hearing beats the Fourier uncertainty principle."
If we agree that the hearing system is not based on fourier transforms, then there was no reason to shout that in the heading of the article and the conclusion. There is not a psychoacoustics book or research that states the hearing system works like an FFT.
So yes, the article confirms that but it was nothing that was stated to be different before.
If we agree that the hearing system is not based on fourier transforms, then there was no reason to shout that in the heading of the article and the conclusion. There is not a psychoacoustics book or research that states the hearing system works like an FFT.
So yes, the article confirms that but it was nothing that was stated to be different before.
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