Re: microtonal birdsong

Hi there,

Been enjoying the music from crazy-music.
Especially remember, Jacky Ligon's 17-tet
ceremonial piece, Rick's Fairy Lullabies and
Margo's swaying tree house.

Not been posting for a while as I've been rather
concentrating on programming and getting FTS underway
again as it had rather begun to drift!

Here are some microtonal transcriptions of birdsong.
http://members.nbci.com/tune_smithy/tunes/bird_song.htm

They are automatic transcriptions done using Fractal
Tune Smithy (new option just added to it). If one
did them by ear (using slowed down bird song) one would
find more notes, but it would take quite a while.

Mostly British bird song, and mostly ones I've heard
(though some I'd like to hear but haven't yet).

The golden eagle transcription is more tuneful
than the recording, and I've done it on Shanai as
attempt to get a more "raucous" type sound.

You set a minimum note length for FTS to search
for and tweak various other parameters until it is
finding as many of the notes as one can get it to find.
If note glissandos or has vibrato, will find the
average pitch, or a series of pitches for a long glissando
(if not too fast).

It's done by counting note crossings, much more accurate
than FFT - you can get accuracy of about +-0.1 cents for a 0.1
second note if note is optimal, such as sine wave
(by linear interpolation between the
two samples before and after change of sign).

Only works for some timbres, but most of the birdsong
timbres are pretty good. So is singing, recorder,
even string instruments, if you tweak the paramaters
according to the instrument (for these timbres,
you need to set it to ignore secondary waves
lower in amplitude than the primary one).

Examples of birdsong that it hasn't worked for, not yet,
are Reed Bunting, wood pigeon, and chaffinch.

New version of FTS will also have FFT which one can
use to find partials of a timbre, and by peak interpolation
between the frequency bins, you can get pretty accurate
partials too for short notes.

You will be able to sing / play a seed into new version
of FTS for it to use for the fractal tune, though it may
add apparently extra notes, e.g. from the attack, or the
in-between note clicks you sometimes get with the recorder.

More later - lots to do still!

Page will need to be moved soon - nbci stop their
web hosting service mid July. Good free hosting is getting
hard to find now, if one needs a lot of web space and
possibly high bandwidth (i.e. so visitors can
download megabyte size files such as programs), so
haven't quite sorted out where it goes yet.

Plan to use the birdsong in fractal tunes, and
possibly in organised pieces too. Page has a fractal
tune using the curlew song.

I include the ts files as well, as you should be able to
play them in the current beta even if you can't yet
make them - and try changing voice / speed / pitch
etc or use in fractal tunes.

Robert

Hi there:

New url:

http://tunesmithy.netfirms.com/tunes/birdsong.htm

nbci is very slow at present, and this new site is
really fast.

Apologies if anyone followed the spaceport.com urls
that I had as alternative on the nbci page for a short while - didn't
know about the popups that appear - not when you view
the page, but later (somehow), and are resized so
that the caption bar goes outside the screen, so that they
are hard to get rid of. Lots of them - my screen was
full of them afterwards, and it took a while to get
the default browser window back to its normal position!
They've lost my custom!

Robert

--- In crazy_music@y..., "Robert Walker" <robertwalker@n...> wrote:
> Hi there:
>
> New url:
>
> http://tunesmithy.netfirms.com/tunes/birdsong.htm
Robert, that is really cool. Some of them even fooled my cat.

Robert,

Gee, thanks.

I played your curlew midi-file, and my cat visciously attacked and
eviscerated my speakers.

Do you know how much these cost me?

O.K. Now to some of you, $15.00 bucks ain't much, but these were the best
speakers i ever had!

Thanks for sharing Robert,

GZ

Robert Walker wrote:

> Hi there:
>
> New url:
>
> http://tunesmithy.netfirms.com/tunes/birdsong.htm
>
> nbci is very slow at present, and this new site is
> really fast.
>
> Apologies if anyone followed the spaceport.com urls
> that I had as alternative on the nbci page for a short while - didn't
> know about the popups that appear - not when you view
> the page, but later (somehow), and are resized so
> that the caption bar goes outside the screen, so that they
> are hard to get rid of. Lots of them - my screen was
> full of them afterwards, and it took a while to get
> the default browser window back to its normal position!
> They've lost my custom!
>
> Robert
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> crazy_music-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Hi George,

Sorry for any speakers damaged by cats!

Anyone has any favourite birds they'd like to hear done this way
let me know.

Curlew is one of my favourites - very evocative of the seashore in
Scotland. Quite fun to play the clip at a quarter speed and hear all
the notes - you can do that with the wave sound too, but of course
it lowers the pitch of the notes.

Robert

>
> Gee, thanks.
>
> I played your curlew midi-file, and my cat visciously attacked and
> eviscerated my speakers.
>
> Do you know how much these cost me?
>
> O.K. Now to some of you, $15.00 bucks ain't much, but these were the best
> speakers i ever had!
>
> Thanks for sharing Robert,
>
> GZ
>

Hi John,

> > http://tunesmithy.netfirms.com/tunes/birdsong.htm
> Robert, that is really cool. Some of them even fooled my cat.

Great, thanks!

If you have any particular bird songs you'd like to hear like this,
let me know.

Once FTS is finished, anyone can have a go at it. However,
program itself isn't quite ready to upload, still at
the stage of finding bugs and fixing them as they arise.

I've also made a couple of major revisions of the way parts of
the program are organised recently and am gradually going through
it all getting everything in line again.

The changes are: midi relaying to support multiple output ports,
which is the current beta preview, and the part to do with showing the values
in edit fields and check boxes and saving them at end of
session etc - I've figured out a way to do it with just a single
line of code for each one that I write myself, with the rest generated
from those lines with a little code generator I wrote. Will make quite a
difference for a program with as many edit boxes and check boxes as
FTS. However needs a shakedown period to delete all the old code,
carefully! So, not uploaded anywhere yet.

Advantage is - if you see the value displayed correctly in the box,
then you know it will be saved to the .ini file correctly, read from it
okay, initialised correctly on Reset or New, is declared as correct variable
type and with extern to it, and is read correctly from the box too -
seven places in the code to check for each one reduced to just one place
to check, so will make quite a difference for debugging - it's this repetetive
type of work that is most responsible for introducing bugs I find.

In same way, when adding a new dialog to FTS, requires editing in
nine places in the code at present, and I'll reduce that to a single
place, with the rest all auto-generated.

I'll prob. do some gifs of "scores" for the bird-song too as that is easy
to do in FTS.

Enjoyed your base solo!

Robert