Re:Improvisation on pitches from a recording of a song thrush

Hi Graham,

> Have you looked at Csound? Chapter 21 of "The Csound Book" describes
> how to make a pitch to MIDI convertor. I haven't tried it out, but it
> looks like a lot of thought has gone into the pitch tracking utilities.
> I think the source code is LGPL, so you can use it, but with
> restrictions.

> It's a few weeks since I read it, but I think they do best fits for the
> full harmonic series.

Oh right I'll look into it. No I hadn't realised that it had
this feature.

I've just found the relevant opcode here:

http://kevindumpscore.com/docs/csound-manual/specptrk.html

Yes it says that you can specify the number of harmonic partials
to look for based on the instrument you want to track.
It's an FFT based approach and I've tried that in
FTS but my work on that is rather rudimentary
when it comes to tracking changing pitches.
They seem to have done a lot of work on tracking
simultaneously changing partials through time.

What FTS can do quite well is to find the notes
via FFT if you first mark out the notes on the
recording yourself by hand rather than asking
FTS to locate the notes itself. (It can do the
same with the wave count method too - after it
finds notes, if it finds too many for instance,
you can simply delete the extra notes and then
get it to refind the frequencies of the remaining
ones). It won't attempt to track pitch glides
however. Yes, FTS already calls CSound in FTS 3.0 to render to audio
and to let users play CSound instruments in real time
using CSoundAV. The easiest thing would be to use the
opcode, and call CSound to analyse the performance.

Yes as far as I understand the license, it is okay
to use lgpl'd code so long as I make sure that
if I make any code I derive
from it into a library or a separate program that
I make that available for anyone to use and further
modify if they want. While GPL'd code I just
can't use at all from a commercial app.

The restriction for lgpl is that I can't use the code
directly in FTS. You have to make any derivative
code open source too. But you can wrap it all up in
a library and make that available for other programmers
to use, and that is fine. I find LGPL is not really much of an
issue in most cases for the ways I want to use the
projects. Actually commercial programming involves
a lot of shared code too, with various sites
where you can go down and get examples of how
to code various things. Actually when I mentioned sine wave best fit though
I had in mind actually plotting a sine wave through
the data points and doing some kind of best
fit type approach to find the best curve to actually
go through all the points.

Like the way it is done on this page:

http://www.mathematic.co.uk/examples/SineCurves.htm

perhaps but with several sine waves simultaneously.

I wonder now if somehow the two approaches can be
combined somehow - i.e. use the zero interpolation
method to refine the estimates of the pitches
of the peaks, and the peak frequencies to refine
the expectations of the shape of the waveform
and the parameters to use for the wave count searches.
But that is just a vague thought. I have no idea really
how to set about it.

Anyway thanks for letting me know about the CSound pitch tracking opcode and I'll look into
it and see how it goes.

Thanks

Robert

Hi Ozan,

> Solo Explorer 1.0 from www.recognisoft.com has a modest pitch to midi
> conversion feature for monophonic wave files.

Thanks. I tried to download it too, and as with Carl,
got a message to say that it had expired when I tried to
install it. Did a google search for the message text
and found nothing to explain it. Also tried e-mailing
him about it and got the same thing, bounced back
e-mail with hte same error message.

I can see the help for the installed program and
will take a look at that. Thanks for letting me
know about it.

Robert

You're welcome dear Robert. I include now the help file of solo explorer
with the hopes that everyone interested will find it useful.

It's good to hear from you again by the way.

Cordially,
Ozan

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Walker" <robertwalker@ntlworld.com>
To: <tuning@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: 16 Nisan 2005 Cumartesi 13:29
Subject: [tuning] Re:Improvisation on pitches from a recording of a song
thrush

>
>
> Hi Ozan,
>
> > Solo Explorer 1.0 from www.recognisoft.com has a modest pitch to midi
> > conversion feature for monophonic wave files.
>
> Thanks. I tried to download it too, and as with Carl,
> got a message to say that it had expired when I tried to
> install it. Did a google search for the message text
> and found nothing to explain it. Also tried e-mailing
> him about it and got the same thing, bounced back
> e-mail with hte same error message.
>
> I can see the help for the installed program and
> will take a look at that. Thanks for letting me
> know about it.
>
> Robert
>
>