Audio foo/woo thread

[davedotco]

PS Vlad I always had it in my head you were American. Kudos on your English! X

I was taught British English in school but due to global cultural hegemony, the American English prevailed. *blush*

You went to school.....?

I kind of thought that you sort of appeared, fully formed, for the enlightenment of us all.

 

[Freddy58]

You went to school.....?

I kind of thought that you sort of appeared, fully formed, for the enlightenment of us all.

Now now Dave, be nice *biggrin*

 

[SteveR750]

So what about the plethora of musicians who have pitch perfect hearing? It's not as if they are a freakish rarity either, a significant numer of people can reproduce a middle C without any reference other than memory.

Sorry for skipping your question Steve. I didn't see it.

Pitch may be quantified as a frequency, but pitch is not a purely objective physical property; it is a subjective psychoacoustical attribute of sound.

Pitch is an auditory sensation in which a listener assigns musical tones to relative positions on a musical scale based primarily on the frequency of vibration. Pitch is closely related to frequency, but the two are not equivalent. Frequency is an objective, scientific concept, whereas pitch is subjective. Sound waves themselves do not have pitch, and their oscillations can be measured to obtain a frequency. It takes a human mind to map the internal quality of pitch. Pitches are usually quantified as frequencies in cycles per second, or hertz, by comparing sounds with pure tones, which have periodic, sinusoidal waveforms. Complex and aperiodic sound waves can often be assigned a pitch by this method.

The pitch of complex tones can be ambiguous, meaning that two or more different pitches can be perceived, depending upon the observer. When the actual fundamental frequency can be precisely determined through physical measurement, it may differ from the perceived pitch because of overtones, also known as upper partials, harmonic or otherwise. A complex tone composed of two sine waves of 1000 and 1200 Hz may sometimes be heard as up to three pitches: two spectral pitches at 1000 and 1200 Hz, derived from the physical frequencies of the pure tones, and the combination tone at 200 Hz, corresponding to the repetition rate of the waveform. In a situation like this, the percept at 200 Hz is commonly referred to as the missing fundamental, which is often the greatest common divisor of the frequencies present.

Source: Pitch - Wiki

Does that seem accurate remembering of frequency from memory to you Steve?

Partly. It might explain why a large number of professional musicians have the ability to pull a middle C either vocally ir by tunuing a guitar. I reckon I could tune a guitar to within 10% of concert pitch starting blind.

What it does not answer then is the ability to improvise, to improvise a melody. Few rock musicians can read music, let alone the maths behind it. There is probably something more fundamental about the human interaction with harmony and rhythm that we really don't understand, but I don't want to get into a debate about quantum physics and wjhat is reality etc, the point being that the best players can improvise in new harmonic areas, so its not just a question of learning a bunch of licks and stringing them together. Even if it were, it relies on a memory of harmony that is longer than 4s, though I can see that this is not necessarily the same process as using memory to conduct an A-B test for example. Where is the basis of the 4s rule anyway? Is this validated scientific data?

In probably bring thick, but I don't see the relevance to musicians creating tunes and golden ears?

I was challenging the assumption that we only remember the last 4s of audio.

 

[Vladimir]

You went to school.....?

I kind of thought that you sort of appeared, fully formed, for the enlightenment of us all.

I didn't know copy-pasting and interpreting Wikipedia articles is such a bother. I personally find these topics about acoustics and engineering interesting. Otherwise all we do on the forum is talk shopping or how cables are a scam.

 

[Infiniteloop]

You went to school.....?

I kind of thought that you sort of appeared, fully formed, for the enlightenment of us all.

I didn't know copy-pasting and interpreting Wikipedia articles is such a bother. I personally find these topics about acoustics and engineering interesting. Otherwise all we do on the forum is talk shopping or how cables are a scam.

....or not.