[CAUT] aurally pure tunings

Fred Sturm fssturm at unm.edu
Wed May 6 16:36:42 PDT 2009


On May 4, 2009, at 3:19 PM, Kent Swafford wrote:

> Early on, I realized that the characteristic OnlyPure sound depended  
> upon, among other things, very clean unisons. I also realized that  
> the unique accuracy of the OnlyPure display lent itself very, very  
> well to fine unison tuning.

Hi Kent,
	I think you are on to something here. One thing that struck me about  
your description of Stopper's software was the delay in time between  
playing the note and seeing it displayed. I wonder if he has it set up  
to "skip the prompt tone" and just listen to the sustained tone in  
some fashion. A lot of the confusion in reading displays comes down to  
the prompt tone being different (usually noticeably sharp), so you see  
one thing, and then it shifts gears and shows you something else. Not  
very intuitive to follow. You can learn to ignore the prompt display,  
but it is hard to control reflexes.
	You also note that the display is very stable. I speculate that the  
software does some kind of smoothing operation, which could be in the  
form of averaging over very short spans of time, or perhaps throwing  
out pitches it identifies as anomalous. Jumpy display syndrome is the  
bane of the ETD. We learn (some of us, anyway) to "read through" and  
interpret, but it sure would be nice if the machine calculated and  
figured out what we wanted to be listening for, and displayed it. So  
maybe Stopper has figured out how to do that, in which case a big  
bravo to him!
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu





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