How To Listen

Pigeons Can Hear 0.1 Hz [OR] Finding A Better Drone For Fun And Profit

Also, provocative titles make for interested readers, even if said title is ancillary to the crux of the post. (Pro tip.)

As some of you may know, I played the second of my DMA recitals last Friday. For all intents and purposes, the performance went well. It was effective and I believed I conveyed my ideas convincingly and artistically. There are many moments I would like a do-over, but that is not an uncommon feeling to have.

After listening to it, I was struck in both a good way and a bad way, by my intonation. Oftentimes it was very good, but that made the times that it was bad, REALLY bad. I know that I can be a bit of a tuning freak when I am being critical of other people’s performances. I am here to let those people, and everyone else, know that I hold myself to the same standard:

Everything must be in tune. Everything that is not already in tune, must be tuned as quickly as possible. No exceptions.

For the past week I have been thinking about how I can become better at tuning. Obviously tuning is a listening exercise as well as a memorization and adaptation exercise; all three of which require a fair amount of practice.

I do not own a Dr. Beat. I have a metronome that I like. The only other function that a Dr. Beat has is its droning ability. For those who are unfamiliar, the Dr. Beat can play any pitch indefinitely, which is very useful for tuning exercises. Unfortunately, and this is the reason I don’t own one, those tones have an annoying timbre that distracts from the exercise at hand. It is buzzing, nasal, and exhaustive on the ears. Not to mention, at $160, the Dr. Beat is rather expensive for a metronome.

With the Dr. Beat out of the question, I set about finding a better drone. I knew I could always generate tones on the mixing console at Recording Services and record that into Pro Tools, but I wanted a faster and better way.  I found an app for Mac OS X called Tone Generator that fills the need. It is not an elegant program, but what it does is play sine waves at any frequency with up to two decimal places of accuracy for any duration of time. It also allows you to export those sine waves as .wav files. It’s perfect for benchmarking your audiophile gear and it’s also perfect for what I did next.

A little Google-Fu awarded me with the formula for determining a Frequency (Hertz) to Pitch conversion:

FREQUENCY = 2^(n/12)*440

n = the number of semitones away from A₄. Pitches below A₄ are represented by negative numbers.

I put the formula into a spreadsheet and got going with representing all of the pitches on the grand piano. Then I used the Tone Generator to generate a 4 minute .wav file of every pitch between A₂ and A₆. Finally, I took all 49 of those files and popped them into iTunes to tag and compress them.

ET VOILÀ! [SineWaves.zip] (132 MB)

ahem…

ET VOILÀ! [SineWaves2.zip] (125.8 mb)

The application is obvious. Simply download the zipped file, uncompress it, import the tracks into your music player of choice and get droning. Personally, I rounded all of the little guys up into a playlist for easy access and loaded them onto my iPod for tuning practice on-the-go.

But Tim! We already have The Tuning CD!

Fine. Good, in fact. The difference is the sine waves are free, accurate, long, and properly tagged in MP3 format. The Tuning CD is $20, each track is only a minute or two long, and they have more than one pitch sounding at a time! It’s amazing to me that people really like using that CD, but it’s their money. If you enjoy the sine waves and would like to donate to the Timothy Rosenberg Academic Enhancement and Debt Reduction Program you can donate via paypal here:

Your kindness and generosity is graciously accepted. There are special places in paradise for all of you.

I think you will find that practicing tuning using pure sine waves will be rewarding and not as exhaustive on your ears as other methods. I know that I am looking forward to working more with them.

Oh, the title? It’s true. Carrier Pigeons can hear sounds down to 0.1 hertz. That’s one cycle every ten seconds! They use that ability in their migratory exercise by guiding their flight based on the sounds of the ocean. It is also widely known that birds are creepy, pigeons especially. With aural abilities like that I am pretty confident they can hear the future and that is just another reason to worry about them.