How To Listen

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

UPDATE: I have cleaned up this post a bit by fixing a dead link and removing some unnecessary blather at the beginning.

Everything must be in tune.

Everything that is not already in tune, must be tuned as quickly as possible.

No exceptions.

I have devoted many years of my life to thinking about how I can become better at, and make my students 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! [SineWaves2.zip] (125.8 mb)¹

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 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!

If you enjoy the sine waves and would like to donate you can do so via paypal here:

Your kindness and generosity is graciously accepted.

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.

Testimonials

Rachel writes:

Thank you so much! I am a violinist who thinks there is nothing more beautiful than a scale in tune with a drone. I am practicing now with your drones on my ipod. It is SO helpful.

Richard Schwartz, the man who “invented” The Tuning CD writes:

Hi Tim,

Thank you for addressing intonation through the use of drones and The Tuning C.D. You are right. For some, especially those studying music in college, $20.00 can be a lot of money. For those people in particular I have now released The Tuning C.D. in an mp3 format on itunes.com and amazon.com for under $10.00. Also, the booklet is available for free from our website under “8-page Booklet.”

Thank you again for bringing this to my attention and I hope this helps.

Sincerely,

Rich Schwartz

Dr. Richard A. Schwartz, founder The Tuning C.D.

I responded to Mr. Schwartz:

Hi Richard,

Thanks for browsing my site. I hope this post doesn’t offend you. We’re both trying to get at the same thing, which is great tuning ability.

My gripes with your product remain the same, 50% price cut notwithstanding. * The tuning CD costs money. In my opinion, spending any money at all for drones is too much. * The Tuning CD still plays two pitches at once. That defeats the purpose of tuning by multiple intervals (sixths, fourths, etc.). * Each of my tones are a full minute longer than The Tuning CD’s.

I clicked on “8-page booklet” on your site and it took me to “The Tuning CD Facebook Page”.

Anyway, I hope you do not see my SineWaves project as a direct affront to any business you have made out of selling The Tuning CD. I hope you continue to find success with that. Let me know if I can help you in any way. Thanks again for visiting my site and leaving a comment.

Dr. Timothy Rosenberg

Founder: Free SineWaves