Linux has this “pulseeffects” package with some nice features (eq, left-right balance), but it is a real CPU hog (especially for something that sits in the background all the time). Kinda wonder if it is worth re-compiling for avx-512…
>> Linux has this “pulseeffects” package with some nice features (eq, left-right balance), but it is a real CPU hog
Yeah, but one or two cores should handle it just fine. If it really is a hog, it probably needs some optimization. Real-time audio DSP has been a thing for decades and should not be a hog.
The strange thing is, search engines used to be able to do this. But they have gotten progressively more terrible at finding a very specific result based on a very specific query.
My ChatGPT experience is not that different from the "good old days" of searching the internet. This time the search is in latent space which has up- and downsides.
I think pitch memory is not at all the same neural phenomenon as perfect (absolute) pitch.
I had an ear training teacher who would play a bunch of random atonal notes on the piano between exercises to "reset" our ears. Only works for relative ears.
Similarly I (relative pitch) retain the key of a piece I practice. But if someone plays a random sequence of pitches it pretty easily makes me lose my anchor or at least make it lose focus by a semitone or three.
Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them. Which is also a source of discomfort and difficulty, for example when they need to transpose or work with a different A4 than their "internal" learned one. Where us relative normies would just shrug and accept the new A4.
> Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them
Actually they're not immune to being thrown off, there was an experiment where people with perfect pitch were played a long orchestral piece that very slowly detuned, e.g. over the course of half an hour dropped one semitone. The study found this also detuned their sense of absolute pitch, not just immediately after but also months later.
A good friend of mine in high school had perfect pitch. We played music together and he would complain about his 'anchor' of pitch getting thrown off if/when we wouldn't tune to A 440Hz but instead something else slightly up or down from A440.
My choir director finds it easier to transpose organ pieces on the fly than "set the organ to a different key" and just play the keys as written for that reason: There's too much dissonance between what his fingers know they're playing and what his ears are hearing.
He was one of those little kids who had absolute pitch from the start, though, and he definitely views it as a two-edged sword!
I’m a former pro musician. I’m a drummer so lol I don’t have perfect pitch, but I met a few folks who did. Having true perfect pitch sounds awful honestly. The world is constantly out of tune and it takes effort to ignore it.
I knew many more people with very good relative pitch. In school those people would get a middle C at the start of ear training class and ace every note after that because they knew where that C was.
I think there's different components to pitch memory, including both relative and absolute pitch. (I suspect there's more than that, too - some people seem to just hear a chord as a single unit while others pick out the individual notes in it, some people have a very good ear for timbre.)
I don't have perfect pitch, but I actually seem to have anchored on A=443Hz. When my violin teacher insisted on 440Hz it would cause me discomfort the same way you describe, just feeling wrong. And I've found that when I try to tune an instrument from memory, I'm consistently sharp. (Assuming I'm not off by a whole-tone, because I don't have perfect pitch.)
When I played in a youth orchestra our music director told us that certain European orchestras use A=443Hz (he said ones in Vienna specifically but there might be others). Perhaps you have a history of listening to many recordings with such tuning.
>the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them. Which is also a source of discomfort and difficulty
Not least because the argument about "what note is this" and "what note do you think you're singing" starts basically day one of singing lessons. Trying to learn any practical music when you can hear the difference between close frequencies mean you're effectively learning colours from a group who insist that blue and green are the same colour.
One of my party tricks used to be saying the song and artist from the first 5 seconds of a track. These days with samplers and synthesisers that's almost impossible. I still get tripped when I hear some samples, like "that's the bass guitar from {song x} WTF" in the middle of some otherwise pleasant song.
Cellist for the last 35 years here. No perfect pitch. My "perfect" note identification is based on timbre: I know what each note sounds like on the instruments I know intimately.
For synthetic tones, I will be off +/- 3 semitones because I will be using an aural memory of the cello a string as a reference, rather than recognizing the frequency like the perfect pitch folks do.
Never occurred to me to practice perfect pitch because, as you said, it is not that useful.
Same for me on the guitar: it is easy to distinguish even the same note on different strings. Chords, too. But it's more a timbre plus relative pitch sensibility.
It is useless for everyone except singers. If you’re a singer, you can cold-start a song in tune and have the band come in seconds later. Hard to do that without the confidence that you both started correctly and haven’t drifted.
There's a story about the opera singer Kirsten Flagstad (1895 - 1962) from when she performed at a small place somewhere, singing opera songs with just a piano. Afterwards one from the audience actually complained directly to her that she didn't sing well, she was out of tune. She apologized and said that she had perfect pitch, and the piano wasn't tuned to her inner pitch - and she found herself unable to adjust to the piano.
As for singers in general, I've seen lots of professional singers who don't have perfect pitch but still can cold-start a song - they know their own vocal cords so well that they can start at the right pitch with confidence.
My experience with pitch memory is nearly identical to yours (but only 34 years playing cello, not 35).
Absolute (perfect) pitch really does seem to be a whole different thing neurally, akin to (and perhaps actually related to) the difference between learning a language before a critical age and learning one afterwards.
I'm gonna try to teach it to my kid, because, why not. Even if it's not that useful most of the time, there are definitely times when it would come in handy for me, e.g., being faster at transcribing notation from recordings. If he doesn't end up using it, that's fine.
I suggest not to do it. It is really painful in the orchestra when the orchestra has gotten sharper than what you are comfortable with and you have to play a minor third. I remember playing Mahler 2. The hall was hot as hell and the orchestra had risen from A441 to what must have been A445. I had to play a major sixth and it was borderline revolting.
I stopped practicing it after some experiences like that. Knowing what note to play by some absolute measure is only useful if you are playing alone. What you play in an ensemble is relative to a lot of other people.
Having perfect pitch can be useful for a lot of musicians, or educators, or composers in various ways, including:
Improving accuracy in performance: Perfect pitch can identify and reproduce musical notes more accurately and quickly, which can help perform music with greater precision.
Improving music education: Perfect pitch can help people teach music theory and composition more effectively, as students with perfect pitch can better understand and apply the concepts.
Enhancing creativity in music composition: Composers with pitch can more easily hear and reproduce musical ideas in their heads, which can help them create more complex and interesting compositions.
Facilitating communication among musicians: Musicians with absolute pitch can communicate more effectively with each other by using a common standard for identifying notes.
Improving the ability to transcribe music: Musicians with perfect pitch can more easily transcribe music by ear, which can be useful for analyzing and studying music.... the list goes on
I am an orchestra musician. Having perfect pitch was only trouble, despite playing in good orchestras at the time.
In the end of Ein Heldenleben the orchestra will not be the same pitch it started and, and for you to be in tune you will have to play notes that will be more than a quarter tone too high compared to what you think is correct.
I found it awful. The only orchestras I have played in that stayed in tune was the Swedish radio orchestra and the Munich Phil. But a major third is 13 cent low there as well.
And regarding most other things: I would have loved to have it during solfege exams. That is about it. The trouble it gave me when doing the work I studied to do it got in the way.
Most colleges I went to had special classes for students with perfect pitch as they were taught different strategies. In my final exam in "Gehörbildung" the two top scoring students did not have perfect pitch.
from what I understand, perfect absolute pitch is (to me) of negative value in the sense that it makes you annoyed at a lot of music. I've heard some people say it makes them not enjoy practicing pieces with other musicians. I think "why be aggravated if I don't have to?"
On the bassoon this was (and is) the case for me. It even translates to instruments very close to the bassoon such as dulcian and the French basson. If I hear a baroque bassoon I know what note it is in 415.
Perfect pitch is by no means a requirement for musicians, although it is more common than in the general population, even more so for conductors.
But intonation is equally easy/hard for absolute and relative ears. Some tasks, like transposition, can require more practice for people with perfect pitch.
Source: lived experience from my doctorate in music from Sibelius Academy, Helsinki.
Some, but not all, treaps have a node weight that is updated in a probabilistic fashion. The act of balancing the tree is still deterministic, but the weights of each node are randomized.
I keep trying to find a use for treaps, but haven't had a project that needed it. In particular, the value of a balanced tree is in consistent cost of lookups for arbitrary elements. But if you are mixing entries that are accessed often with those that are not, having an 8:1 access time ratio between the two would be a feature not a bug.
I used a persistent treap for a lock free priority queue (swap in a new root at insertion). It felt nice but to be honest, didn't do a comprehensive comparison to alternate implementation strategies.
