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Cathleen  Faraj's avatar

Ooops! Still an interesting read! but a bit beyond physics or trig 101. Sorry I was sarcastic in my post. . I must be more discerning in the future. Keep posting though as one really has to use brain power to read through this.

Rainbow Roxy's avatar

It's interesting how precise your pitch detection script is able to get, especialy with vocal fry. It makes me wonder if an AI could ever truly differentiate natural vocal nuance from digital correction.

David Barry's avatar

It feels to me like even hand-coded algorithms could do a reasonable job at distinguishing natural vocals from pitch-corrected vocals? I think that “Percentage of time spent within epsilon of the standard frequencies”, with appropriate thresholds, would classify a lot of pop recordings correctly.

You’d probably need something more sophisticated to correctly classify a singer as accurate as Karen Carpenter (and perhaps opera-trained singers are similar).

Mark Wesley's avatar

Read it 3 times, found no errors.

Well done, Dave, well done.

Cathleen  Faraj's avatar

Dave, Thanks so much for enlightening us about pitch variation. I often wondered how I would ever use sine and cosine in real life but now I know! But the part about vectors still puzzles me. I do love Fibonacci curves but I must have skimmed that part

Thanks for the great year in review, it was a stupid crazy year all the way around!💕🐸💕.

David Barry's avatar

Sorry, I realise now that when you say ‘vectors’ you’re referring to the arrays x_n etc., which basically look the same as vectors.* My target audience for that material is people who’ve done at least a couple of years of university-level maths, and I just expect everyone else to quickly tune out and possibly look for the ‘unsubscribe’ button.

*(In my head I usually think of a vector as a geometric object – something that points somewhere, defined by a set of coordinates – whereas for my purposes, the arrays in this post simply store data.)

David Barry's avatar

Hi Cathleen - you’re mistaking me for the other Dave Barry! The humour writer at https://davebarry.substack.com/ is the one who wrote a year in review, and he usually doesn’t write about trigonometry; I am a different person with the same name.

(I’ve certainly mentioned vectors in some previous posts, but not in this one about measuring pitch!)