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Re: How's the pitch-to-midi of Roland VP-70?
At 11:19 AM -0700 5/7/03, Herb wrote:
>Wonderfully terrible is how I'd describe the VP70.
>The VP70 is a very ambitious mid-80's vocal processor that often fails in
>very interesting ways. The pitch-to-MIDI is amusingly poor. It's fun to
>hear it trying to make sense out of speech, drums or chords.
This sort of behavior seems to be endemic to most, if not all, pitch
trackers. I've done a bit of work with the Fairlight Voicetracker,
which originally sold in the $2000+ range. It also freaks out in
amusing and musically useful ways when fed complex inputs. I chose to
pursue this as a compositional strategy.
One of the situations that really gets a pitch tracker going is when
it is part of a feedback loop. If you use the MIDI output to drive a
synthesizer or sampler and then allow the pitch tracker to "hear"
that signal it will begin to pick up different components of the
sound, such as resonances and upper harmonics. This can be greatly
enhanced (or "aggravated") by adding a lot of reverberation to the
mix. I once did a piece where I initiated the pitch tracking process
with a short "pop" and then walked around the room waving the
microphone through the sound field of the loudspeakers. I was able to
generate (and control to a reasonable extent) slow pitch glides. I
did this in several passes, overdubbing into a sequencer and playing
back the different tracks with a variety of timbres. The combination
of sounds, with a 10 second reverb time providing a sort of "memory"
for the system, resulted in fairly coherent melodic material, largely
based on complex arpeggiations.
Other strategies can involve acoustic instruments that are either
polyphonic or that have mutable spectra. As an example of the first
case, I did a performance with two percussionists playing xylophone
and marima, again with a lot of reverb. They started playing
sustained unisons and octaves, then introduced fifths, major thirds,
and increasingly dissonant intervals. The generated melody
progressed similarly from simple to complex behavior.
I also got very interesting results with bassoon, and instrument
which typically produces stronger overtones than fundamental pitch.
The player, composer Chuck Holdeman, quickly learned to manipulate
this effect and dynamically adjusted the timbre of sustained tones to
cause the Voicetracker to jump merrily among the harmonics.
Have fun!
--
______________________________________________________________
Richard Zvonar, PhD
(818) 788-2202
http://www.zvonar.com
http://RZCybernetics.com