Rock band

[r_transpose_p]

So recently Yishan and Kimberly got me into the game Rock Band, and a friend at skool got me into Karaoke RevolutionIn each of these games, a singer is given a pop-song, with a staff-like graphic of the pitches the user is supposed to sing

Comments

[r_transpose_p]

Oh, PS, the singing tone you use seems to affect how easily one can score points as a singer in these games. The more twangy the voice the easier it is to "hit" the pitches. I need to get my hands on a spectrograph and sing into it one of these days.

[catamorphism]

I don't understand most of this (I get the music parts, just not the signal processing parts), but it sounds really cool.

Partly -- I've recently started thinking about how I would write such a tool. -- huh? I don't think you explained what the "tool" is.

But I've really wanted something that automatically turns any recording (well, hopefully a recording of a human singing along with some instruments, but y'know) into a Karaoke Revolution track. That would be sweet.

[tgies]

That's actually remotely feasible, if you can pick the voice out from everything else reliably. The best way to do it would probably be to ask the human operator to apply such filters as remove as much of the rest of the music as possible while leaving the vocal track, and generate the pitch track from that. I've done this before for laughs

[pyrtolin]

>Whats fascinating is that it works even when the song is transposed --
> although transposing it by some amounts works better then others --
> octaves seem to work well, fifths and fourths confuse it.

I'd say that that's probably by design- transposing by octaves allows people of any range to be have a shot, but 4ths and 5ths puts you off key with the recording.

[r_transpose_p]

I think arguing the "4ths and 5ths puts you off key" is going to involve some form of "always/sometimes/never" clarification. Most natural instruments will have a harmonic at an octave above a fifth above the root tone (brass especially -- but also really brassy sounding electric guitar). Having said this, some pieces deliberately use chords in 4ths, so playing a 5th above the root will involve two notes a whole step apart. Whether this is "off key" depends on the listener and the piece ;)

[skamille]

All I know is, you can be *very* far from the actual pitch on rock band and still score consistently awesome. I also think it would be a damn sight easier to sight sing with real notes than this half-assed pitch bar they give you.

[r_transpose_p]

Pitch detection is hard.

If its decent pitch matching, and you're using a human voice, it'll at least require you to sing some nice clean harmonic away from the target pitch.

[tgies]

jfyi you can confuse the hell out of those things with a bunch of sawtooth waves all offset from each other by a few hertz

it tends to want to score you as Highly Correct

introducing: really dubious fast realtime fourier transforms

Not sure how to get the sign of the pitch difference

The first real-time pitch corrector, Antares Auto-Tune, has a really odd way of doing this. They came up with a bunch of new windowing functions and all kinds of stupid crap. I believe it's described to some extent in one of the patents they filed on it.

[r_transpose_p]

You are my new hero.

[tgies]

am i your new guitar hero