Reaktor For You Community - Pitch & Frequency - Part 2 8/2/09 4:01 PM

reaktorforyou
Reaktor For You Community
Native Instruments Reaktor Community

Pitch & Frequency - Part 2

reaktorforyou March 6th, 19:05

FREQUENCY & PITCH :: PART 2

In previous tutorial we gave definitions of pitch and frequency. We discussed their formulas and connection
between them and implemented it in Reaktor. If you didn't read the first part of tutorial, I suggest you to read it
before we continue.

Once more about connection between pitch and frequency

When you look at formulas once again you'll see that lower pitch gives lower frequency. In usual terms pitch is
understand to be between 0..127 value, but many people dismiss the actual use of negative low pitch. The
lower the pitch, the lower the frequency. Actually you get frequency of near 0 if you set your pitch to -300.
You almost won't hear any sounds when you set this pitch to your oscillator, but the curve of frequency still
moves very very slowly. Look at following table:

Pitch Frequency
0 8.1758
-50 0.455238
-75 0.107422
-100 0.0253482
-300 2.43658e-07

The advantage of such values of frequency is that you can use any oscillator's output as controller for
frequency modulation or amplitude modulation. These are only examples tho. The main math behind it the less
the pitch (and frequency) the less the curve and the less the modulation.

Example of using low pitch and frequency

Look at following picture:

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(http://pics.livejournal.com/reaktorforyou/pic/0000a22d/)

Here we used sawtooth oscillators outputs for frequency and amplitude modulation of parabolic oscillator. Try
to build this structure and mess with pitch input values of FM & AM. Few comments:

1) I used Recify (absolute value) module to make movements of AM sawtooth oscillator output more smoothly.
If you delete it you will hear clicks in parabolic oscillator's output. That happens because sawtooth oscillator
changes its value and becomes negative. You still hear little clicks when there is absolute value module, but it
makes the sound more clear anyway.

2) Multiply module after FM sawtooth oscillator makes output diapason -20..20, so it will affect frequency,
while original output is -1..1, that almost won't move frequency.

Futher usage of pitch and frequency low values

I've said before that it's only limited with your imagination. There is a very good topic on Native Instruments
forum which I started when I just got inside of Reaktor. There were some good posts about frequency and
pitch low values and you should definitely read it and make some tasks there:

www.native-instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=77977 (http://www.native-
instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=77977)

If you have any questions about any of the parts of this tutorial, feel free to ask!

Good luck!

I think i know what's next..(Anonymous) Hmm, two series of pitch and freq discussion.. i think it's going to
the pitch-tracker direction and eventually pitch to MIDI, right ? I really hope so, as the more people dig into it, the
closer we are to perfection, and pitch to MIDI isn't going to be some holy grail anymore.

I'm looking forward to it, and i'm more than happy to help in any way i could.

-Bertrand 'Bert' Antolin-

Re: I think i know what's next.. : reaktorforyou: Thanks for your feedback! I'm not sure what exactly
are you talking about, but I would be very pleased to work on this problem, if you tell me more about it. Btw, I
was about to close this two-part tutorial, but it seems that there is logical continue of this one. Thx!

Re: I think i know what's next..(Anonymous) Oh, sorry for the misunderstanding, what i mean is for
many people including me one of the goal of studying pitch and frequency is to build a pitch detector or even
better, a pitch to MIDI converter that can convert audio to MIDI in realtime.

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Freq-Tracker instrument in Reaktor Library is a good start, you can give an in-depth explanation of it and
zero-crossing method as the basic method for detecting pitch/freq from the audio to the blog readers. Then
maybe showing how it can be improved to become a true realtime pitch to MIDI converter, so people really
knows what behind pitch detector and pitch to MIDI converter, which isn't impossible to build at all..

Here's some discussion about pitch detection that really concerns me :

http://www.native-instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=25505
http://www.native-instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=40396

I feel if more people are introduced and getting into pitch detection, it will become lot less frustrating than it
is now, when only few people doing it, and everyone will benefit from that. Reaktor has all the power needed
to do realtime pitch-tracking (i have proved it with both monophonic and polyphonic detection, although it's
still a long way to perfection), it's just that we have to know how to use it.

Sorry for the long comments, hope it doesn't bother you.

Thanks,

-Bertrand 'Bert' Antolin-

Re: I think i know what's next.. : reaktorforyou: Thanks for your comment! I've looked
through threads, but I couldn't find Freq-Tracker instrument in UL using search field. Would be nice if
you post straight link, I'll get it. It is actually a very interesting topic and I'd like to cover it, but there is a
little problem - I'm not on that level to discuss this problem yet, but on next weekend I'll take some time
to dig deeper into this problem and will probably post some blog. Is there any good theory in the net
about it (expect fast google links)? Thanks again!

Re: I think i know what's next..(Anonymous) Hmm, Freq-Tracker should be on the default
Reaktor instrument library folder (Instruments->Analyzers and Displays->Frequency Tracker), here's a
demo posted by CList on the forum if you don't have it on your computer : http://www.native-
instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=25644

It's one of the most amazing instrument ever created, which got me started exploring and learning to
do pitch detection. I bet you'll like it once you've tried, it only offers simple waveforms and no proper
post-processing/filtering, but the oscillator is very responsive to the audio input's pitch/freq and
volume without any lag/latency. Of course you can build a more sophisticated audio-controlled synth
from there, it's the same as doing MIDI-driven synth except that it's driven by audio input.

There's a lot of good theory on the net, and can easily be found using keywords such as "zero-
crossing pitch detection", "pitch detection algorithms" and something like that. Here's from Wiki :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_detection_algorithm

Hope you find those useful, enjoy !

-Bertrand 'Bert' Antolin-

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