Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Audio filter for aural training - New App!

I have developed an audio filter app for Android. It is designed specifically for aural piano tuning. I would like for anyone with an Android device and interested in aural training to try it out. It can be downloaded directly onto your Android device from my website here:

https://www.tunelab-world.com/bandfilter

The operation of the app is explained by the help file in the app. It must be used with headphones to avoid feedback.

Currently the bandwidth around the selected pitch is about +/-100 cents, but that should be enough to make the selected pitch stand out from the rest of the sound to make it easier to hear beats. You can center the filter around any note very easily. In a later version I plan to make the bandwidth a variable parameter that you can set. If you try out the app and have any other suggestions on modifications to this very primitive app, please send me a PM through the forum.

This can be great for concert tuning on a loud stage. I'll try it for sure. It would also be useful if it can run in the background while using Tunelab. Just recently I was preparing a piano on stage and the engineer had to do high decibel testing and I had to leave. I had only 30 minutes to prepare this piano and missed the top octave as I ran out of time. A filtered audio signal along with noise cancelling headphones and Tunelab would be great for this scenario

Thanks

Very interesting. Former member Marc Cerisano (banned for various reasons) is now selling a hardware tuneable bandpass filter for the outrageous price of $500 (or $900 if you get the kit that includes amps). Great use of the DSP power in modern phones to do this in software.

I often wondered if anything in GarageBand (for iOS) could process live input audio and feed it through one of the synth emulators? Even a resonant lowpass filter would do a decent job of emphasizing the beating partials.

Paul.

Always wondered why it was so hard to do. I'm going to play around with it.

Peter Grey Piano Doctor

I suppose one might, with a sigh, ask why YOU had to leave, while HE did high-decibel testing. Why didn't HE have to leave while YOU did piano tuning, leaving HIM half an hour to do his testing. (I have used the male pronoun, but recognise that the engineer might have been female).

Mr. Scott-
This is an excellent training tool!
Are you considering more developments?
For example, a sequence might be created to automatically follow parallel chromatic thirds or to move through a temperament with chromatic contiguous interval tests...but of course this is pretty easy to do if you know the coincident partials you want to test.
I'd think the main use would be to gradually train a person to hear the coincident partials by reducing the amplification step-by-step.
I wish I'd asked you to do this years ago!
Ed Sutton

By the way, it works well with earbuds, but apparently not with my noise cancelling headphones. ???
es

Noise cancelling headphones have microphones on the outside and are actively listening to sounds out there, particularly constant frequencies.
Nick

The stage director was a she. The main feature of the presentation of awards at this private company function was a video made for the event and there was a sound problem. Piano was tuned a few hours earlier. The artist, who was getting very well paid said to leave the top notes because he preferred more rehearsal time to a micro tuned top ocatave. To most stage managers the piano tuner is an unavoidable nuisance.

Here is a major update to the new audio filter app that I announced a few weeks ago. The app is designed to help aural tuners hear beats by accentuating the coincident partials for an interval. This update provides a selectable filter bandwidth from 50 cents to 400 cents, a selectable 2-pole or 4-pole filter configuration, and pitches defined by an average piano stretch. As before you can download this version for Android phones and tablets from

https://www.tunelab-world.com/bandfilter

Please let me know your thought on the app if you should happen to try it out. (It is free for now.)

I tried the app. In my opinion, very muffled headphones are needed in order not to hear a direct acoustic signal from the piano, which, moreover, is a little late (time spent on processing information by the phone's processor). In this sense, an analog device would be preferable.