why do wav files get higher in pitch as you move up in octaves and is there a way around this?

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and so, i apologize to 'you' xoxos :phones:

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I have to lend my support to xoxos in this case astral, as your post topics do often seem like they're designed as trolling bait.

That doesn't mean they are, perhaps you honestly don't understand the connection between pitch and frequency. Alternatively it may just be that you phrase the question in a way which doesn't quite express what you are really asking about.

I can see it as "why does pitch need to increase with higher frequency?" and the answer to that would be that it doesn't always need to. More often people ask the question "why does the rate of the evolution of timbre need to increase at higher frequency?" and the answer to this is to take many more samples across the keyboard rather than just one, as many as one or more per key.

You have to admit though that this isn't what you've been asking.
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Jace-BeOS wrote:When people approach music from the top down, they don't learn the physics. This isn't necessarily bad, though it limits them at some points in their exploration. When someone approaches music from the bottom-up, examining sound itself, it's a completely different perspective. Often, the ones looking from the top-down are impressed at the detail of specialized knowledge of the ones who worked from the ground-up, and they often seek to attain that level of understanding (up to their necessity, or level of ability to understand). Sometimes there's insecurity there. Not always. The people who started from the ground-up often do not comprehend the reverse perspective, and often see those who lack their level of knowledge as inferior. Not always. It's really an example of their own limitation in their thinking, when that's the case. However, they can also learn: Learn to accept the differences between people. The differences in specialist knowledge, the differing levels of desire for such knowledge, and the ability to intellectualize said knowledge.
This is true. The best singer I know, except for a couple of opera types I backed on one-off occasions, doesn't even know what a kick drum is. Makes it more time-consuming to explain when she wants some changes in a track, but she actually knows what she wants, and she sure as hell knows singing.

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One thing that I think should be sorted is that 'chipmunking' does not refer just to the fact of frequency translating as pitch; in sampling it came to be a term to refer to the lack of dealing with the formant characteristic in sampling. Doing nothing results in 'chipmunking' (as per Alvin and the Chipmunks records back in the day, David Seville producing cartoon chipmunks by the mere trick of speeding up the playback of the tape).

I was taken quite aback by the question, as I would have thought someone this long at a KVR type of forum would have noticed 'frequency' as it translates to 'pitch' by now.
That's why a person could even have assumed 'trolling?'.

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(double post)
Last edited by cron on Sun Jan 25, 2015 8:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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jancivil wrote:One thing that I think should be sorted is that 'chipmunking' does not refer just to the fact of frequency translating as pitch; in sampling it came to be a term to refer to the lack of dealing with the formant characteristic in sampling.
edit: forgot to write my post underneath :lol:

This is indeed the main concern. There are two ways you can alter the pitch of material in granular synthesis. One is by changing the pitch of the grains themselves, and the other involves altering the rate at which grains are generated. Most people tend to think of the former when repitching with granular synthesis, coupled with grains being generated at a somewhat random (asynchronous) rate. This changes the pitch of the sample, but also shifts the formant characteristics so your sample will still be chipmunked regardless of the amount of timestretching or time compression involved. When you start playing with synchronous grain generation rates on monophonic material, formant preserving pitch shifts become possible, with the rate of grain generation controlling the pitch while the pitch of each individual grain controls formant characteristics. Demonstration I made in Cecilia something like 10 years ago below. Hourglass can do all this stuff now, but I'm not aware of a granular synth plug that can do it. Can Padshop do this? My demo has expired but I remember that grain generation rate was coupled with pitch input by default (IIRC). I've been able to get something somewhat playable across an octave using The Mangle, but it's very tricky to set up and there are always a few wolf notes as the pitch modulation source doesn't appear to take the idiosyncrasies of equal temperament into account.

https://soundcloud.com/chqtestsubjects/ ... in-the-fog

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deastman wrote:
aciddose wrote:Time-stretching however can be accomplished with methods other than "granular", and my point about "granular" being a ridiculous term to use stands.
Additive resynthesis, for example.
To me that's pretty much the same thing.

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aciddose wrote:Why do notes play higher as you play higher notes!? :hyper:

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I'll give you an even better one, in fact, it's "one".

How do you define "one" apple? Can you define it in some way which is not purely subjective and arbitrary? How do you know that something exists merely because it exists? Could it not in fact not exist despite appearances?
One apple that has the potential to be more apples (seeds). So saying it is only one apple and will be only one apple is up to interpretation.
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My point was only that questions like these are all in the same "why do we exist?" sort of category. It requires a sort of anthropomorphism of nature which is really pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.

So in the case of "why do higher notes sound higher?", this is really asking the wrong question. It doesn't need a reason to be the way it is, it simply is. This is the reality we exist in. If you need a bit more depth perhaps studying physics might provide some insight, but it will still never provide "an answer". Sort of like "42" being the answer, then having to figure out what the question was in the first place.

The right question to ask may be "how do we avoid notes being perceived as higher pitch as we increase the frequency of the content in the sound?". This is like for example adjusting the tempo of a drum loop without adjusting the pitch of the sounds it is built from.
Free plug-ins for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Xhip Synthesizer v8.0 and Xhip Effects Bundle v6.7.
The coder's credo: We believe our work is neither clever nor difficult; it is done because we thought it would be easy.
Work less; get more done.

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