Here is my question to the UUMN and their answer. Read from bottom to top
There are tons of apps out there that will give you a pitch--I find the "piano" sound is pretty awful on all of them. (Synthesized versions of piano, guitar, etc. tend to add all kinds of decay, detuning, and other effects, which make it hard for the ear to center on the fundament of the pitch, and the tiny speakers on your iPhone don't help at all.)
The best "patch" for communicating a pitch to the human ear is a consistent waveform--either a sine wave, a saw wave, or a square wave will work. Look for "flute," "oboe," or other similar patch names, as those tend to be pretty un-messed-with waveforms. (Unless they try to add vibrato. Run. Run fast.)
Or, spend 8 bucks on a tuning fork from Amazon and teach your choir to find intervals away from it: "Here's an A; let's sing a G Major triad, please." ;-)
D.
On Aug 22, 2012, at 10:24 AM, Elaine Fredendall wrote:
> We like to sing away from the piano and I have been using an app called Real Piano to get our pitch. Last night a singer mentioned that she had difficulty hearing the pitch from this app because of the electronic sound ( in spite of the app name, it is Not the same sound as a piano). What apps do you all use? Is there an app that produces a vocal sound? I'm using an iphone.
way cool, Elaine! Thanks for doing this research!
ReplyDeleteI've got a few things I could try bringing: real pitch pipe (all notes), tuner (A440, and maybe a few others).
I have a set of tuning forks I could dig out
DeleteThanks Heather and Sherri
ReplyDeleteFeel free to bring whatever you've got, if you want. But don't stress-- SusanClay has a pitchpipe too.
I like the idea of us learning to hear a g and sing a A But sometimes when we are lost in a new key, hearing the actual note is helpful.
I have to say - I was kind of embarrassed at how hard I found it to hear the note based on the tuning fork, _even tho_ it was the exact note we needed - am sure it would be a good thing for me to work on - i.e. hearing the note a third lower than the fork or a 5th higher or whatever if we were just using a standard fork but in the interim I'll probably just wait for others to hum the note _they_ think it is - seriously I'm really astounded that I couldn't hear it :(
ReplyDeleteYeah the forks are a bit hard. That's one reason I would put the tang against Sara's neck for the BEnedictus. I've worked with them for a bit and if you'd like to practice I'd be happy to loan then to you. A good pitch pipe might be easier.
ReplyDeleteThe fun thing with the forks is they also
Produce harmonic overtones which can help for finding a harmony y note.