OpenAl pitch values for particular musical notes in an octave - iphone

I have an OpenAl sound engine on my iPhone app. When I play a sound that I have loaded, I can control it's pitch.
In OpenAl a pitch set to 1.0 has no effect. If you double it to 2.0, it plays the note 1 octave higher(12 semitones). If you halve it, to 0.5, it will be an octave lower (12 semitones).
So, my original sample is playing a C. I assumed that if I divide 1 by 12 (semitones) I could get the pitch for the individual notes in that octave. But this does not seem to be the case. Which makes we think that semitones are not equal values. Is that true?
Does anyone know how I can work out the openAl pitch value for individual notes in an octave?
Thank you

Semitones are equal ratios. So, if your sample is C, C# will be the 12th root of two. If you count semitones C=0, C#=1 etc, the ratio is pow(2.0, n*1.0/12.0)
Works for negative numbers, too.
I should note, this is not strictly true in every tuning scheme... but this is a good start. If you really care about the full complexities of musical tuning, I can find you some references.

Related

Sine LUT VHDL wont simulate below 800 hz

I made a sine LUT for VHDL, using 256 elements.
Im using MIDI input, so values range 8.17Hz (note #0) to 12543.85z (note #127).
I have another LUT that calculates how many value must be sent to my 48 kHz codec in order to play the sound (the 8.17Hz frequency will need 48000/8.17 = 5870 values).
I have another LUT that contains an index factor, which is 256/num_Values, which is used to call values from the sin table (ex: 100*256/5870 = 4 (with integer rounding)).
I send this index factor to another VHDL file, which is used to calculate which value should be sent back. (ex: index = index_factor*step_counter)
When I get this index, I divide it by 100, and call sineLUT[index] to get the value that I need to generate a sine wave at the desired frequency.
The problem is, only the last 51 notes seem to work for me, and I do not know why. It seems to get stuck on a constant note at anything below that frequency (<650 hz) , and just decrease in volume every time I try to lower the note.
If you need parts of my code, let me know.
Just guessing, I suspect your step_counter isn't going through enough cycles, so your index (into the sine lut) doesn't go through a full 360 degrees for the lower frequencies.
For anything more helpful, you'll probably have to post code.
As an aside, why aren't you using something more like a conventional DDS? Analog Devices has a nice write-up on the basics: DDS Tutorial

iPhone - AudioQueueLevelMeterState - What are the units for the power?

In iPhone's library, AudioQueue.h file has a structure AudioQueueLevelMeterState.
It has two floats -> mAveragePower and mPeakPower
What are the units stored in them.
Is it decibels or not?
Since neither the documentation nor header comments say so I think it is assumed to be the only standard unit. As far as I know, the decibel is the only unit of power for sound.
There are other units for measuring sound but only the decibel measures power (in the scientific sense.)

Getting displacement from accelerometer data with Core Motion

I am developing an augmented reality application that (at the moment) wants to display a simple cube on top of a surface, and be able to move in space (both rotating and displacing) to look at the cube in all the different angles. The problem of calibrating the camera doesn't apply here since I ask the user to place the iPhone on the surface he wants to place the cube on and then press a button to reset the attitude.
To find out the camera rotation is very simple with the Gyroscope and Core Motion. I do it this way:
if (referenceAttitude != nil) {
[attitude multiplyByInverseOfAttitude:referenceAttitude];
}
CMRotationMatrix mat = attitude.rotationMatrix;
GLfloat rotMat[] = {
mat.m11, mat.m21, mat.m31, 0,
mat.m12, mat.m22, mat.m32, 0,
mat.m13, mat.m23, mat.m33, 0,
0, 0, 0, 1
};
glMultMatrixf(rotMat);
This works really well.
More problems arise anyway when I try to find the displacement in space during an acceleration.
The Apple Teapot example with Core Motion just adds the x, y and z values of the acceleration vector to the position vector. This (apart from having not much sense) has the result of returning the object to the original position after an acceleration. (Since the acceleration goes from positive to negative or vice versa).
They did it like this:
translation.x += userAcceleration.x;
translation.y += userAcceleration.y;
translation.z += userAcceleration.z;
What should I do to find out displacement from the acceleration in some istant? (with known time difference). Looking some other answers, it seems like I have to integrate twice to get velocity from acceleration and then position from velocity. But there is no example in code whatsoever, and I don't think that is really necessary. Also, there is the problem that when the iPhone is still on a plane, accelerometer values are not null (there is some noise I think). How much should I filter those values? Am I supposed to filter them at all?
Cool, there are people out there struggling with the same problem so it is worth to spent some time :-)
I agree with westsider's statement as I spent a few weeks of experimenting with different approaches and ended up with poor results. I am sure that there won't be an acceptable solution for either larger distances or slow motions lasting for more than 1 or 2 seconds. If you can live with some restrictions like small distances (< 10 cm) and a given minimum velocity for your motions, then I believe there might be the chance to find a solution - no guarantee at all. If so, it will take you a pretty hard time of research and a lot of frustration, but if you get it, it will be very very cool :-) Maybe you find these hints useful:
First of all to make things easy just look at one axis e.g x but consider both left (-x) and right (+x) to have a representable situation.
Yes you are right, you have to integrate twice to get the position as function of time. And for further processing you should store the first integration's result (== velocity), because you will need it in a later stage for optimisation. Do it very careful because every tiny bug will lead to huge errors after short period of time.
Always bear in mind that even a very small error (e.g. <0.1%) will grow rapidly after doing integration twice. Situation will become even worse after one second if you configure accelerometer with let's say 50 Hz, i.e. 50 ticks are processed and the tiny neglectable error will outrun the "true" value. I would strongly recommend to not rely on trapezoidal rule but to use at least Simpson or a higher degree Newton-Cotes formula.
If you managed this, you will have to keep an eye on setting up the right low pass filtering. I cannot give a general value but as a rule of thumb experimenting with filtering factors between 0.2 and 0.8 will be a good starting point. The right value depends on the business case you need, for instance what kind of game, how fast to react on events, ...
Now you will have a solution which is working pretty good under certain circumstances and within a short period of time. But than after a few seconds you will run into trouble because your object is drifting away. Now you will enter the difficult part of the solution which I failed to handle eventually within the given time scope :-(
One promising approach is to introduce something I call "synthectic forces" or "virtual forces". This is some strategy to react on several bad situations triggering the object to drift away although the device remains fixed (? no native speaker, I mean without moving) in your hands. The most troubling one is a velocity greater than 0 without any acceleration. This is an unavoidable result of error propagation and can be handled by slowing down artificially that means introducing a virtual deceleration even if there is no real counterpart. A very simplified example:
if (vX > 0 && lastAccelerationXTimeStamp > 0.3sec) {
vX *= 0.9;
}
`
You will need a combination of such conditions to tame the beast. A lot of try and error is required to get a feeling for the right way to go and this will be the hard part of the problem.
If you ever managed to crack the code, pleeeease let me know, I am very curious to see if it is possible in general or not :-)
Cheers Kay
When the iPhone 4 was very new, I spent many, many hours trying to get an accurate displacement using accelerometers and gyroscope. There shouldn't have been much concern about incremental drift as device needed only move a couple of meters at most and the data collection typically ran for a few minutes at most. We tried all sorts of approaches and even had help from several Apple engineers. Ultimately, it seemed that the gyroscope wasn't up to the task. It was good for 3D orientation but that was it ... again, according to very knowledgable engineers.
I would love to hear someone contradict this - because the app never really turned out as we had hoped, etc.
I am also trying to get displacement on the iPhone. Instead of using integration I used the basic physics formula of d = .5a * t^2 assuming an initial velocity of 0 (doesn't sound like you can assume initial velocity of 0). So far it seems to work quite well.
My problem is that I'm using the deviceMotion.and the values are not correct. deviceMotion.gravity read near 0. Any ideas? - OK Fixed, apparently deviceMotion.gravity has a x, y, and z values. If you don't specify which you want you get back x (which should be near 0).
Find this question two years later, I just find a AR project on iOS 6 docset named pARk, It provide a proximate displacement capture and calculation using Gyroscope, aka CoreMotion.Framework.
I'm just starting leaning the code.
to be continued...

Compare sounds inside of the App

Is it possible to compare two sounds ?
for example app have already a sound file mp3 or any format, is it possible to compare any static sound file and recorded sound inside of app ?
Any comments are welcomed.
Regards
This forum thread has a good answer (about three down) - http://www.dsprelated.com/showmessage/103820/1.php.
The trick is to get the decoded audio from the mp3 - if they're just short 'hello' sounds, I'd store them inside the app as a wav instead of decoding them (though I've never used CoreAudio or any of the other frameworks before so mp3 decoding into memory might be easy).
When you've got your reference wav and your recorded wav, follow the steps in the post above :
1 Do whatever is necessary to convert .wav files to their discrete- time
signals:
http://www.sonicspot.com/guide/wavefiles.html
2 time-warping might or might not be necessary depending on difference
between two sample rates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_time_warping
3 After time warping, truncate both signals so that their durations are
equivalent.
4 Compute normalized energy spectral density (ESD) from DFT's two signals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_spectrum.
6 Compute mean-square-error (MSE) between normalized ESD's of two
signals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_squared_error
The MSE between the normalized ESD's
of two signals is good metric of
closeness. If you have say, 10 .wav
files, and 2 of them are nearly the
same, but the others are not, the two
that are close should have a
relatively low MSE. Two perfectly
identical signals will obviously have
MSE of zero. Ideally, two "equivalent"
signals with different time scales,
(20-second human talking versus
5-second chipmunk), different energies
(soft-spoken human verus yelling
chipmunk), and different phases
(sampling began at slightly different
instant against continuous time
input); should still have MSE of zero,
but quantization errors inherent in
DSP will yield MSE slightly greater
than zero.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_mean-square_error
You should get two different MSE values, one between your male->recorded track and one between your female->recorded track. The comparison with the lowest difference is probably the correct gender.
I confess that I've never tried to do this and it looks very hard - good luck!

Audible Click when pitch shifting in OpenAL

I am using OpenAL to pitch shift a note. e.g.
alSourcef(source, AL_PITCH, aPitch);
I am noticing however an audible click when I do this. Other than that the pitch is perfect, correct pitch etc.
Any ideas what might be causing this?
I haven't used OpenAL, but in other sound libraries I have seen this "artifact". There is usually, when dealing with tone generator etc. a variable for the time it takes a tone to reach 100% volume level, I can for the life of me not remember what it is called :)
like this:
playTone(400 Hz, 40 dB, 50 ms, 3000 ms).
where 400 is the Hz, 40 dB the volume, 3000 milliseconds is the duration and 50 milliseconds is the time it takes from starting the tone at volume 0 (or +100dB) to it reaches 40 dB. I simply can't find the word right now.
Anyways, if you have the ability to set this variable, try doing that, just set it to something like 10 ms. You wont be able to hear it, but it has removed clicking sounds for me in both an open source sound library I used for the iPhone and in some Java/Processing libraries I used in the past.
Maybe it has to do with the way the underlying code is triggering some hardware connected to the speaker?
i have experience on this one, mostly it is because you shift the pitch too high or too low, shifting pitch is stretching or shrinking wave-data length, the case is if your data does not have enough sample to stretch it will sound "weird", in case of shortening the length (pitch-up) if your playback buffer does not have enough sample to feed in time, it will lag or jitter because conceptually the playing rate is increased to due shortened the length of audio, mostly clicking or popping is what you heard.
to prevent this, you should limit the shifting range, mostly 0.5 to 2.0 is the limit on most sound-card, and it is vary across soundcard, since shifting the pitch could be make better by using some advanced smoothing and processing in DSP, so it will depend on processing power of your DSP or CPU to do such processing. i've tried it using onboard intel HDA that the limit is mostly 0.5 to 2.0, but using X-Fi soundcard it is better, shifting to 0.1 .. 5.0 doesn't have a problem