pitch drop / was virgil's natural beats

[Ron Nossaman]

>So, Ron N, are you still looking for info?  Maybe you should re-post exactly 
>what you are looking for.  Using pianolizer on RCT should be able to do 
>this, especially if samples are averaged.  A consistant "key bonker" would 
>probably be a good idea too.

My efforts have been on temporary hold while I'm writing an FFT spectrum
analyzer. It's usable at the moment, if not finished, but I haven't tried
it on the pitch drop thing yet. I seriously doubt that any number of
readings at any given partial will tell you anything useful all by itself.
At best, it will show you where in the scale the effect happens - mostly.
Since the nearly universally acknowledged tone productions in the killer
octave haven't apparently taught the tech world about soundboard impedance,
I sort of doubt that compiling numbers on the pitch drop thing will be any
more instructive. I found that in some unisons, I could sometimes steer the
pitch drop a bit by adjusting the purity of the unison. That alone could
pollute the data. Tuning as pure a unison as I could, some dropped a
little, some dropped a lot, some remained on pitch, and some seemed to
climb. When I taped off the back scale and tried again, not a single
solitary unison in the killer octave section dropped in pitch (that I could
tell with TuneLab) from the single string reading. Not ONE. That struck me
as rather significant. What I observed was either a statistical anomaly
akin to having a flaming green buffalo fall out of the sky at 4:15 CST
today and smash my truck, or the open back scale has something to do with
the effect. I'll post back at 4:16 and let you know. <G> So before you go
gathering vast piles of disconnected readings that don't correlate to
anything at all, try a few simple minded elimination experiments and see if
you can find some basic cause and effect relationships. Then gather data
relating to the observed relationships. That's what I'm going for. I don't
care to find where it usually happens, and to what degree. Anyone can find
that with a little time and an ETD. I want to know why it happens, and what
the pertinent factors are. From that information, the "where" will become
obvious. Trust the Force and try the back scale Luke.

 
Ron N