InTune: A System to Support an Instrumentalist's Visualization of Intonation

One of our most beloved music teachers emphasized the importance of " facing the music, " by which he meant listening to recordings of our playing. As with the first hearing of one's voice on recording, many were both surprised and suspicious of this external perspective. While sometimes revealing more than we were ready to hear, the long-term effect of this exercise helps us to " hear ourselves as others hear us. " Thus armed, we initiate practice habits that, perhaps over many years, move our music-making toward a state we would admire hearing from another player. The " face the music " approach begins by accepting that most of us are not born able to judge ourselves objectively, but can learn to do so when given the proper external perspective. We adopt this approach here, still in the service of music education, though we use visual, in addition to aural, feedback. While a visual representation of audio is necessarily an abstraction, it has the advantage that the observer can " visit " the image according to her will. For instance, she may see a note having a certain undesirable (or desirable) property; find the same trait in another note of the same pitch; formulate a hypothesis of systematic error (or accuracy); and validate or refute this theory on subsequent notes. In contrast, audio data must be digested nearly at the rate it comes into the ear. We apply the " face the music " approach to the practice of intonation — the precise tuning of frequencies corresponding to different musical pitches. While good intonation, " playing in tune, " is often neglected in the earliest years of musical practice, it is as essential a part of technique as the playing of fast notes or the control of emphasis. Intonation is also central to what some see as the illusion of tonal beauty — that is, for a sound to be beautiful it must (among other things) commit clearly to the " correct " pitch. We introduce a system that allows musicians to visualize pitch in ways that leverage the centuries-long tradition of music notation, and are intuitive to the non-scientist. The electronic tuner is, without doubt, one of the most widely used practice tools for the classically-oriented musician, thus justifying efforts to improve this tool. The tuner provides an objective measurement of the pitch or frequency with which a …