TuneCrack stands for: Crack the tuning problem. Learn to tune instruments precisely.

Tuning is one of the most important activities in music. However, it is often underestimated. Because tuning is not part of the performance, few people spend time to perfect that skill.

Tuning is a listening skill. It consists of the following process:

1. Listening to the reference tone (e. g. church organ).
2. Abstracting and extracting the reference pitch.
3. Taking over the reference pitch.
4. Listening to the sound of the instrument to tune (e. g. violin).
5. Abstracting and extracting the instruments pitch.
6. Comparing the two pitches.
7. Making a decision, if the instruments pitch is lower, higher or the same as the reference pitch.
8. Adjusting the instrument accordingly.
9. As long as you have the reference pitch in your mind, you repeat the steps 5 through 9 until the pitches are the same.
10. If you are no more sure about the reference pitch, repeat the process from step one.

 

There are two main dimensions in this process:

1. pitch dimension
2. time dimension

 

While the first dimension is obvious, the second dimension comes only into play with step 9: "As long as ..."

Realizing that listening and tuning is one of the most important musical skills, we launched Listening-Music-Teacher in October 2011. The program contained ear-training exercises that went beyond half step precision. The program introduced the “Precision Listening Method”. Since the program allowed precisions in the cents level, it also contained a slider for the time between the two notes to compare. If you set the time between the notes to zero, you can easily hear small changes between two notes. In addition the program allows you to play the sounds simultaneously. If the sounds are very close to each other, simultaneously played sounds will overlay a loudness variation with a low easy to recognize frequency. However, Listening-Music-Teacher only allowed to reduce the time between the notes.

Realizing that we can also increase the time, we developed "TuneCrack".

Where Absolute Pitch and Relative Pitch meet

Tuning is a relative skill: You tune an instrument relative to the sound of another instrument. That is it requires relative pitch skills.

Absolute pitch is, when you do not need an external reference tone to establish a pitch relationship. That is, you have access to pitches from your memory.

Now, if you look at the above description of the tuning process and especially focus at the two dimensions, pitch and time, then you can easily see where relative pitch meets absolute pitch: It is point 10 in the tuning list.

If you have absolute pitch, then you don’t have to go back to step 1, since you detect off tuned sounds and can tune your instrument accordingly to the off tuned reference sound. In any performance the real (reference) sounds are responsible for the outcome of the performance and not the theoretical defined equal tempered frequencies. Therefore, if the instruments are said to be tuned to the equal tempered system then you may be tempted to skip steps 1 to 3 altogether and start directly with step 4. However, keep in mind that even equal tempered instruments change their frequencies with temperature changes. Exact tuned instruments are tuned with a predefined temperature. Since their is very unlikely that the temperature on an arbitrary day matches that predefined temperature, you are strongly advised to listen to the reference tone.

Just for the believers of “you are born with absolute pitch”: keep in mind that people with absolute pitch did not skip steps 1 to 3. They merely went through these steps in early childhood and found it enough interesting and important to capture the pitches.

With TuneCrack you can train the pitch and time dimension. We call the point in time, where you still can answer relative pitch question within the required precision of 50 cents: the personal Absolute Pitch Point. Thus, TuneCrack allows you to push your personal Absolute Pitch Point towards absolute pitch.