 Unless you're a DJ, or have one
of those high-end digital music players, mixers, or mixing software tools
(and actually read the instruction book) you probably don't know what
Pitch Lock is. Basically, it's a function that allows you to change the
tempo (speed) of a recording without changing its pitch. DJ's use this
function to 'sync' two songs so that one blends into the next. This is
called 'beatmixing' and here, from the DJ
Cafe site, is an example of how it's used, with cross-fading
(lowering the volume of the ending song while increasing the volume of
the starting one) to make a series of songs with different
beat-per-minute tempos into one 'endless' song:
If
the song the crowd is hearing is 130 BPM, and the next song you want to
play is 132 -- you slow the second song down to 130 bpm using pitch
control, and cue it up to the beat. When you are ready to bring the
second song into play, throw the record so the beats stay aligned and
listen to it on your
headphones. Make sure they are in sync!! Once you are sure things are
in order, use your cross fader to let the new song blend into the old
one, and eventually go completely across so only the new song is
playing. This will give the illusion that the song never ended.
I didn't think much about this, although one of the software tools that
works with my MP3 jukebox has a Pitch Lock feature, and it was kind of
fun slowing down and speeding up my favourite songs and second-guessing
whether the artists should have picked a different tempo. But then this
afternoon I was listening to one of my favourite songs from the new
Sarah McLachlan album on the radio and it sounded funny -- a lot faster than the
version I was used to. I figured it was a remix so I listened through
and the DJ announced it but didn't say anything special about it. So I
cued up the original and listened, and I knew it wasn't a remix or my
imagination. And then it occurred to me: The station is using Pitch Lock to speed
up the songs by a just-less-than-noticeable amount so they can play
more songs per hour and have more time for commercials.
So that got me thinking: What else could this be used for? Consider
this fact: Average speech is about 140-160 WPM, and when we try to
speak much faster than that our speech becomes slurred. When we're
thinking about what we're saying, we talk even slower -- 80-120 WPM.
But we are able to comprehend properly-articulated speech of 210 and
even 240 WPM without difficulty (average reading speed, by contrast, is
275 WPM, and speed readers top 800 WPM, though they don't read every
word). So that means that we could use Pitch Lock to accelerate speech
by 50%, to a speed much faster than we could crisply deliver it, but with no loss in
comprehension. And thanks to Pitch Lock, it would come out in the same
deep, calm, enticing voice as the original, but deliver 50% more words,
information or argument per minute. Still think this is a silly
innovation?
Here are some commercial and time-saving applications that occurred to
me right off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more:
- Voice-mail
message replay: Double the playback speed to whisk past the ums and ers and retrieve your messages in
half the time.
- Audio
tape/audio book learning: Get through the tapes in 2/3 the time;
learn 50% faster. Ditto for audiotaped or even videotaped conferences.
- Advertising:
Tell your customers, or your
potential voters, 50% more in the minute you're paying for. And
maybe, by using up their idle brain time, reduce attention deficit
syndrome and get people to pay closer attention to what you're saying
to boot. Or maybe not.
- Language
learning: Slow down the playback speed while you're learning a
language, and gradually increase it as you learn to parse the words
faster and as your vocabularly grows. This could also be used for
simultaneous translation in conferences, as long as they allowed short
breaks after each speech for the translator to catch up.
- Padding
a good show: If the show you're watching or the music or talk
you're listening to is wonderful, and you never want it to end, or if
you're a producer and the program's a bit short, just use Pitch Lock to
stretch it out a bit. After all, if Bernstein can get away with stretching Samuel Barber's famous and extraordinary 6:50 Adagio for Strings into a piece that lasts over 10 minutes without adding any notes, maybe he's on to something.
- Studying
and transcribing music: Having trouble following the chord
changes or finger patterns in a favourite song? Slow it down with Pitch
Lock and take your time. Likewise if you're visually disadvantaged,
slow down speeches to the pace at which you can comfortably take notes.
These and other applications could be exploited either at the time of
recording, or at the time of playback. I'm sure the military and
forensic sciences are already using this. It might also be used to
listen to heart-beats, or study the songs of whales or birds, in slow
motion yet at an audible pitch level. Or to determine an optimal
speaking rate for computerized voice synthesizers (likely a lot faster
than today's unsophisticated versions).
What else could Pitch Lock be used for? And what if we combined it with
other new technologies:
For example, could we teach speech-recognizing computers to 'speed
talk' much the way we 'speed read', to 'read aloud' or play back the
common words that make up 80% of normal speech and are not essential to
understanding at, say, 500 WPM, and the rest at 200 WPM, so we could
become 400 WPM 'speed listeners' and 'speed learners'? And in this
increasingly oral/aural culture, might we then give up reading and
writing entirely?
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MADE IN CANADA
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