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settable bpm
A walkman that speeds/slows down music to a user-set bpm | |
When I go for a run, i like to run to the beat of the music that I listen to, (for example, taking a step for every beat) but sometimes I get really slow music, which doesn't work well if I'm trying to keep to a set pace, or really fast music that I can't keep up with.
So, say I'm training for the
Boston Marathon, and I know that I run at 160 steps per minute to reach a 7:15 minute mile. I would set my walkman (actually, MP3 player in my case) to 160 bpm and it would automatically speed or slow down the music so I can run to it. It would need some pitch adjustment, too, so I don't end up listing to the chipmunks.
1/2 or 2x the set bpm would be OK, too. The walkman should decide on a song-by-song basis.
I can imagine that this would be good for people that use stair-stepping and elliptical training machines, too.
gyMP3
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/gyMP3 [Fishrat, Oct 21 2004]
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Annotation:
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Or just tie it in with a pedometer ... |
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trouble is [harisetty], is that if your music source is analogue, raising the BPM will also make Barry White sound like Michael Mouse. Welcome to the halfbakery. |
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There must a chunk of code that could correct for this....I've heard too many musical collages where the beats all matched and the vocals sounded correct. |
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If nothing else this could be done with a bit of dynamic MIDI software. |
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I had an idea which kinda bakes this in a different way. Linky. |
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[jon] and [norm] There are absolutely ways to increase the bpm of a song without changing the pitch. This technique is used by DJ's all the time to meld one song into another while maintaining the same beat. It is also used in television to edit certain things for time, like old reruns that don't have enough room for commercials. |
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I've seen plugins for winamp that do this, could you not strap a laptop to your back? You did say you use MP3's... |
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[krelnik] think my anno said that pitch and speed are interelated with analogue sources, such as a tape. I think its possible with digital such as mp3. |
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A lot of DJ and MIDI gizmos have a tap tempo thingy. |
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I keep thinking that this is some sort of user configurable pacemaker thing. |
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[jonthegeologist] - // think my anno said that pitch and speed are interelated with analogue sources // |
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There's nothing magic about being digital, though. You could digitise the tape recording (and compress to mp3 if you like) and then use pitch-shifting tools.
Moreover, those tools, afaik, merely perform selective frequency adjusting in the frequency domain. Analogue hardware can convert between the time and frequency domains just fine, and do the job without using a bit of digital hardware. |
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Adjusting the tempo and pitch of an audio signal independently is possible, but tricky, to do well; it's easier to do nowadays digitally than with analogue electronics, but neither can be perfect. |
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For example, suppose that there's a piece of music which is at a tempo of 122bpm, and has a low C# and D (one octave below middle C) playing. Playing those two pitches together will produce a very noticeable 8.25Hz beat, which would sound in time with music at 122bpm. Changing the pitches or tempo independently would cause the beats to no longer be in time with the music. |
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[benjamin] thanks for putting me straight ... that's why I'm a geologist and not a sound engineer. |
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