Sing, hum or play a single-note instrument, and Pitchy turns it into notes for a synth. It follows one melody from an audio input and sends it out as MIDI: either clean, stable notes or continuous pitch that keeps your slides and vibrato.
The idea
Pitchy is a MIDI source with an audio input, not a sound of its own. The instrument you connect after it decides the timbre, so a hummed line can come out as a lead synth, a bass or anything else that accepts expressive notes.
It has two ways of hearing you:
- Continuous keeps every bend, slide and wobble. Each note is identified, and the exact pitch between notes travels with it as expression.
- Quantized settles on stable notes, which is what you want for a melody you mean to play "in tune" on the synth.
Controls
- Output chooses Continuous or Quantized.
- Note dwell (0 to 200 ms) is how long a new pitch has to hold before Pitchy commits to it as a note. Longer settings ignore quick passing tones.
- Release hold (0 to 500 ms) keeps a note sounding through short gaps and breaths instead of cutting it the moment the input goes quiet.
- Boundary margin (0 to 49 cents) is how far past the midpoint between two notes you have to go before Pitchy switches, so a pitch that hovers on a boundary does not flicker between them.
- Tuning compensation is experimental and off by default. In Quantized mode it estimates how far your whole performance sits from standard tuning and corrects for it. It has no effect in Continuous mode, and it cannot guess which note you meant when a pitch is ambiguous.
The face shows the measured pitch, the pitch being sent and any correction applied, along with how confident the tuning estimate is.
Getting started
Choose an audio input in the host and start the engine. Try the two presets: Stable notes (Quantized) and Expressive voice (Continuous). For the most faithful pitch, set the receiving synth to equal temperament. The voice-to-synth rack connects Pitchy to the Oscillo synth, ready to play in Continuous mode.
On the module page, pick Sine as the output instrument to hear the notes. Other preview voices and external MIDI devices do not yet accept Pitchy's expressive output.
Limits
Pitchy follows one note at a time; chords and mixed recordings will confuse it. It works best on a clean, single voice or instrument with little background sound.
