Zynaptiq PITCHMAP: Real-Time Polyphonic Pitch-Correction and Pitch-Mapping
 

Hello fellow gearslutz,

after more than half a year of insanely hard work behind the scenes, I'm totally thrilled to spill the beans. boingboingboing

Say hello to PITCHMAP.

http://zynaptiq.com/fileadmin/user_u...screenshot.png


PITCHMAP is a plug-in that allows correcting tuning issues as well as changing key, scale, chords, harmonies and melodies of a mixed/polyphonic signal in real-time. Yep, that's right, FULL real-time, including MIDI input (meaning that you can play the notes/chords that stuff gets tuned to), macro functions for near-instant changes of key/scale, snapshot automation and lots of other cool bits and pieces. And it has a very slick GUI designed by Axel Hartmann. Announcement is now, release is scheduled for the 19th of January. Drinks will be served at the Musikmesse heh

Zynaptiq is the company I've recently founded together with Stephan M. Bernsee, the DSP brain behind the Prosoniq products (like SonicWORX Isolate and Morph), the DIRAC time-stretching algo and the Hartmann Neuron synth (amongst others). I still remember reading music tech magazines in high school and drooling when I read about his software (sonicWORX Artist, at the time). I'm a big fan of his work, and really very, very excited to be working with him now hooppie

Here are the first two audio demos, still designed as "sneak preview teasers", more to follow ASAP:

String section minor to major (took about ten seconds to set parameters):



Detuned wanna-be guitar, tuning corrected and compositionally enhanced:



And below, there's the full press-release for your reading pleasure.

Any questions --- PM me or use the contact form on our site.

Enjoy!

Denis


Zynaptiq Announces PITCHMAP: Real-Time Polyphonic Pitch-Correction And Pitch-Mapping

Hannover, January 16th, 2012: Zynaptiq GmbH announced the imminent release of PITCHMAP, the world's first and only audio plug-in capable of polyphonic pitch-correction and pitch-mapping in real-time.

PITCHMAP allows real-time correction of pitch inaccuracies within mixed signals, as well as completely altering the tonality, chords, harmonies or melodies of a musical signal on- the-fly, a process Zynaptiq refers to as Pitch Mapping. PITCHMAP does this using Zynaptiq?s proprietary, artificial intelligence based MAP technology (Mixed-Signal Audio Processing) to de-mix an incoming signal - like, for example, a full mix - into individual elements, and then allows the user to arbitrarily or automatically correct and modify their pitches. Additionally, PITCHMAP provides means to deliberately induce processing “errors” to make results sound synthetic in a very futuristic and unique way.

“Our DSP Developer Stephan M. Bernsee has come up with what we believe to be a real game-changer.” Zynaptiq CEO Denis H. Goekdag said. “PITCHMAP lets you reach into a recording and change the pitch-related aspects of the composition on-the-fly. You can change an entire song from minor to major with just a couple of clicks, simultaneously correcting any tuning issues and changing the key. While there are other pitch processing solutions available, PITCHMAP combines polyphonic capability, a real-time workflow and an exceptional processing quality based on techniques that model the human auditory system, thus opening up a whole new level of creativity.”

Zynaptiq GmbH, based in Hannover, Germany, creates audio software based on artificial intelligence technology, and was founded in 2011 by Stephan M. Bernsee and Denis H. Goekdag, known for their involvement with Prosoniq, Hartmann Music, Surround SFX and the DSP Dimension, amongst others.


PITCHMAP provides all of the following functionality in real-time:

• Automatic correction of pitch inaccuracies in polyphonic/mixed signals
• Pitch Mapping: Change harmonies and melodies on the fly
• Pitch Mapping via GUI-created source/destination maps or real-time MIDI-input
• Macro controls for near-instant creation of harmony- and key-changes
• Snapshot functionality for fast workflow and easy automation
• Perceptive modeling based Natural mode for voice-adapted processing
• Continuously variable Electrify parameter for making results sound synthetic in an
  exciting and unique way

PITCHMAP as well as a free trial will be available from the Zynaptiq website January 19th, 2012.

PITCHMAP will initially be released as Mac AU (AudioUnits) Plug-In, with VST and AAX support for both Mac and Windows platforms planned for later in 2012.

PITCHMAP is priced at USD/EUR 399,- and a limited-time introductory price of USD/EUR 269,- is available until April 1st, 2012 (prices in EUR inclusive of 19% VAT).

For more information, please visit the product's website at zynaptiq: pitchmap

Woaw!!
It looks promising. Congratulations for this new product!!!
I will give it a try for sure. ( when it will be available on pc )
:)

Can it tune a floppy kick drum head for more "boom" in a dense mix? heppy

*grin* now THAT would rock ;-) To be honest, I haven't tried that yet. I will keep that scenario in mind when making the next batch of audio examples.

Basically, though, PITCHMAP is trained to touch the drums in a mix as little as possible, so that you don't get your drums all mushy when you change pitches in a full mix.
So far, PITCHMAP is doing a pretty good job at that, though it's obviously not possible to leave the drums *entirely* untouched in a real-time setting, at least not with current CPU's ---- keep in mind that we're doing some VERY intrusive processing and that that requires a lot of mathematics :-)

Kick drums may however be editable if they have a sufficiently tonal component. I'll check and report back (but give me a little time, we've got quite a lot going on at the moment :-) )

Cheers,
Denis

Crikey oh Riley! Realtime transposition and tuning on audio, I have been after this for years! just to make seamless and smooth (or not) transitions in songs or what ever material you are working on a simpler matter and or just to hear where you want to put pieces without having to just hear it in my head then try it out.Massive time saver and experimenter with just those features and that's before you dig in and abuse it for all the other creative uses.

Weird I was just thinking about the Neuron VS last night (one of my favourite synths ever, I wish it would come back as a plugin, no nuke needed) and read last year that something really of the radar was being worked on by SB.I guess this is it?.Looks fabulous.

Congratulations to all at zynaptiq.

Thanks :-)

Yes, the ability to quickly try stuff is really one of the strong points of the concept.

I'm currently working on a video demo where I change a synth-plink line in an urban beat, to demonstrate how the algorithm performs in presence of drums. If I may say so I'm very pleased with the fact that the drums aren't taking a significant hit with moderate settings heh

Microtones
 

Hello Zynaptiq team,
Congratulations with this wonderfull product. I have been using sonic worx for a long time and what I see now is mind blowing but and yes there is a but I cannot understand why such a revolutionary software still does only support musicians which make western 12 semitone in an octave music so we are being discriminated cause we cannot use it because of lack of microtonal support.
Correct me if I'm wrong and if you do support it I am sorry to bother but for instance if I load my Turkish recordings with lots of microtones in it I bet Pitchmap will get confused. I tried a lot of audio to midi converters, autotune plug-ins, harmonizers, Band in a box etc. etc. but they are all developed for western music only and that's a big pity if you consider that the biggest part of the world makes microtonal music, India(almost 850 million people), China, Indonesia, Middle East+Arabic world, Turkish world etc. so how come that there is still no support for it by noone except Celemony Melodyne.
They are beginning to support real microtuning.
Mostly microtonal support by developers is very limited for instance you can retune an existing tone inside an octave and have a microtone but you will end up losing the existing tone cause at the end you'll have no more tones than 12 in an octave.
I spoke with so many musicians wanting this feature and I know it's gonna be a hit. Talked with so many software developers but nothing is changing while we are living in a multi cultural music world with endless possibilities compared to my Commodore or Atari, taperecorders and Akai samplers time.
The only limit is our imagination but still no support for musicians like me, it's not fair and it hurts so please be the first to revolutionize this and support it otherwise a lot of musicians like me will be limited to twelve semitonal western music while it would be nice to be able to use Pitchmap it in all kinds of music worldwide. It will be appreciated for sure.
Seems like there is someone in your team who can add support for it if I'm not mistaking.
If you can develop something which is really hard to program, microtonal support would be possible too.
Normally when I correspond with software developers they say it's hard to implement or nobody asks for it or they just don't take time to respond and that's a pity and a missed chance.
Ohm studio has a nice DAW being developed to be able to make music with musicians worldwide at the same time but how would it be possible to do that without microtuning. A pakistani or Arab or Indian cannot compose with somebodyfrom say Norway at the time microtones come into action while software recognizing both music would be very nice.
-Is it in the planning to release more nice products like these?
Thanks for taking time reading my message.
All the best.
Haydaristan.

Daaaaaammmnnnnnn! Question - is there a higher quality, non-realtime setting or is it mainly meant just to preview possibilities?

Fantastic!!! Up till now, Waves was my only AU option for real time pitch transposition plugins. And IMO, it probably was the best. However, it's been years that I've been waiting for someone to offer an alternative. This seems like it will not only de-throne it for pitch transposition, but redefine the whole game. MUY excited. boing

Looks interesting, but what does it do that Melodyne Editor doesn't?

Speed and ease-of-use seem to be key differences.

I'm a huge fan of Melodyne, but I'm very happy about this development. Denis is a genius; everything he does is stylish and musical. I still use his Kore-developed software all the time --- and now that Kore's been discontinued by Native Instruments, it falls into "secret weapon" status, I suppose.

Looking forward to this release!

cheers,
c

In a nutshell, automatic polyphonic operation in real-time.

Hi! The initial release will be equal-tempered, 12 semitones per octave only. However, we have been talking about just tuning and non-western scales, as well as harmonic series, fibonacci and other scales. I'm a big fan of Metasynth, which has a very cool user-defined scale system, which is great for sound-design, and I'm 50% Turkish and really dig the BladeRunner-esque flavor of some of the Tribal Percussion vs Auto-Tune club music coming from Istanbul....some ueber-awesome music from non-western culture nowadays, and we'll want to be part of that :-)

Won't happen before v2 at the earliest, though --- it's not trivial to implement something like that in an easy and transparent way.


As to more products: oh YES hehhehheh

Cool. Sounds interesting.

I hope a Windows version will come out soon.

Wish you the best.

The pitch correction in a +-1 semitone range is already running in a higher quality and is pretty much inaudible. Also, depending on material and the context, higher transpositions work pretty well...while making some more sound demos, I've for example changed the chords in a minimal house track and the processed results are definitely better sounding than some releases out there ;-)

We're looking into using a higher quality mode during offline bounce, there are some VI's that have such an option, but that feature is not documented in the AU spec, so we'll have to investigate that once v1 is out. The process itself can be scaled for higher resolution at larger transposition values, the limiting factor here is not the algorithm but the CPU performance available for real-time operation.

But hey, do check out the demo when it's out, IMHO the sound quality is beyond "previewing options only" for many situations ;-)

Yes, exactly. We don't record into a buffer and analyze prior to processing, we operate on the live audio stream, so we're *fully* real-time. Also, you don't do any manual editing of individual note-events, you set up rules to map the input to output pitches, either using the GUI or by playing on a MIDI keyboard. So you can change the target scale instantly and in an interactive way....this makes a huge workflow difference.

And of course, we have the Electrify parameter (which I can't demo ATM because the GUI knob isn't attached to the DSP yet...and all evaluation demos we did in-house are on copyrighted material :-) ), which sounds...well, you'll hear it. I'd buy the plug-in for this alone if I had to.

I also love Melodyne, and to be fair, it has the timing-processing that we haven't implemented because of real-time considerations, so actually these two will complement each other nicely.

Definitely looking forward to demoing this! Will you guys have a booth at NAMM?

Pretty nifty. Interested.

RTAS?

heh

When we're on the case of AAX, we'll look into wether or not RTAS is an additional option. While I understand that there are many people still using PT9, RTAS *is* a deprecated format, so from the point of view of doing a *new* product that's a tricky thing.

No, we won't make it this year. But we'll be at the MusikMesse, directly next to Elysia, Vertigo, Metric Halo, Guido "RockRuepel" Apke and the bunch. We'll also be serving a decent single malt in addition to showing our software hooppie

What about the artefacts that might occur while retuning a heavy/metalcore guitar for about 4 semitones? Will they be obvius? Where is the limit for retuning without noticeable artefacts? :)

Can you export the result as MIDI file?

Re: distorted guitars: hmmm, I must admit that I haven't checked the really heavy guitar stuff yet. And I'm originally guitarist. :facepalm:

Heavy distortion is notoriously tricky in general, though...slight detunings in chords can cause the amp to produce ring-modulator flavored non-harmonic overtones, especially on tube amps; how I wish that my guitar would automatically adapt it's tuning to always give a perfect fifth on powerchords!

With really heavy distortion (read: when you're basically outputting square-waves with modulated pulse-width), a fifth may well be interpreted as a pronounced second harmonic of a lower octave etc....

But I'll have a look and see what I find.

Re: MIDI export: at this point, no. You're not the first to ask about MIDI output/export....and we have been thinking about that since starting out with PITCHMAP. But the AU spec doesn't allow sending MIDI from an effect plug-in to the host.


Cheers,
d

FYI in a similar product/circumstance (realtime plug-in), one approach for AU has been Zplane's 'Veilklang' (excellent plug-in btw):

"The current harmonization state can be rendered to a Midi file by clicking the Save button in the Menu Bar, choose Midi and follow the instructions."

http://vielklang.zplane.de/uploads/F...langManual.pdf

This allows an offline rendering that can then be brought into session for further trigger options (i.e. synth unison track). May not apply here because of pre-play analysis aspect but thought I would share FWIW ;-)

The AU spec doesn´t even support tapestyle per channel "Zero Latency Monitoring" (like ASIO does). hittt
Guess you can´t consider everything when you design a new plugin interface standard... mezed

Well, to be fair, there's *always* room for improvement with any software.... ;-)

I wouldn't mind save&import it manually to the DAW...

We'll think about it for a future version. No promises heh

Was the release date pushed back till tomorrow?