![]() ![]() The Challenge: Pitch Change Without Speed Changeīy 1975, IC technology had sufficiently advanced to the point that it became practical to design a digital pitch change effects box - the H910. However, the interface was not designed to easily dial in pitch-related effects, and there was a technical challenge to overcome. Eventide’s DDL1745M had an optional pitch change module and a handful of studios began to discover digital effects. Prior to its introduction, studios had adopted digital delay as a utilitarian tool to replace the bother of using an expensive tape machine (and salaried tape op) for double tracking and plate reverb pre-delay. The H910 was arguably the first pro audio digital effects product. Just three years later, Buys Ballot, a Dutchman, demonstrated the Doppler Effect on sound waves by having six tubas play the same sustained note while perched on the front of a speeding locomotive. In 1842, Christian Doppler suggested that “the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer.” Doppler was thinking about star light, not sound, but a wave is a wave is a wave. ![]() (Kids whirling objects around on a string were not the scientific observers for which one would have hoped.) ![]() To notice even a slight pitch change of 2% a sound source with 100% constant pitch would have to be approaching the listener at 15 mph. ![]() Why had no one elucidated this effect in our long history? It’s simple few things moved fast enough! Sound travels at ~750 mph. While Pitch Change is naturally occurring, throughout history, humans would rarely have perceived the effect because the sound source must be traveling at a high enough rate of speed relative to the listener to cause a discernible change in pitch. There’s a lot of history to cover about the conception and development of the Harmonizer so let’s first consider the underlying principle: the interesting phenomenon known as Pitch Change. ![]()
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