Exactly what I was thinking, Dieter.
You really need the power of something like Melodyne to pull this off
properly.

We had quite a few engineers (in our DIY modular club, in the 70ties)
trying to tackle the pitch to voltage dilemma, and they all gave up
after a while. Sure, there were some simple modules working - nothing
too critical - but as you say, if the fundamental got lost or was
missing, your p2v got lost as well. I remember doing vc-panning and AM
with my voice as input, which worked rather well, but anything more
complicated or accurate... and, poofff... nothing.

Perhaps one day, when the power of modern CPU's is available in a 10-
cent chip... One can only dream.

-Guy

> > I'm on board, but...
> >
> > Back in the days, when I was working with an engineer on my own
> > modular, I remember him saying "pitch to voltage conversion is one
> the
> > most difficult and complicated tasks to accomplish in an analog
> > voltage-controlled world. It's one of the holy grails of modular
> > synthesizer design."
> >
> > But that was almost 30 years ago, so maybe now it's easier.
>
> Yes and no. If you have a clean rectangle its an eays job today:
> nothing but
> a microcontroller that measures the period (e.g. the time difference
> between
> two rising edges of the signal), calculates the corresponding
> voltage and
> outputs the result by means of a DAC.
>
> But the main problem is to obtain a clean rectangle from (nearly) any
> monophonic audio signal no matter how dirty (e.g. during the attack
> phase of
> a plugged string) it is. Even if the fundamental is missing a problem
> occurs. The human ear (and brain) has no problem to detect the
> fundamental
> (or pitch) even if only higher harmonics are present. With a simple
> module
> (i.e. not a computer with a lot of calculation power and software like
> Celemony) that's nearly impossible.
>
> Best wishes
> Dieter Doepfer

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