Month: January 2022

Playing On the Red Blindfold Test – Answers

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

Back in October 2012 I conducted a pilot study to see whether it would be accurate to state that one could simply listen to a trumpet player and tell by sound alone whether or not that player placed the mouthpiece with a significant amount of rim on the vermillion of one lip. Since then the plugin I used to collect the participants’ answers is no longer being updated for WordPress and is no longer available, so you won’t be able to take the test that way. Furthermore, the original page I created to show the answers and videos to the participants after they took the test seems to have been lost into the aether. This page is my recreation of that post, but it’s been so long I don’t exactly recall how much I wrote there.

Since I’m writing this up now as a post I’m going to put the results below the “read more” fold. If you’re catching this post from the home page you won’t be able to see the results until you click that link, so try the survey out first and then come back to see how well you did.

All the embedded videos below are the same video with all six trumpet players. I set up each embedded video to start directly on the particular player, however.

Continue reading “Playing On the Red Blindfold Test – Answers” →

Free Software to Separate Vocals and Instrumental Tracks

~ wilktone ~ Leave a comment

I recently came across a web-based app, melody ml, that is pretty neat. If you upload an MP3 file its software will separate and put together MP3s of just the bass part, just the drums part, just the vocals, and all the instruments without the vocals. If you’re a bassist, for example, and you need to transcribe and learn the bass part to a song this could be a helpful tool to allow you to hear the bass bart as clearly as possible. If you’re a vocalist looking to create a practice track you can upload an MP3 and get back just the backing track.

I tried it out with a couple of tracks. “Don’t Change Horses,” by Tower of Power, worked perfectly. I also tried it out with a recording I made about a hear ago, “Grandpa’s Spells,” to see how it would handle something that doesn’t have vocals. It didn’t work as well. The separated tracks were mostly silent and the instruments without vocals track sounded the same as the original track (this track, by the way, is a quartet of piano, bass, guitar, and trombone).

So the uses that you might get out of this app are limited to rock style tunes, at least for now. I hope that this app eventually adds the ability to separate other specific tracks in different genre’s of music. I’d like the ability to use it to separate an instrument solo track or just the horn section for transcription purposes, but for a free, web-based app it’s pretty cool.

Try it out here.