H.E.L.P.

Hi guys, absolute beginner here, just wondering is it alright to place and I phone( for tunning) / or any small digital tuner on top of the theremin, while practicing or is it a wrong habit, don't have the best ears really. I use the Etherwave plus is that helps. Thank u... Ahmed

Ahmed - if you do not have the best ears, then you are going to have to do your best to cultivate them. You need EAR TRAINING. In other words, you are going to have to teach yourself how to recognize when a note is on pitch and when it is not.

Playing the theremin is an auditory experience. Using a visual tuner with needles and flashing lights to find your note is probably not a good idea. Is your tuner capable of delivering an A=440 tone? Many of them are. I use a BOSS TU-12EX (http://www.bossus.com/gear/productdetails.php?ProductId=1003) chromatic tuner that will give you all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale. Great little tool!

If you want to play a simple tune like TWINKLE, TWINKLE LITTLE STAR on your theremin, give yourself a reference tone (any note will do) and let it play while you perform the melody. Listen carefully to each note. Is each one in the right tonal relationship to the reference? When you finish playing and come back to the note you started on (in this case the same as the reference tone) is it exactly in unison with the reference?

Try the same tune without the reference and play it three or four times. When you finish, check your pitch with your reference. Has your pitch drifted?

Yes, I know, it's a huge, crashing BORE playing this way but if you want to perform accurately on your theremin, and possibly get to the point where you can play reliably with other musicians, you're going to have to train your ear and refine your hand/ear coordination.

You might ask your uncle Muhammad who plays the qanun (or your aunt Aysha who plays the oud) to help you understand and hear the microtones of the chromatic scale.

Thanks for your quick and thorough reply; the I phone tuner is an accurate chromatic one, with the 50 cents range both ways, no issues with that, and you're right its got to be ears training, that's the bottom line, but i don't think u got my question; since I-phone and theremin are both electromagnetic sensitive devices i wonder is it actually right to put it on top of the theremin, so that I can close my eyes and open them back again to confirm on notes as I need to have a feel of the instrument and imagine the circles where the octaves lie, and subsequently create my reference, thanks any way. Ahmed

Hello Ahmed,

Adding to the excellent commentary above, the weak electromagnetic radiation between your two devices in proximity will not have any damaging affect to either device. If you don’t hear any audio distortion through your theremin then this would have been my only concern though not harmful. Electromagnetic radiation is an interesting phenomena moving about in free space un-influenced by the millions of other waves sharing space with it.

Now a super solar flare would be another story!

The iPhone interneres in two ways with the theremin:

A) Its radiation creates ghost tones and distortion.

B) It is an electrical conductor, so it will influence the pitch field when placed on top of the instrument. The higher octaves will be stretched and the lower ones compressed.

If you want to use a tuner or an iPhone as a tuner, buy a flexible car-mount and fix it on the mic stand below the theremin in an angle which allows you to see the display.

Thierry said:

[i]B) It is an electrical conductor, so it will influence the pitch field when placed on top of the instrument. The higher octaves will be stretched and the lower ones compressed.[/i]

Being the theremin pitch field is one of my specialties I had to test this observation with my own experiment using my custom antenna. This could reveal a technique for pitch field tuning.

All of my theremin pitch fields are perfectly linear as I have often stated. I placed an empty aluminum cola can 4” or 10 cm from the pitch antenna. The pitch field did stretch out about a half a note but perfect linearity remained only needing a slight tweak of the pitch tuning knob.

I repeated the experiment with a cola can full of liquid and the pitch field stretch out a couple of octaves. Thierry’s observations are correct except the higher note intervals compressed and the low note intervals expanded.

The pitch field's "bending" when additional capacitance is brought in depends strongly from 2 factors:

A) from the inductance/capacitance ratio of the variable pitch oscillator's tank circuit

B) if there is (are) linearization coil(s) in series with the pitch antenna. In that case, it depends on the ratio of both inductances (tank circuit and linearization).

My statements/observations are valid for the Etherwave Standard and Plus Theremins.

I am not familiar with the iphone, or with its use as a tuner. Is it audio, or visual, or both?

Most tuner apps for the iPhone are purely visual and use the built-in microphone for sound capture. Some of these apps have also an integrated reference tone generator but the built-in speaker is very weak, so that this functionality does not really make sense. Finally it's not a question of the iPhone, but of what the developer wanted to integrate in his application.

Another problem of "software" tuners is the limited audio sample rate of the portable device or the computer. I'm not sure that this allows really to have the precision which is shown on the display.

Er, just as a point of information, it is certainly possible to use an iPhone for professional grade audio analysis.

For instance, see here: http://www.studiosixdigital.com/

(It is rather expensive to buy their audio interface though, which is $399!)