Why is the instrument used in the mouth?

It looks to me like you vary the pitch by changing the tension on the string.

Cool song though

This is all part of the pitch, he's mocking the Big Bang, so if he equivocates it with crazy and irrational, he hopes to sway the teen opinion

That's a pretty cool "experiment" to perform on the song. However, a fully scientific experiment should attempt to minimize the amount of variables that are being changed -- ideally down to isolating the effects of a single one. This changed two:

1) Auto tune "correcting" the pitch of instruments and vocals AND
2) Changing the key of the song from minor (original is in F minor) to major

I think that the pitch shifting from auto tune to perfectly hit the scale notes actually has LESS impact than transcribing the song into major key. Would be interesting to hear the same thing, but keeping the key in F minor and just using auto tune to shift everything perfectly into scale notes in that key. I think it would still be noticeably ... weird ... compared to the original, but it wouldn't have the bland / banal / happy-poppy feel from the key change.

@ChaosEngine --

I've only seen one other piece by this dude, so I can't claim that I definitely "get" what he's going for, but... To me, his shtick is: "I wanted to be a rockstar / guitar hero when I was growing up, but my parents made me learn the piano instead of guitar. So, I'm going to live that rockstar dream via the piano instead of guitar, partially because I enjoy it, partially to stick it to mom and dad, and partially because other people seem to enjoy it as evidenced by views / likes / comments, etc." (And importantly, he can't play the guitar, so he uses the skill that he has available.)

I like his stuff (well, the 2 videos I've seen of his). This one is pretty reliant on bends, and to nitpick I think he should have used an analog pitch bender for that instead of the fancy touch digital one he had. On the other hand, it isn't too critical, and he seems to go for playing by ear without a lot of (maybe *any*?) practice run-throughs which would definitely be required to nail those bend sections perfectly. So, the imperfect on-hand equipment (digital vs analog) and imperfect execution don't detract much from the performance for me.

You're also correct that he played the wrong notes a few times, but in a musically acceptable way -- he was still playing chord notes in the scale and key of the song, but not exactly the same ones as in the original. So while I noticed it, that also doesn't really detract much from the performance for me either.

Taking a piece for another instrument and adapting it to a different one as opposed to trying to "imperfectly" emulate the original can also be very cool. Youtube covers of rock songs on a Korean Gayageum come to mind. BUT, I also get a kick out of my interpretation of this guy's shtick, and don't feel like he's trying to do the musical equivalent of forcing a round peg into a square hole or anything.

Definitely all subjective though.

Well, yes, a guitar can do things that a piano can't and the pitch-shifter doesn't quite achieve the right timbre but the point is that he's adapted a piano to sound like a fairly convincing facsimile of an electric guitar; the playing of the piece is secondary to that. The achievement is how much the piano now sounds like an electric guitar, given how different the instruments are. It's not a bad version of that guitar solo, it's a good version of the solo considering it's being played on an instrument that's normally unsuitable for playing it.

To play Devil's advocate... why do this?

He's essentially playing a bad version of that guitar solo.

I mean, yeah, he's obviously a good musician and I'm guessing from some of his other videos he's a talented pianist (don't know enough about piano to judge).

But there are things you can do on a guitar (slides, bends, harmonics) that are impossible to do on a piano. That doesn't make a guitar better than a piano, just that it has different strengths.

He's (kinda) compensating for the bends using that pitch shifter, but it's a pretty crude version of a guitar bend, and there's no incorporation of the subtleties of how a guitar player changes little things like pick attack.

I am all for people reinterpreting musical pieces on a different instrument, but if you're going to do that, change it for the strengths of your instrument.

But still, upvote for the dog

I've been on the musical road many times since my wife is from Lancaster. It sounds terrible, just like the video. I always wondered what could have gone wrong and if there was something preventing the engineers from building it with the right pitches. I knew they had rebuilt it because of complaints but that's crazy that nobody thought to correct it. Thanks for the video!

In the US, I believe that component in CRTs is called a "horizontal oscillator" instead of a "flyback transformer" (but could be that they are distinct yet related things). I've always been easily able to hear those, but am not usually bothered by them anymore since CRTs are fairly rare at this point. But this video proves that my 36 year old ears can still pick it up.

I feel like my hearing is bad -- I always want TVs louder than other people so I can make out what is being said, and in normal conversation it always seems like people are mumbling if there is any background noise at all. And I'm one of those annoying loud-talking Americans, especially if I'm talking on the phone (fortunately I don't get/answer many phone calls when I'm in public). But my hearing range pitch-wise seems to be exceptionally high, and not diminishing much with age (yet).

There's a fun easter egg for people like me at the end of that video. He put pulses of that CRT horizontal oscillator pitch where you can see the "Things You Might Know" text on the red background. I recognized it as Morse code, but couldn't decipher it even though I have an Amateur Radio license (I don't do code). In the comments at YT, people are claiming that the code translates to "never gonna give you up" -- so I guess he's Rickrolling people who both A) still have young enough ears to hear that 15kHz range *and* B) are old school enough to know / recognize Morse code. That's a pretty small target audience for an easter egg!

Your video, Why Old Screens Make A High Pitched Noise, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

In this Ghost in the shell movie, cybernetics are just exploding. The guy on the right is pitching his major cybernetics company and he was showing the forign president on the left that their cyberbrain enhancements allowed a 4 year old to learn how to speak french AS she was singing a french lullaby. Normally this would be nothing in the GitS universe, but in the movie this is cutting edge tech. I actually disliked the lit up wire node going to his brain because cyberbrains were never a "visual" thing, but this movie may be before cyberbrains became so advanced. Infact the black president may not even have a cyberbrain, and this is simply an audio/visual transmitter implant.

The only thing I don't like is this is "too" origin. GitS was awesome because it started you in the future utopia, and then used half of its season of episodes to explain indirectly new technologies and how sociologies have changed. Cyberbrains were very commonplace and full cybernetic bodies were available to anyone who had the money, like rich people and the military. Saddly that means alot of things the tv series would have will not be in the movies because the technologies has not come yet.

however as redsky mentioned, they do seem to be latching on to the source material a lot (and aside from the revised thermocamoflauge suit.. oh and Batou's eye implants are just normal eyes and apparently his iconic lenses are just for show) so I am still hopeful. Oh, ok, one other nitpick. Somehow Kusanagi managed to spend like 10 seconds outside the windows shooting in through multiple windows before crashing through. She has no gear or technique to "stop" from her free fall, the only thing she can do is dive through the window.

The reason this seems to work for most people is because they identify the tone/pitch of the notes relative from each other, thus making this very false rendition of this song suddenly 'click' and sound alright.

So my guess is that having great difficulty hearing the melody doesn't mean you're tone deaf. I think it means you're better than the average person at discerning the notes' pitch absolutely. The pinnacle of this phenomenon is called 'Perfect Pitch', which is quite rare. But we might have something close to it.

Most airliners have wings designed to be used in low transsonic. They can't effectively go faster. They would literally lose lift if they went faster. Their wing shape is made to only delay the onset of shockwaves on top of the wing (flat-ish top), allowing it to safely creep closer to mach1 than otherwise, but not to operate within/past mach1.

Fan/propeller blades themselves are also mach limited.
(They can be designed to be supersonic, but then you end up with something like this... which in hindsight nobody wants : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-84H)
A subsonic airfoil in a fan/propeller, operating near/at supersonic speed, loses the ability to move/redirect air, due to shockwave disruption of the airflow.

Fans/propellers with subsonic blades that spin at subsonic speeds are effectively speed limited. They lose efficiency above ~500 mph, where they begin to stop generating thrust as they travel faster. Their pitch has to increase higher and higher, until they are no longer much of an airscrew and more of a 'feathered' configuration.

Supersonic jet engines use intake devices (such as shock cones) to decelerate incoming air to subsonic speeds, so the compressor (itself a fan, i.e. a highly multi bladed propeller) can operate on that air to compress it and feed the engine combustion chambers.
Airliners have no intake devices to decelerate incoming air, and they would lose engine compression when entering near mach1 speeds.

Furthermore, their bypass fans (which are glorified propellers) would stop providing thrust.

You would need to design different planes (like the concorde). You can't just throttle up a modern airliner and go faster [than X limit] - like you can in a modern car.

-scheherazade

Yup. I learned at a very young age not to sneer at softball pitchers. My Dad took me to see The King and His Court, a four man softball team that played against full nine-man teams. They won a majority of their games, and they were mostly playing for comedic effect (like the Globetrotters). That was almost entirely due to the pitcher. His pitches were clocked as fast as 104 mph.

{insert brilliant segue back to video topic here}

Right now, I have two fondest Obama Administration memories that I think will stick with me in the future:

1) His original 2008 campaign and election. "Hope" and "Change" really resonated with me, and made him the first national political candidate that I got sort of actually enthusiastic about.

I am less enthusiastic about what he actually got *done*, but to be fair a lot of the blame for that goes to worthless obstructionist Congress. But not all. Still, Obama was (and remains) a smooth talkin' statesman that knew how to pitch "hope" and "change" in a way that made me believe he could deliver. Maybe I was just young and naive, but that had power.


2) "A few weeks ago, Dick Cheney says he thinks I’m the worst president of his lifetime. Which is interesting because I think Dick Cheney is the worst president of my lifetime."

C'mon, that right there is hi-larious!

Many police think they shouldn't be held to the same standards as the rest of us. It's just like the flap over the Cheesecake Factory recently not seating armed Dept. of Correction officers.

It isn't a corporate policy, but the local store had a rule of no firearms. Rather than lock their guns in the trunk of their service vehicle, they pitched a fit and led to a corporate apology. They weren't even police, but correctional officers.