Show HN: Veena Chromatic Tuner (play.google.com)

53 points by v15w ↗ HN
We're happy to present Veena Chromatic Tuner, an app we've developed for musicians, instrument makers, and ethnomusicologists who need more than just a standard chromatic tuner. Our goal was to create a tool that not only supports pitch detection but also provides deep support for diverse musical intonation systems and offers intuitive visual feedback.

The Problem We're Solving: Many tuners are good for Equal Temperament, but has limited support when it comes to the Just Intonation, microtonal music, or the specific requirements of instruments like the Veena where fret positions are determined by precise ratios.

Oscilloscope-like Visual Feedback: Instead of just a needle, you get a dynamic, oscilloscope-like waveform display.

In Tune: The waveform appears stabilized, giving you an immediate, confirmation of perfect pitch. Sharp: The waveform rotates right. Flat: The waveform rotates left.

This dynamic visual feedback, akin to a digital oscilloscope's trigger synchronization, offers immediate, precise adjustment cues that go far beyond what a static needle can provide, allowing for incredibly fine-tuned adjustments.

Unmatched Intonation Flexibility: We understand that music isn't just 12-TET.

Just Intonation Support: Perfect for Indian classical music, early music, and any tradition that relies on pure harmonic relationships between notes. This is crucial for achieving the rich, resonant chords and melodic purity that Equal Temperament can't always deliver.

Custom Temperaments: Go beyond presets! Create, save, and manage your own unique temperaments with personalized ratio settings. This empowers composers, researchers, and performers to explore microtonal scales and historical tunings with ease.

Dedicated Veena Instrument Mode: It allows users to play and tune notes across 24 fret positions, specifically highlighting how note positions on the fretboard vary relative to each other when pure intonation is applied. This feature is invaluable for instrument makers and those studying the physics of string instruments.

Other Key Features:

Multicultural Note Naming: Display notes in Western, Indian classical (Carnatic/Hindustani), and Solfege, with support for multiple Indian language scripts (Tamil, Devanagari, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam).

Adjustable Reference Pitch: Customize A4 frequency from 440Hz to 432Hz or anything in between.

Transposition Support: Easily transpose notes for different instruments.

This app is would be useful for string players (veena, violin, guitar, sitar, etc.), wind instrument musicians, vocalists, music teachers, students, ethnomusicologists, and especially instrument makers and tuners who need to work with precise intonation and fret setting. Anyone exploring microtonal music will also find it incredibly useful.

We're actively developing the app, continuously adding features and improvements. While pitch detection is resource-intensive, we strive for broad device compatibility.

Check it out on Google Play: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.magima.digi...]

We welcome your feedback, questions, and thoughts!

13 comments

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This is an interesting project. It isn’t immediately obvious to me how the visualisations aid the tuning process. Please can you say a little more about how you expect a user to interpret those as they perform tuning work?
A tuner with ads. There's plenty of ad-free tuners, thank you.
The visual feedback sounds very much like the strobe feature on my guitar tuner. I think the first like this was the Stroboconn in the 1930s.
Any plan for an iOS version?

Most musicians use Apple platforms, so focusing only on Android could be limiting.

So “Show HN” is now for straight-up advertisements of commercial products?

This ad copy is in the smarmy style of the worst corporate slop.

- Instruments list should have more instruments

- Would appreciate other temperaments: Pythagorean-C temperament, perfect 5th, etc. See the gstrings app for example.

- Base note selection only provides tone and sharp options (C, C#, D, D#...) but as you know, outside of equal temperament, C# and Db (and so on) are different pitches.

Sounds interesting... Is there a youtube demo? Or a web-version of this for those who want to check it out? Maybe an iOS version?

Thanks

To wrap up, Thanks, HN community. Your feedback, comments, suggestions, and technical discussions have been truly humbling. We're delighted to offer a complimentary premium version of the app to anyone who contributed to this thread, once it's released. Just email us when it's available.