The Pitch

No, this is not an elevator pitch for anything, quite the opposite. I just made an app, and it’s called Pitcher! And by that, I don’t mean I really wrote any code, it’s all written by deepseek and anthropic large language models (AKA token generators, AKA stochastic parrtos).

The idea of the app came out of a personal need. I’ve been playing santour for more than 30 years now, and the standard santour is a diatonic instrument which just means you can play one diatonic scale at any given time, say you can play D Minor, and if you want to play E Minor then you have to tune the whole instrument, which has 72 strings! Well, often depending on which scale you’re going to/from, you’ll be spared several because they are the same. Even my recent fancy super modern santour that has keys to change any note a semitone up and down in a fraction of second can’t handle all of them. As a result every time I’m trying to learn a new song by listening to it I have a very hard time. My last resort has been to use a setar (which has only 4 strings) and tune it to that song and try to learn it there and then play it on santour. It works but since I’m not very good at setar, it takes way longer than it should. So, I thought if I can’t change the tune of my instrument to match that of the song, I should be able to change that of the song to match my instrument. Hence I started writing an app. I know, I know, there are proably already apps out there that already do this, but first they probably do a ton more than that which I don’t really need, and they heavy apps that take forever to load, and second, it is very likely that they are pripriotary apps and I have to pay a fortune to use them, probably as a subscription! But changing a few frequencies here and there is not something I’m afraid of, and there are very good free software packages that do that. Especially if I want to change all the frequencies the same way! (Note: I do, I don’t want to change the song, I just want to make the whole thing, say, a semitone flatter).

So, a couple years ago I’d probably do an online search to find a commandline package that does that, figure out how to use it, write a simple script with input and output parameters and give it an audio file, get my output and be on my merry way learning that song. But, the token generators (AKA LLMs) have become very powerful recently. So, after doing that I started writing a web app, and it worked nicely on my laptop, but then I thought, it would be good to have it on my phone, so I then had them write an andorid app too. And they did. And then I added a whole bunch of fancy touch features to it and packaged it and made it public so that everyone can use it. It is here and after it is reviewed (likely in a few weeks) it will be available on F-Droid too.

Now, I don’t know how many other people in the world have the same problem as I did, but I’m guessing that number is not small. So, if you have musician friends, they might want to know about this. And the best part? it is free, both as in free beer and as in freedom. Enjoy!

PS: Depending on who I’m talking to people either think I’ve taken the AI pill or they think I’m a (neo)luddite. Well, (un)fortunately, I’m neither. When it comes to AI, I think these are tools that are good for some use cases and bad for others. Think of the knife in your kitchen. I don’t think they’ll ever be good for somethings, i.e. there is no future that your kitchen knife used for killing people would be a good usecase and your knife will do it humanely! Similarly, if you ask an AI who you should vote for in the next election, well, the joke’s on you. But if you can write an app that is useful and you can check it does what it is supposed to do and doesn’t do any harm, then you’re a responsible chef, and not a heartless murderer. And I’m right there in the middle, I think these are useful tools, and I don’t think there’s any force that can stop them from being developed, but that also doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t push for laws that enforce responsible use of it, espeically by big coroporations and the governments. These should be kept to a much higher standard than anyone else. Unfortunately, the recent progress in tech shows that is not likely to happen. So, until then, “hide your kids, hide your wif[i]”.