Origins

How it began

Dr. Eric Freudenthal is an Associate Professor of computer science at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Both Eric and his wife, Susan, love music. Susan, has a great singing voice and Eric is an enthusiastic but off-pitch singer who can't even carry a tune.

Dr. Eric Hanson is an opera singer and is presently Chair of Music at SVU. Hanson previously was also faculty at UTEP. He was fascinated by incompetent singers like Eric Freudenthal. He made a critical observation that incompetent singers frequently sang notes whose harmonic series includes notes they intended to sing.

Freudenthal's Big Idea

• the reason some of us sing notes whose harmonic series includes intended notes is that we primarily hear the on-pitch harmonic, and
• these same people may sing better if they could hear their own voices without the confusing harmonics.

First analog prototype

Dr. Bryan Usevitch, a former professor of electrical engineering, implemented a first prototype from analog electronics that included a manual filter adjustment.

App implementation with automatic adjustment

Ed Seymour ( a student in Computer Science) was tasked with constructing a software implementation as an app that automatically tunes a low-pass filter based on the note the singer utters. Seymour first implemented this app for Windows, and then ported it to Android.