About Bryce Alexander

Funnily enough, there's no amusing anecdote to tell you about how I acquired Perfect Pitch. I took up the guitar at the age of 15 and picked it up pretty quickly. I read a lot of magazines about music and guitar playing. Articles about the nature of perfect pitch caught my eye when I was 18 and I began looking into methods to develop it. I began studying at Glasgow University and continued training my ear. I made progress and, within a year, I was able to tune a guitar to concert pitch by ear. My training continued from there and my ear improved over time, to my satisfaction, but I always remember that first stumbling block where I was frustrated about what I was trying to listen for. I read all about these elusive “qualities” of the various notes, but what were they? Apart from the fact that E flat sounds duller than F sharp, it seemed impossible to find the answers to these problems.

That's why, when I finally grasped the sounds that distinguish the notes, I conceived the idea of the Perfect Pitch Simulator. I cannot remember when I thought of the idea but I guess I was about 20 at the time. I had not yet developed my theory of perfect pitch, as described here: What is Perfect Pitch?, but I was sure digital processing could achieve what I had imagined, so I decided to study Electronics. After I finished the degree with a first class honors, I decided to complete the Master of Arts undergraduate degree I had started when I was 18. I now had an MA in music and a Bachelor of Engineering. I was then offered a scholarship to study a postgraduate masters degree in system level integration, involving electronics and software engineering. I completed the degree but my ideas on perfect pitch were still at the back of my mind. At this point, I imagined a physical piece of hardware, like a guitar pedal, which would do the processing. I took a graduate job and began using money I earned to build the Simulator in hardware, using audio amplifier chips and an FPGA processor (a programmable chip). I overcame many obstacles and was successful with this project, although it was never fully developed and I was beginning to wonder about the extreme difficulties of launching a physical electronic product. It had been suggested by now that it may be a lot easier to use the power of the PC to do this and create the system in software. I saw software as a bad option because I wanted the system to be portable and I thought software would be easily pirated. However, laptops have become more powerful over the years and are able to cope with complex applications and, well, if pirate copies of the Simulator are created and put me out of business then at least I can say I tried.

One day in 2008, while driving home from another mind-numbing day in the rat race, it suddenly dawned on me that software was the way forward for the Perfect Pitch Simulator. Do I wish I had this epiphany earlier? Sure, but what can you do? I left the job in 2009 with some money I had saved and Bryce Alexander Music was born.

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