About Bryce
Alexander
Bryce Alexander BEng., MA,
MSc.
I don't have an exciting or
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 fast. 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. Of course, there are many distractions at
university, however, 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 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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