fiat vox - chromatic tuner

fiat vox is a chromatic tuner for Sailfish OS. It listens continuously and has nothing to press.

The face shows one letter — the nearest semitone — with seven dots above it and the frequency in hertz below. The centre dot lights green when you are in tune. To the right of centre you are sharp, to the left you are flat, and the dots turn amber and then red as you drift. The seven dots span twenty-five cents either way, so each one is worth about eight. Nothing slides sideways as you move up the scale: the letter is centred on itself and the sharp sign hangs off its right edge, so a C sits exactly where a C sharp sits.

Tap the face and it sounds the note. Not the frequency it just measured — the true, correct pitch of the letter on screen, because a reference is the target and not the mistake. With nothing detected it sounds a plain A: a tuning fork in your pocket. Tap again to stop, or it fades out by itself after a minute.

The reference pitch runs from 415 to 443 Hz — baroque, Viennese classical, Verdi, old French, nineteenth century, modern standard, and the orchestral tunings above it. One tap sets it and the app remembers.

It hears with YIN, a time-domain pitch detector rather than an FFT, which is what lets it stay accurate on harmonically rich sounds — organ, bowed strings, a sung vowel — instead of jumping an octave. Measured against synthetic tones it is within one and a half cents at its worst, and under a tenth of a cent through most of the musical range. It reaches down to a low organ pedal A at 27.5 Hz.

The cover keeps tuning, so you can prop the phone on the music stand and read it from where you sit. The reference tone has a cover action too.

fiat vox follows your ambience by default and takes its colours from it. If you would rather it kept its own, there is a single toggle in the pull-down that switches it to Fiat colours — the warm paper palette shared by the rest of the family. Green, amber and red never change, in either mode: they mean true, close and wrong, and a tuner must not say different things in different ambiences.

It needs the microphone and nothing else. No network, no accounts, no data leaves the phone.

Part of the Fiat family of small, quiet Sailfish apps by Munkstolen.

Source: https://github.com/munksh/FiatVox