Pitch shift

On the Contrabass mailing list the past couple days there’s been some talk about low flutes, and about how a pitch-shifted concert flute will not sound quite like a real bass (or whatever) flute, but might at least convey the idea in the absence of a real bass (or whatever) flute sample. So I decided to do some flute pitch shifting and post the results. I started with a file from Wikimedia commons, a performance of Debussy’s “Syrinx”, and pitch shifted it using Audacity. I converted the original and the shifted versions to MP3 since Ogg support is still patchy.

Here’s the information and attribution for the original:

Description	Syrinx Recorded at Brechmin Auditorium, University of Washington, October 2006 by Stephen Bangs. Sarah plays a Miramatsu silver flute, a=442.
Date
Source	The Al Goldstein collection in the Pandora Music repository at ibiblio.org.
Author	Sarah Bassingthwaite (flute)
Permission (Reusing this file)	The license information states that this file is “available for free download subject to the EFF OAL” (Open Audio License), which in turn is interchangeable with the CC-BY-SA-2.0.

And here are the MP3 files of the original and shifted versions:

• syrinx-0 Original pitch
• syrinx-7 Down a fifth
  
• syrinx-12 Down an octave
  
• syrinx-19 Down an octave and a fifth
  
• syrinx-24 Down two octaves
  
• syrinx-31 Down two octaves and a fifth
  
• syrinx-36 Down three octaves