The ability to identify or produce any musical note from memory without reference, aka true perfect pitch, is a rare gift. In fact, less than one in 10,000 people have it--but you don't need the ability to spontaneously recall a melody with decent accuracy. If anything, you may not be as tone deaf as you think. Past research in lab settings shows people tasked with remembering and singing a well-known song can do so at least 15-percent of the time, more than can be chalked up to chance. Even so, psychologists' understanding of this recall process remains incomplete.

We have implemented a real time front end for detecting voiced speech and estimating its fundamental frequency. The front end performs the signal processing for voice-driven agents that attend to the pitch contours of human speech and provide continuous audiovisual feedback. The al- gorithm we use for pitch tracking has several distinguishing features: it makes no use of FFTs or autocorrelation at the pitch period; it updates the pitch incrementally on a sample-by-sample basis; it avoids peak picking and does not require interpolation in time or frequency to obtain high res- olution estimates; and it works reliably over a four octave range, in real time, without the need for postprocessing to produce smooth contours. The algorithm is based on two simple ideas in neural computation: the introduction of a purposeful nonlinearity, and the error signal of a least squares fit. The pitch tracker is used in two real time multimedia applica- tions: a voice-to-MIDI player that synthesizes electronic music from vo- calized melodies, and an audiovisual Karaoke machine with multimodal feedback.

Google has launched a new feature for its smart voice'Assistant' that lets you identify a song by simply humming, whistling or singing the tune. The feature, which is available on smartphones and smart speakers that use Google Assistant, uses machine learning to identify potential song matches. Users just need to tap the microphone on the search bar on the Google Assistant app and say'what's this song' or address their smart speakers by saying'Hey Google, what's this song?' before reciting it to the best of their ability. Without lyrics or even a perfect-pitch performance, the new tool will return potential matches and help the user identify the song that's been stuck in their head. In MailOnline's tests, the technology successfully identified 60 per cent of the songs hummed, sang or whistled into the Google Assistant mobile app.

Its creators claim it is one of the most powerful gaming consoles on Earth, now the newly launched Xbox One X from Microsoft is after a new accolade - to beat its rival Sony to dominate Christmas wishlists and the hearts of video game players. Microsoft's new console, a substantial upgrade to the original Xbox One released in 2013, comes almost exactly a year after Sony delivered a similar performance boost with its PlayStation 4 Pro. Things didn't used to be this way. Although format wars between gaming platforms have always raged – Commodore versus Spectrum, Sega versus Nintendo, Microsoft versus Sony – the hardware available in each generation was something fixed and immutable. A new games machine would give developers a set platform to create and optimise software on, sometimes for up to a decade, while players would benefit from having a reliable device they knew they wouldn't have to upgrade, as is common in PC gaming.