The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics
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The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics
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Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics
#2Time Cube, but for sound!
I know next to nothing about music theory, but this felt like an abstruse statement of the bleeding obvious up until the section "What Tuning Really Is: Subsets of the HarmoniComb", which was interesting. I have no idea if it's accurate.
Incidentally, the author seems to use some strange 'İ' character (a capital I with a dot over it) a lot. I'm not sure why.
Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics
#3Beautiful visuals. Ever since the pythagoreans there is a mystical fascination with harmonic ratios and harmonic perception but after reading Philip Ball's "music instinct" I am not sure its justified. I don't know if there is something more updated since 2010 (for non-brain neurologists)
Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics
#4Time Cube, but for sound! I know next to nothing about music theory, but this felt like an abstruse statement of the bleeding obvious up until the section "What Tuning Really Is: Subsets of the HarmoniComb", which was interesting. I have no idea if it's accurate. Incidentally, the author seems to use some strange 'İ' character (a capital I with a dot over it) a lot. I'm not sure why.
"İ" is from some Turkic languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I
Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics
#5>There is of course a questionable degree of dissonance that can be tolerated, but the most obvious fact is that the brain can well be conditioned to accept and even enjoy these dissonances, as long as they are part of the only music it has ever experienced.
I disagree. I have listened to a fair amount of music in just intonation, and I am capable of hearing the tuning flaws of 12 equal temperament, but I am still capable of enjoying dissonance, and of appreciating the artistic flexibility that those tuning flaws give you.
This article presents a very limited view of music. Just intonation does have artistic merit (check out the works of Harry Partch), but it's not the only valid form of music. The human brain doesn't count frequencies, and integer ratios are not fundamental to perception of consonance. They just happen to work well with a common class of timbres. But for other timbres, e.g. tuned percussion, other tuning systems can sound more consonant. You can even hear this in Western classical music: pianos are tuned with non-integer octaves to compensate for the inharmonicity of their strings. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning
William Sethares published a more general model of consonance perception that handles all these cases:
https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf
I previously posted about this on HN with some more background and references:
Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics
#6>There is of course a questionable degree of dissonance that can be tolerated, but the most obvious fact is that the brain can well be conditioned to accept and even enjoy these dissonances, as long as they are part of the only music it has ever experienced. I disagree. I have listened to a fair amount of music in just intonation, and I am capable of hearing the tuning flaws of 12 equal temperament, but I am still ca…
That's right. If you spend too much time eating sweet chocolate you might start enjoying something more savory, too.
I am learning to play Irish trad on Irish flute and I have learned some time ago that dissonance is a real tool that can be used to create certain kind of moods, especially in slow airs.
Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics
#7>There is of course a questionable degree of dissonance that can be tolerated, but the most obvious fact is that the brain can well be conditioned to accept and even enjoy these dissonances, as long as they are part of the only music it has ever experienced. I disagree. I have listened to a fair amount of music in just intonation, and I am capable of hearing the tuning flaws of 12 equal temperament, but I am still ca…
I accidentally abandoned many of my preferences (likes/dislikes) and automated judgments. I took this newfound perspective into music, embodying the idea of "there are no wrong notes." I find deep joy in sitting at a 120+ year old pump organ, holding a mishmash of dissonant notes, including some out of tune ones, and wiggling one of the keys to learn to spot it in the mashup. It gives me a chance to witness the internalized feelings conditioned from classical musical training and listening to a ton of western music throughout my life, as well as to watch those feelings fade away into the joy.
We can learnjoy anything, which is why choosing to do anything without joy doesn't make sense to me anymore.
Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics
#8Ctrl-F: harmonic bundle
.. hmm ..
Ctrl-F: conjugate
.. hmm.
Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics
#9>There is of course a questionable degree of dissonance that can be tolerated, but the most obvious fact is that the brain can well be conditioned to accept and even enjoy these dissonances, as long as they are part of the only music it has ever experienced. I disagree. I have listened to a fair amount of music in just intonation, and I am capable of hearing the tuning flaws of 12 equal temperament, but I am still ca…
Sethares and Tymoczko are the go-tos on this.
But there's a lot more to creating interesting musical structures than creating chords out of mathematical structures that are based on the harmonic series.
The more time I spend trying to understand music, the less I understand it.
That's what makes it so endlessly fascinating.
Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics
#10Time Cube, but for sound! I know next to nothing about music theory, but this felt like an abstruse statement of the bleeding obvious up until the section "What Tuning Really Is: Subsets of the HarmoniComb", which was interesting. I have no idea if it's accurate. Incidentally, the author seems to use some strange 'İ' character (a capital I with a dot over it) a lot. I'm not sure why.
My immediate thought on reading the first paragraph is, "this is like Time Cube if it actually made complete sense under the word salad." It's really, honestly rather obnoxiously, obtuse, but I get what they are getting at.
It feels like when academic ML papers use the abstract to try to boozle and astound the reader with tons of jargon, because we all know a paper wins more Academia Points (TM) the more they can make other smart people feel dumb.