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The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

whatmusicreallyis.com

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Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#11

Post by chestervonwinch »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #7
mrob wrote: post #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 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 inter…

> I accidentally abandoned...

It sounds like you made a conscious and intentional decision. How does one drop their preconceived judgements by accident?

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#12

Post by king_magic »

twic wrote: post #2

Time 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.

Ah, Time Cube - instantly what I thought as well.

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#13

Post by egonelbre »

mrob wrote: post #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 ca…

I like to think that in an alternate world, somebody wrote:

> There is of course a questionable degree of consonance that can be tolerated, but the most obvious fact is that the brain can well be conditioned to accept and even enjoy these consonances, as long as they are part of the only music it has ever experienced.

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#14

Post by qmmmur »

mrob wrote: post #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 ca…

> as long as they are part of the only music it has ever experienced.

So noise music is only enjoyable if listened to from birth in isolation?

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#16

Post by bsedlm »

I have been thinking very much this for over a decade now. Down to even using the times and the division signs the same way (or + and - given they are more easily typed).

An interesting thing is that 2 is very special musically, but not mathematically, because it makes all notes musically the same (establishes pitch classes).

A very funky thing (kinda annoying really) is as follows:

Given a note, any note, as a tonal center or starting point (I call it O for origin) you 'make' a new note from this one by multiplying by 3 (O+3) [note 1]. Similarly we can make O+5.

O+5 is in traditional western music closest to the major third

AND O+3 corresponds to a 12-tet perfect fifth (flat 2 cents).

In short +3 is the fifth and +5 is the third...weirdly annoying.

note 1: Here's were 2 (which defines octaves) comes into play because it allows to say that O+3 defines a pitch-class no matter the octave.

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#18

Post by bsedlm »

mrob wrote: post #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 ca…

I based my bachelor's graduation project on Setahres' work.

The one thing I wish we could find is the drum version of this. As in instead of starting from a string (which leads to harmonic series), start from a circular membrane (which leads to a very complicated mathematical result based on bessel functions ircc).

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#19

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

I found the first 2/3 of this mostly acoustic-woo, but by the time it got to the actual 2D "HarmoniComb" I was quite excited by the concept of this as a playing surface.

However, then I decided to go visit another page at the same site, the one on "Tuning". It has a section on digital sample rates that is just so completely incorrect that it made me wonder about everything else I had read. The page linked above is specifically about "combining harmonics". However, the author doesn't appear to understand how the exact same concept (more specifically, how any waveform can be represented as the sum of a (potentially infinite) series of sinusoidal waves) makes their musings on digital audio totally wrong.

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#20

Post by klysm »

This is incredibly dismissive of any harmony that is based on equal temperament, or anything that isn’t the harmonic series. I don’t think that’s justified - a lot of jazz harmony only sounds good in equal temperament. For instance, minor 6 chords are going to sound terrible.
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