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The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

whatmusicreallyis.com

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Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#21

Post by klysm »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #19

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 sp…

Yeah a lot of the explanations have a pseudo-scientific flavor to them with questionable mathematical hand waving.

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#23

Post by deeviant »

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.

> 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.

This is because the author is actually a fractal within a 420-dimensional LSD hypercube, the 'İ' denotes membership of the set of infinity|UniTYTriome.

Also, you nailed in one, definitely timecube vibes going on here.

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#25

Post by iainctduncan »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #9
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…

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.

I've read quite a bit on this, but not Sethares, do you have a recommendation for starting on his work? thanks!

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#26

Post by bigbillheck »

From the 'Tuning' page:

> In the case of the human voice, these overtones will all be harmonics, because they display relationships based on perfect integers. On non-biologic instruments (which display slight deviations from perfect numbers due to mechanical attributes like stiffness), the whole matrix will get stretched or compressed according to the deviation (or “inharmonicity”) factor

I'm not sure I understand an instrument made mostly of meat and cartilage and maybe a little phlegm can be more 'perfect' than a mechanical one.

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#28

Post by tomc1985 »

chestervonwinch wrote: post #11
crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Psychedelics, perhaps?

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#29

Post by eezurr »

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…

+1 for Harry Parch. Here's a good introduction for new people [1]. I'd add in Lou Harrison [2] and Tristan Murail [3]

Lou Harrison was heavily influenced by Gamelan music, and Tristan Murail is one of the founders of spectralism, which uses spectrograms of individual instruments to build distinct harmonies by having orchestral instruments play the harmonic series as shown on the spectrogram. They stretch this idea even further by adding in "harmonics/overtones" that are not shown on the spectrogram to create dissonance.

[1] https://youtu.be/kCuYcS_Lcro?t=372

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7IwH01YFAI

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6WXzOIsBuQ

Re: The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics

#30

Post by seph-reed »

Holy cow! I just came up with this theory and started proving it like... 2 months ago. Crazy how these things line up sometimes.

One thing not included in here: given tests on human response rates to sound, it is very likely that grouping frequencies together based off a harmonic series is done "before the brain." (ie, that bird is this set of frequencies, that tree in the wind is this other set)

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