should check Tero's other works: https://teropa.info/
another comment:
if you want to use any number of sine waves of any freq, you can use code to do this:
Harmonics Explorer
41–50 of 55 posts
Re: Harmonics Explorer
#42This is really cool. I used to do a lot of overtone ("harmonic") throat singing and playing with this tool reminded me of those days. For anyone curious, vowels are mostly just how we perceive different harmonic distributions. Put differently, harmonics are the basis of what it means to pronounce a different vowel. The human voice is basically just a harmonic chord, with different distributions of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th,…
90 second video demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnC8I3d2MXQ Lots of different notes present. Perfect 5th, major 2nd, major 3rd, major 7th are all found in the harmonic series. In addition there's some beautiful non-piano intervals, notably the 7th harmonic (slightly flat minor 7th) and the 11th harmonic (flat tri-tone)
Strictly speaking they're all non-piano intervals, just some are more non-piano than others. (Or you can retune your piano …)
Re: Harmonics Explorer
#43My similar project, with a bit of a spirograph mixed in: https://merely.xyz/waves
Re: Harmonics Explorer
#44This is really cool. I used to do a lot of overtone ("harmonic") throat singing and playing with this tool reminded me of those days. For anyone curious, vowels are mostly just how we perceive different harmonic distributions. Put differently, harmonics are the basis of what it means to pronounce a different vowel. The human voice is basically just a harmonic chord, with different distributions of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th,…
That reminds me, I saw a video recently of a choir practice where they sang "brighter" and "darker" based on the conductor's hand position. It was fascinating how the singers could control the brightness of their voice while holding the same note and frequency. When they went bright, it sounded closer to "eee" or "iii". When they went dark, it sounded like "uuu" and "ooo". From that, I learned that the lyrics of a so…
Funnily, this is how Hungarian appends suffixes at the end of the words. The "brightness" of the suffix has to match the brightness of the stem.
We'd call e/i/ö/ü "high" tone class while a (as in the word calm) / o / u "low" tone.
Re: Harmonics Explorer
#45I like the thing, but it misses what I enjoyed teaching about these most: phase. Many people know white noise is nominally 'all frequencies at the same intenisty', yet those taught Fourier mathematics are also taught that the same recipe makes a pulse. The difference is all in the phase information, and why I maintain to this day the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, as typically applied, is incorrect.
Yes phase information is really important. Try this: 1. Fourier Transform an Image 2. Set all magnitues the the spectrum to 1.0, but do not change the phase 3. Inverse Transform and look at the result 4. Now try the same, but this time keep the maginutes unchanged but change all phases to 0° Spoiler: When changing all amplitudes the image is still regocognizable, when changing all phases, it is not. See example: [1]…
Typically the Nyquist Shannon theorem is stated to say that you need to sample at twice the maximum frequency for complete reproducibility. Applying this to a digital signal, that does indeed work with a discrete Fourier transform. Applying this in the perspective of a sample rate (i.e. *.wav file of a recorded audio signal) does not hold true though in my opinion as the discrete signal has become a scalar, not a vector of the Fourier example.
If we take the highest reproducible frequency, two samples per wave, we find we could perfectly sample at the highest and lowest values of that wave, but we could have equally sampled the zero-crossing point, all depending on where in the phase the sample rate aligns with a given wave form. As the sampling has lost significant information, I believe a sample rate should be much higher than what Nyquist-Shannon would suggest for a high degree of reproducibility.
If your source is a digital signal, and you only need to reproduce that signal, of course 2x is ample.
Re: Harmonics Explorer
#46This is really cool. I used to do a lot of overtone ("harmonic") throat singing and playing with this tool reminded me of those days. For anyone curious, vowels are mostly just how we perceive different harmonic distributions. Put differently, harmonics are the basis of what it means to pronounce a different vowel. The human voice is basically just a harmonic chord, with different distributions of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th,…
Is this related to formants? I don’t actually know what that term means but I’ve heard it used in this context
As I understand it, the formant is the difference between the interval from the harmonic series, and the interval using whatever temperment you're in. Piano-notes are in equal temperment. String players, and some wind instruments allow you to play the "in-between" notes selectively (like a true major third, unlike the horrid thing a equal temperment produces) giving you a powerful emotional tool
Re: Harmonics Explorer
#47Nice, I built a similar toy with RNBO - https://knobs-gallery.vercel.app/harmonics
Re: Harmonics Explorer
#48It's wonderful when an interaction makes you question that which you thought you knew.
My understanding was that, in order to produce a triangle or sawtooth wave, you need to have a phase control. This is because of the (-1)^k term in the Fourier expansion, as seen in Wikipedia.
After seeing this site produce a sawtooth wave with no phase control, my mind is blown apart, into tiny little pieces.
Re: Harmonics Explorer
#49Nice visualization! A few improvement suggestions -- I noticed that it is easy to clip the 'master' output, a 'master fader' to control its output (or a checkbox to rescale visualization based on maximum value). Also, implementing a phase control for each harmonic would also be interesting for visualization. Finally, why not add a wavetable synth to allow you to hear the resulting waveform?
Master volume fader, please. This is cool but I have to change my computer volume to adjust the volume and that's not a very great experience. Especially when I click Square and it just starts screaming at me.
It's in the top left, labelled master or sawtooth. Defaults to 0.500.
Re: Harmonics Explorer
#50should check Tero's other works: https://teropa.info/ another comment: if you want to use any number of sine waves of any freq, you can use code to do this: https://glicol.org/tour#mixjs2
I really love the https://teropa.info/musicmouse/