Cancelling out beats

On the Autumn home page (is that thing being updated or what?) it says:

As Bill Sethares shows in his recent papers on timbre and
consonance,("Local consonance and the relationship between timbre and
scale"1993. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 94(3): 1218-1228
(Sept) and "Relating Timbre and Tuning" 1993. Experimental Musical
Instruments 9(2): 22-29 (Dec) consonance can be obtained in virtually any
tuning if the overtone spectrum is properly designed (algorithm given).

Might it be possible to find these online? If not, could anyone suggest
libraries which might have them?

My guess, without knowing exactly what those papers say, is that they are
generally based on an algorithm for cancelling out the beats of any two
notes. I know the beats can be essentially calculated using continued
fractions, so I'm guessing there's a rather straightforward way of
calculating, given a*sin(x) + b*sin(y), a and b being volumes and x and y
being wavelengths, there's a rather straightforward way of calculating a
bunch of other sin functions which when added will cancel out all the
beats.

If my above guess is correct, I might (might) take on a project of writing
a utility which would play any random set of pure tones and do automatic
beat cancellation on them, which I think would be a very cool toy if
nobody's done it already, although there's some math I need to know
first ...

-Bram

excuse me, Ed Sanders created a 31-TET instrument called the "microlyre."

Johnny Reinhard
Director
American Festival of Microtonal Music
318 East 70th Street, Suite 5FW
New York, New York 10021 USA
(212)517-3550/fax (212) 517-5495
reinhard@idt.net
http://www.echonyc.com/~jhhl/AFMM

On Wed, 30 Sep 1998, Johnny Reinhard wrote:

> May 20 and May 27, 1999 -- both Thursdays -- are concert nights for the
> AFMM at St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University, NYC.
>
> One hightlight (May 20) will be the premiere of "Thirsting For Peace in
> a Raging Century" for 2 voices and microlyre by Ed Sanders, leader of the
> Fugs. The microlye is an electronic pad instrument invented by Sanders to
> play harmonically rich bass in 31-TET. I keep listening to his 20 minute
> work over and over again for simple joy. The piece was spurred by the
> death of Abbie Hoffman.
>
> Johnny Reinhard
> Director
> American Festival of Microtonal Music
> 318 East 70th Street, Suite 5FW
> New York, New York 10021 USA
> (212)517-3550/fax (212) 517-5495
> reinhard@idt.net
> http://www.echonyc.com/~jhhl/AFMM
>