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beating the beats

🔗sethares@eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu (William Sethares)

10/2/1998 6:11:54 AM
Bram wrote:

> Might it be possible to find these (Sethares consoannce papers)
online?

An .html version of "Relating Timbre and Tuning"
is available online at:

http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/consemi.html

and theres a bunch of "supporting stuff" like computer programs to
do the dissonance calculations branching from my homepage at:

http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/

***

As Paul Hahn mentioned, Bram's idea of cancelling beats in
a "noise cancellation" kind of way is not directly related to the
minimization of beats via a sensory dissonance calculation (which is
what's going on in "Relating Timbre and Tuning").

In any case, one useful formula from trig is:

sin(x) + sin(y) = 2 cos( (x-y)/2 ) sin( (x+y)/2 )

To apply this to the beat cancellation, use this in the form

sin(w t) + sin( (w + dw)t ) = 2 cos( dw t /2) sin( (w+dw/2)t )

where w = one frequency
w+dw = other frequency
(thus dw = different between the two frequencies)
and t is time.

The "amplitude" is thus the slowly varying wave cos(dw t/2)
while the basic wave if sin( (w+dw/2)t )

***