Nonharmonic Overtone Structures

I personally didn't get the impression that Paul E. contended that
nonharmonic overtone structures would not fuse into the effect of a single tone,
but Brian M. is definitely correct that they do.

If any of you who have heard Bill Sethares' tuning-optimized timbres can
clearly attest to that. They're very interesting, by the way, and I encourage
you folks to explore them a bit if you haven't heard them yet. But you
certainly don't have to go that far either. Just listen to a bell or a marimba.


Now Brian may be side-stepping one important point though: Some of the more
wildly nonharmonic timbres can be difficult to nail down to a specific pitch.
Chimes and timpani seem at first to have a very clear pitch, but I find that
when I try to tune samples of those instruments to each other, I start having
problems. Strangely, the more carefully I listen to them the less sure I am of
what exactly their pitch is.


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