Re: Search for consonant diads

Hi Paul,

Well, I could have a drop list of ones to try out, so one can try
the Helmholtz idea, and some of the modern ones, and compare.

Depends on how easy they all are to program. I'd start with
the Helmholtz type idea as the easiest, and because it is all
set up to count beats anyway.

I'm mainly interested in it from practical point of view as a heuristic
for finding new chords, with the scale already given.

The Sethares book looks interesting, especially, the suggestion
that the Gamelan scales are linked with the timbres of the gamelan
instruments.

I've also looked at your ideas from time to time, but couldn't
say I understand enough to be able to program it in yet.
I will be sure to ask you when / if I need to know.

At present don't know if this idea of searching for consonant
diads will be a useful way of finding chords,
but it seems quite promising, and if it works, makes sense to list
the main ways of sorting diads according to consonance, so
that one can try them all out and see what happens.

It's good at any rate to have some awareness of what
has being done in the field, at this stage.

I was very interested to hear you say in one of your posts
that if one superimposes notes to make
an otonal chord, using a timbre with inharmonic partials,
then one will hear a sequence of "harmonics" in the
same pitch relationship as a "normal" harmonic series,
with a new short "harmonic series" above each inharmonic partial.

Your idea seemed quite likely to me that those would remind one
of an instrument timbre with harmonic partials.

As for your idea that this would make the otonal
chord sound more consonant than the utonal ones,
I'd be interested to listen to them.

Were there any example clips for this - I'd be
especially interested to listen to them to hear what they
sound like. Maybe other "newbies" would too?

One could imagine indeed with a sufficiently
strange timbre, and with many notes in the otonal
series, the constructed timbres might overwhelm
the actual ones, so that one would hear kind of
"ghost instruments" in the sound.

Could be fun to try and create that effect, and
see if it works! Especially if one could do it
with real samples, rather than synthetic timbres.

I wonder if anyone has done it...

Robert

Robert Walker wrote,

>As for your idea that this would make the otonal
>chord sound more consonant than the utonal ones,
>I'd be interested to listen to them.

>Were there any example clips for this - I'd be
>especially interested to listen to them to hear what they
>sound like. Maybe other "newbies" would too?

It seems that we came to this conclusion already with harmonic timbres, but
I'd be happy to repeat the experiment with some random inharmonic timbre, if
someone doesn't beat me to it.

>One could imagine indeed with a sufficiently
>strange timbre, and with many notes in the otonal
>series, the constructed timbres might overwhelm
>the actual ones, so that one would hear kind of
>"ghost instruments" in the sound.

>Could be fun to try and create that effect, and
>see if it works! Especially if one could do it
>with real samples, rather than synthetic timbres.

Well the thing is we perceive timbre more by the timing of the attacks than
anything else -- so it would be hard to acheive this in a strictly
human-controlled performance unless long sustained tones were used. A
computer-contolled performance should be capable of exploiting this effect
and completely confusing the listener!