"excitalking"

Hi All,

I've just uploaded a new piece called "Excitalking Very Much"
which is similar to "Earlight" in that it uses an adaptive
tuning and (roughly) the same sound palatte. It's at:

/tuning/files/sethares/excitalking.mp3

Since there's been some discussion here of methods of adaptive tunings,
I'd be happy for any comments/critiques/thoughts about the piece or the
effects of the tuning strategy...

-- Bill Sethares

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, sethares@e... wrote:

> Since there's been some discussion here of methods of adaptive
tunings,
> I'd be happy for any comments/critiques/thoughts about the piece or
the
> effects of the tuning strategy...

Could you tell us what the tuning strategy is?

when replying to my request for feedback on "Excitalking,"
Gene Ward Smith wrote:

> Could you tell us what the tuning strategy is?

Be happy to. The basic idea is to take all the notes that are sounding
at any given time and to retune them so as to maximize a measure
of "sensory consonance," or perhaps more properly to minimize the
"sensory dissonance." This measure is built up from the Plomp and Levelt
curves for the roughness between pairs of sine waves by assuming that
the dissonances between all pairs of simultaneously sounding partials
are additive. For harmonic sounds (likemost of those in "excitalking,"
this comes down something very close to JI, but a JI in which there
are no fixed pitches at all (because the pitches always wiggle around
depending on what else is sounding at the time).

Of course, there are a number of practical details -- and I talk about
some of these in a paper in the J. New Music Research.
I've put a version online at:

http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/paperspdf/adaptun2002.pdf

--Bill Sethares

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, sethares@e... wrote:

> Be happy to. The basic idea is to take all the notes that are
sounding
> at any given time and to retune them so as to maximize a measure
> of "sensory consonance," or perhaps more properly to minimize the
> "sensory dissonance."

This is funny; I've been thinking about doing this very thing, and
was going to ask over on tuning-math for easily computed smooth
dissonance functions, and whether critical bands might work better
for this purpose than plunging into the murky depths of harmonic
entropy. I am wondering how you deal with a disonnace function whose
derivative is not monotonic, or am I leaping to conclusions that you
did things the way I was turning over in my mind? I also wonder if
you assume a certain timbre in advance.

> I've put a version online at:
>
> http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/paperspdf/adaptun2002.pdf

Ah, thanks. I suspect I'll find my questions answered.