Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale

by William A. Sethares

The only things truly universal in music are those that are based on biological and/or perceptual facts. Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale focuses on perceptions of consonance and dissonance, which are defined in the Harvard Dictionary of Music: ?Consonance is used to describe the agreeable effect produced by certain intervals as against the disagreeable effect produced others. Consonance and dissonance are the very foundation of harmonic music... consonance represents the element of smoothness and repose, while dissonance represents the no less important elements of roughness and irregularity.? TTSS begins by asking (and answering) the question: How can we build a device to measure consonance and dissonance? The remainder of the book describes the impact of such a ?dissonance meter? on music theory, on synthesizer design, on the construction of musical scales and tunings, on the design of musical instruments, and introduces related compositional techniques and new methods of musicological analyses. A new chapter contains a detailed explanation of how the software works. It incorporates several important simplifications over the full presentation in the current Chapter 7 in order to allow it to function in real time. Another new chapter describes the various ways that the software can be used. New sections throughout the book bring it up to date with the current state of the subject. TTSS offers a unique analysis of the relationship between the structure of sound and the structure of scale and will be use to musicians and composers who use inharmonic tones and sounds. This includes a large percentage of people composing and performing with modern musical synthesizers. It will be of use to arrangers, musicologists, and others interested in musical analysis. TTSS provides a unique approach to working with environmental sounds, and there are clear applications for the use of inharmonic sounds in film scoring. The book will also be of interest to engineers and others interested in the design of audio devices such as musical synthesizers, special effects devices, and keyboards.

Genres: Music, Mathematics

444 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2004

Reviews

[Mark Moon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had fun and learned a lot! Now I understand the relationship between the nearly-harmonic timbre of most traditional Western musical instruments, on the one hand, and the tunings typically used for Western music (i.e. 12-tet and various just intonations). The author also explores the relationship between the timbre of musical instruments and the tunings/scales in use in both traditional Indonesian music and traditional Thai music. There are many very cool ideas in here, including ideas about how to design tunings for given timbres, and vice versa. I learned lots of interesting things about the details of real-life tunings; for example, a professionally-tuned piano will typically have slightly stretched octaves (around 1202 cents), and this is related to the inharmonicity of piano wire that makes it ring a few cents sharp towards the end of a note.

[Tom Blurbgess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seriously engaging and enjoyable for something that should be such a dense read, going into all kinds of psychoacoustic theories and their musical applications, with decent mathematical and algorithmic explanations in the appendices. Huge range of tuning/timbral topics explored, and shows compositional potential excellently for anyone wanting to use the ideas for themselves.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read two editions of this book, and found it completely fascinating. It's a great source of information for a lot of the stuff about tuning, consonance, and dissonance, and perceptions, which they do not teach in ordinary music school. I used concepts from this book in tinkering with my own synthesized sounds and tunings, to good effect. A must-read for all microtonalists.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant practical fusion of mathematics and music. If you've ever sampled metal percussion and had a hard time making it sound good, the solution, quantified and graphed, is here.

If that ain't your bag.