source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 18:32:04 -0800 Subject: Re: mapping spectra From: rtomes@kcbbs.gen.nz (Ray Tomes) William Sethares wrote: >A few years ago, Tom Staley and I wrote an article called "Sounds of >Crystals" in Experimental Musical Instruments (EMI) that did >something very similar (ref. below). We looked at x-ray diffraction >patterns (spectra) and mapped them into the audio spectra. Many of >the resulting sounds were exceedingly complex (*very* many >nonharmonic partials), but there were some real standouts. One of >our favorites was the sound of the morphine crystal, which we used >for a piece titled "Duet for Morphine and Crystal" that appeared in >the EMI compilation cassette that year. Neat! William, can you please explain how you determined what frequencies to play at what time. I imagine that the crystal output (slowed down) is a bit like sitting on the keyboard and staying there so you need a way to seperate the notes. If any of you composer types want data on this sort of thing then I have the CRC handbook which has 3600 pages of physical and chemical constants. It includes the spectra of all elements and heaps of other similar stuff. I also have a scanner that can do OCR (although it is behaving weirdly at present) which allows lots of numbers to be put in with little effort and good accuracy. *** All my posts to the list seem to suffer from numbers being inserted after certain characters. For example an equal sign "=" gets the treatment as did some recent capital f's "F". This does not appear to happen to other people's posts and it doesn't happen to me on any other list or in usenet or email. Does anyone have a clue about this? *** -- Ray Tomes -- rtomes@kcbbs.gen.nz -- Harmonics Theory -- http://www.kcbbs.gen.nz/users/rtomes/rt-home.htm Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 11 Mar 1997 04:42 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA01162; Tue, 11 Mar 1997 04:42:00 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA01160 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id TAA21171; Mon, 10 Mar 1997 19:40:30 -0800 Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 19:40:30 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu