source file: m1369.txt
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 1998 13:31:50 -0600

Subject: talk in Illinois

From: sethares@eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu (William Sethares)

For those of you in the Champaign-Urbana area,
I'm giving a talk this next Friday (April 3)
in the Music Building at U of I... about musical
scales and spectra and so on. Here's the abstract:

***************************


Perception-Based Audio Processing

At the intersection of signal processing, music, and psychology lies
perception-based audio processing, which investigates the
relationships between the structure of sounds, the structure of music,
and the underlying biological/perceptual aspects of the human
auditory system.

The talk begins by showing how to build a device that can measure
the "sensory" consonance and/or dissonance of a sound in its musical
context. As shown in my recent book "Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum,
Scale", such a "dissonance meter" has implications in music theory, in
synthesizer design, in the construction of musical scales and tunings,
and in the design of musical instruments.

Two issues are discussed in detail:
  (a) Given a sound, what is the scale in which it can be played
most consonantly?
  (b) Given a scale, how can sounds be constructed which will appear
most consonant in that scale?

Sound examples and musical excerpts are presented throughout,
and both the strengths and limitations of the method are discussed.