source file: m1541.txt
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 22:35:04 -0700 (PDT)

Subject: Cancelling out beats

From: bram <bram@gawth.com>

On the Autumn home page (is that thing being updated or what?) it says:

As Bill Sethares shows in his recent papers on timbre and
consonance,("Local consonance and the relationship between timbre and
scale"1993. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 94(3):  1218-1228
(Sept) and "Relating Timbre and Tuning" 1993. Experimental Musical
Instruments 9(2): 22-29 (Dec)  consonance can be obtained in virtually any
tuning if the overtone spectrum is properly designed (algorithm given). 

Might it be possible to find these online? If not, could anyone suggest
libraries which might have them?

My guess, without knowing exactly what those papers say, is that they are
generally based on an algorithm for cancelling out the beats of any two
notes. I know the beats can be essentially calculated using continued
fractions, so I'm guessing there's a rather straightforward way of
calculating, given a*sin(x) + b*sin(y), a and b being volumes and x and y
being wavelengths, there's a rather straightforward way of calculating a
bunch of other sin functions which when added will cancel out all the
beats.

If my above guess is correct, I might (might) take on a project of writing
a utility which would play any random set of pure tones and do automatic
beat cancellation on them, which I think would be a very cool toy if
nobody's done it already, although there's some math I need to know 
first ... 

-Bram