source file: m1559.txt
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1998 13:05:45 -0700 (PDT)

Subject: Re: Cancelling out beats

From: bram <bram@gawth.com>

On Wed, 21 Oct 1998, Drew Skyfyre wrote:

> I don't know much about all this yet, but might what Brad is talking
> about and Sethares' approach be achieved using additive synthesis ?

Yep.

> there's always building samples in any of the free
> software 
> synthesis systems  (Csound, Syd, etc.) and loading them
> into a sampler like Vsamp<http://www.kagi.com/smaug/vsamp> 
> (on a PowerMac).

I should probably look into CSound, the sound capabilities for Java (my
development environment of choice) appear to not have been written yet.

I've now gotten a copy of Roederer's book, "The Physics and Psychophysics
of music" and have to say the first chapter is one of the best
philosophical tracts I have ever read.

I've also got a copy of Sethares's book on special order, but it will be a
matter of weeks or months before it arrives (grrr). Anybody have a
suggestion for how to order it other than just going through amazon.com?

I have a somewhat better idea of what I mean by 'beats' now. If take the
volume of a sound wave (I forget the three letter acronym off the top of
my head) and express it as the sum of a bunch of volumes of individual
sine waves, (no, I don't know a simple way of doing that transformation)
the beats are the waves in the resulting summation which weren't added
together to get the original waveform.

I think making a sound whose timbre is a bunch of pure tones is even
easier - just take the derivative of the square root of the sum of their
squares, but that just seems *too* easy.

Some testing is clearly called for.

I'll let you all know how it goes.

-Bram