Searching for New Sound - Music Composition ideas

On every acoustic instrument, when a string, an air column, or even a material vibrates, it does not just produce the frequency is played (the fundamental) but also the sequence of frequencies as the series of integers multiple of a fundamental. A note is played also means a series of notes are above sounding weak above. If we focus on playing around the harmonics, we can get a kind of hazy sound contrast to the solid fundamentals that we usually play. On string instruments, harmonic is a quite standard technique. But on woodwind, it is a technique that has not been used widely. The hazy sound is very special and deserves to be heard more. These two pieces are stunning. Skip to 03:26 for the harmonics tone color A piece with harmonics as the major feature by  Wil Offermans The piece by Wil Offermans is the only piece I found used the harmonic extensively. Ravel and Toru Takemitsu have some examples of it but are not prominent. Thus, I improved based on the harmonic technique, ...

When an instrument is played, it does not just produce the frequency is played (the fundamental) but also the sequence of frequencies as the series of integers multiple of a fundamental. Each instrument differs from the other mainly in the volume of the individual harmonics. If I can manually fine-tune the volume of every single harmonic, in theory, I can mimic every single instrument or create any new timbre. This pure data patch I made l randomly generates different ratios of harmonics, thus, randomly creating timbre. However, the harmonic series is infinite, in this patch, only eight have been generated.

When you play two tones in different frequencies, there is always a combination tone, a faint tone produced in the inner ear by two simultaneously sounded musical tones. It is more audible in higher volume and pitches.  Here is a pure data demo. Try to sing the third tone when you hear two tones in the beginning. Can you sing the third tone before it is played? The third tone is the different tones of the playing frequencies. In the demo, 1000-800=200. So you can "hear" and sing the 200Hz tone. But it is not played in real-life since the interference makes you hear it👻.  Interference of two soundwaves For more info, you may look into the page of combination tone in Britannica. To explore this phenomenon further, we now have three tones playing at the same time 1000, 800, and 600 Hz. Both combination tones are 1000-800=200Hz and 800-600=200 Hz. Our brain can work backwards to generate the fundamental and the harmonic series. (f, 2f, 3f, 4f, 5f,...) The fundamental is 200H...

As a succession of the previous article of C. Vivier harmonized his melody by harmonic series, I was inspired and tried to do something similar, treating the harmonic series as a  scale and building triads. The example below is a  harmonic series on B-flat. I picked part of the series in the red box as an 8-note scale. (the digit on the notes show how many cents deviate from the equal temperament) A harmonic series on B-flat (the series is infinite, only the first 16 partials have shown) Now we stack chords with thirds, every 2 steps on the harmonic series scale (red box). The result is below. chords from the harmonic series I would like to borrow the idea of traditional functional harmony, the tonic, dominant and subdominant function, in order to give myself guidance on using these chords. Then, I rated the quality of the chords, 1 for the purest and 5 for the harshest. I did it by ear so it is subjective. (This is art.) Back to our traditional functional harmony. It is ...

Equal temperament, dividing an octave into 12 equal semitones has a lot of advantages. Composers can compose with all 12 keys and freely modulate to each other. However, it is disconnected from nature. It disrupted the simple ratios of third and fifth that harmonics naturally vibrating. The harmony constructed with ET is sounded slightly out of tune. Claude Vivier (1948-1983) was a Quebecois composer. His music emphasis on tone color. His writing focus on a melody by the most special of him is harmonized his melody by harmonic series. See the chord at m.24. The chord (m.24) is built from the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th overtones of G2  (the D of 11th is omitted in the chord) He spread out the notes to smoothen the quality. However, he quantized the notes to quarter tone, it is not super accurate to the actual harmonic series. These are the overtones notated for absolute accuracy. (the digit cents. 1 cent = 1/100 of a semitone) Putting the digit on the score is not very user-frie...

When you try to compose in a random style, writing melody with random notes or spelling chords with random notes, after you compose for a few measures you may start to find a pattern is forming itself. You can try it but It is extremely difficult. How about we pass it to the computer, in theory, a computer can generate truly random numbers but we need to set a boundary to it. For instance, we don't want the frequency or the midi note number is beyond the human audible range. In this case, to ensure the numbers are useable, we will design a pseudorandom system that satisfies one or more statistical tests for randomness but is produced by a definite mathematical procedure. This is a pure data patch that I made. The program would randomly select the notes for the gamelan scale. The fun effect is the melody is randomly generated by the program there shouldn't be any pattern. But the longer you listen to it, your brain starts to organize patterns. Very cool for a composer, just sit ...

If you try to understand what is equal temperament (ET) and go to Wikipedia, the article says which we divide the octave into 12 equal parts (so far so good and easy to understand) and with a ratio equal to the 12th root of 2 (12√2 ≈ 1.05946). The problem is how can we use a household calculator or the app on our phone to calculate the 12th root of 2, let alone in the age without a calculator that Chu-Tsaiyu in 1584 was the first person who calculated the ratio of ET in China. Chu only wrote the answer/result only but we can only guess his process.  Back to square 1, we divide the octave with 12 equal ratios (r), the distance between two semitones. When 12 semitone distances sum up, we arrive at the octave of the original tone. We know that an octave is the original frequency double itself. Right now hands on your calculator. Step 1, calculate the square root of 2. Step 2, calculate the square root of the answer of step 1. Step 3, calculate the cube root of the answer of ...