the way I see it, pitch is timbre and timbre is pitch. timbre is made of harmonics which can be observed as discrete pitches. Play around with an additive synth and you quickly begin to see this. Speed up a polyrhythm and you get a musical interval.
pitch, timbre, rhythm, harmony.. all the same phenomenon seen from different perspectives.
@palms, @lala I think my perception of these micro adjustments is somewhat "mainstream": I can definitely hear the advantage of going the extra mile and I find it surprisingly obvious with isolated chords but it's not that I listen to music and say "uh-oh, that tuning needs to be fixed".
What I do hear and can't stand at all is if an acoustic melodic instrument tuning is off more than maybe 15 cents.
It may have to do a lot with what kind of music in a certain context we've listened to as young children in their first years. It's not only about perfect pitch but also about the precision I believe.
But even in additive synthesis the added harmonics are usually based on the root pitch/frequency no?
At least this is the case with most additive synths I've come across so far?!
Another way is naturally to build an additive synth manually by stacking sine-waves at what ever frequencies and amplitudes one desires and scale each oscillators frequency input and output individually 😎
to me it seems like the small detunings are just a way to get "more color" out of an acoustic instrument when there isnt much you can manipulate. maybe you get a resonance at certain frequencies you like or u dont like ...
some opera houses have a pitch of the house thats not a=440hz to avoid certain frequencies in the room ...
western harmonics are easy to decipher - is this happy, is this sad, angry ? - no matter where you come from
with some of the worlds scales I have no clue what emotion its supposed to transport because all the diminished notes sound sad to my ears ...
If I listen to Chinese opera I have no clue what is going on, is this drama, are they angry, is this meant to dance to, are they happy?
I have no idea. ^^
so in the end I stopped looking into world music because I dont know how to express me in this "cultural language " that I dont understand - I cant say what I want to say - if that makes sense.
you do realize that the emotions you relate to western harmony is completely subjective.. right? There is nothing inherently happy about major or sad about minor. These are learned cues.
your presumption that somejow western harmony is universally understood and “world” scales (god this term is so weird and racist) are incomprehensible to anyone but the culture from which they spring is very suspicious to me. Smacks of a weird supremacy that I don’t like. scales are arbitrary. 12 notes could be 14 or 22 or 164 notes per octave.
If you don’t feel emotion when listening to other cultural musics, that’s very interesting and nearly the opposite of my own experience. I’ve been brought to tears by music in languages and tuning systems that I don’t “understand”, played on instruments I’ve never heard of. Somehow I can find deep emotional connections to music that isn’t from my country of origin. Even music written hundreds of years ago!
drop a track in and it will resynthesize it. you can drag sections around, smear things out, etc.
Also check out videos of the Panharmonium eurorack module. Can resynthesize incoming audio (with a bit of latency) but it tracks pitch and assigns bands to one of its 33 oscillators. Really lovely stuff!
Wow @palms, outstanding box! Thanks for posting this!
This kind of realtime DSP controlled by knobs is lots of fun, and it works in realtime! 😍
I wonder what could be done to make the resynthesis sound less mechanic. Not necessarily more true to the original source but a more "pleasing", "organic" result.
aha! I'm truly impressed you were able to make a polyphonic microtuner out of modules. Absolutely awesome. Thanks so much for sharing your skills with novices like me :-)
Hi @godrejparkretreat . Not sure about the relevance of your post. Is it maybe in the wrong thread? Or are you just making a point about an aimless discussion?
I thought I'd post in this thread as it was the first result I came across when originally searching for a solution for microtuning in Drambo:
I recently finished putting together a set of tools for creating custom tunings using a variety of methods including ratios, exact cent values, EDO, etc. The most interesting part is probably the ability to not only work with pitch CV but also output these tunings as microtonally tuned MIDI to any synth you like, using the appropriate pitch bend messages and with optional support for polyphony via MPE. All CV modules are fully polyphonic.
Hopefully this comes in handy for someone wanting to explore microtonal/xenharmonic tuning systems, I think Drambo could be a really powerful tool for this. The modules I've included can be combined in some pretty interesting ways, for example morphing smoothly between two different just intonation systems, or translating ideas from one EDO to another.
Thanks to @rs2000 for the great idea of feeding an N-1 switch with a self indexed poly signal, I ended up using this in several of the modules.
Comments
oh wow, just now seeing all these posts. Can't wait to try these out! thanks for sharing :-)
you dont get what I am on about, its human non linear perception ;)
the point I am on about is :
do you perceive "the wobble" as pitch difference or timbre?
this is essential 😉
i perceive it as timbre
id like to have an straight answer, thx.
per definition everything that isnt pitch is timbre but this doesnt match the human experience.
so I have to ask how do you perceive it?
this will vary from person to person ...
im always interested in human perception, not so much in numbers ;)
since u talk about "color" I assume you perceive it as timbre too. aha. that's very interesting. ;)
so we are not talking about pitch at all we are talking about timbre. that's very interesting. ;)
well mr. Bach didn't have a synth to spit out timbres at will so he had to get his "colors" somewhere else ;)
the way I see it, pitch is timbre and timbre is pitch. timbre is made of harmonics which can be observed as discrete pitches. Play around with an additive synth and you quickly begin to see this. Speed up a polyrhythm and you get a musical interval.
pitch, timbre, rhythm, harmony.. all the same phenomenon seen from different perspectives.
@palms, @lala I think my perception of these micro adjustments is somewhat "mainstream": I can definitely hear the advantage of going the extra mile and I find it surprisingly obvious with isolated chords but it's not that I listen to music and say "uh-oh, that tuning needs to be fixed".
What I do hear and can't stand at all is if an acoustic melodic instrument tuning is off more than maybe 15 cents.
It may have to do a lot with what kind of music in a certain context we've listened to as young children in their first years. It's not only about perfect pitch but also about the precision I believe.
But even in additive synthesis the added harmonics are usually based on the root pitch/frequency no?
At least this is the case with most additive synths I've come across so far?!
Another way is naturally to build an additive synth manually by stacking sine-waves at what ever frequencies and amplitudes one desires and scale each oscillators frequency input and output individually 😎
@rs2000
yeah below 15 cents or so it just changes the color
like any 2 synth oscillators ...
much fuzz about an old hat with fancy words 😈
I mean there is amazing microtonal music that makes my jaw drop,
but I am not Wendy Carlos and able to do that. so I am not very skilled I guess. ^^
beauty in the beast sounds like smoking opium ^^
(its a potpourri of world music and her own findings)
I like it very much; but I can torture all my friends with it. ^^
if u can get a copy of it
I got it from oink
it hasn't be rereleased since forever
no one ever sailed away with the pitch like that before
I guess she is the only person in the world that can say I used scales no-one ever used before.
what's interesting is she later returned to the usual again
Im not sure what that means
I guess to many notes in an octave to choose from are to many options to get things done???
to me it seems like the small detunings are just a way to get "more color" out of an acoustic instrument when there isnt much you can manipulate. maybe you get a resonance at certain frequencies you like or u dont like ...
some opera houses have a pitch of the house thats not a=440hz to avoid certain frequencies in the room ...
hm i guess
western harmonics are easy to decipher - is this happy, is this sad, angry ? - no matter where you come from
with some of the worlds scales I have no clue what emotion its supposed to transport because all the diminished notes sound sad to my ears ...
If I listen to Chinese opera I have no clue what is going on, is this drama, are they angry, is this meant to dance to, are they happy?
I have no idea. ^^
so in the end I stopped looking into world music because I dont know how to express me in this "cultural language " that I dont understand - I cant say what I want to say - if that makes sense.
Yeah that makes zero sense to my brain.
you do realize that the emotions you relate to western harmony is completely subjective.. right? There is nothing inherently happy about major or sad about minor. These are learned cues.
your presumption that somejow western harmony is universally understood and “world” scales (god this term is so weird and racist) are incomprehensible to anyone but the culture from which they spring is very suspicious to me. Smacks of a weird supremacy that I don’t like. scales are arbitrary. 12 notes could be 14 or 22 or 164 notes per octave.
If you don’t feel emotion when listening to other cultural musics, that’s very interesting and nearly the opposite of my own experience. I’ve been brought to tears by music in languages and tuning systems that I don’t “understand”, played on instruments I’ve never heard of. Somehow I can find deep emotional connections to music that isn’t from my country of origin. Even music written hundreds of years ago!
its very simple
western harmony sells well around the globe, so I assume people get the message independent from their backgrounds ;)
thats why we call music a universal language
your turn 🙄take a chill pill 😐️
Lol it’s not universal. I’m chillin’ though. Gonna agree to disagree
i love microtonal and non microtonal music. It’s all good. Over and out.
as far as I understand, you can resynthesize most audio with sine waves. If you have a Mac, I highly recommend playing around with this free software:
drop a track in and it will resynthesize it. you can drag sections around, smear things out, etc.
Also check out videos of the Panharmonium eurorack module. Can resynthesize incoming audio (with a bit of latency) but it tracks pitch and assigns bands to one of its 33 oscillators. Really lovely stuff!
check out minute 3 for example of resynthesis.
Wow @palms, outstanding box! Thanks for posting this!
This kind of realtime DSP controlled by knobs is lots of fun, and it works in realtime! 😍
I wonder what could be done to make the resynthesis sound less mechanic. Not necessarily more true to the original source but a more "pleasing", "organic" result.
if you want to talk about your grandmas knitting class open a thread that says so.
back to topic gentleman, or I will close this down.
I'm not sure what you mean. The posts I made were of microtonal synths.
No idea why you're talking about knitting here.
@palms I've updated the video thanks to your help 👍🏼
https://vimeo.com/648423718
I'm afraid you can't close this or any other thread.
aha! I'm truly impressed you were able to make a polyphonic microtuner out of modules. Absolutely awesome. Thanks so much for sharing your skills with novices like me :-)
I see we need MIDI2CV to work with scl and tun files sooner than later
i have 2 sinewaves and I can tune them, by that logic it must be microtonal. yes, well 😴
😍
correct!
the charme of additive / resynthesis is that what works in theory (rebuild any sound with sinewaves)
does not work inpratice.
If it would work it would sound exactly the same.
it doesnt yet. ;)
I wonder if machine learning and the new chips would help here.
thats basically what it does?
compare this with that?
@giku
this stuff is freaky, my iPad now tells me when the dogs did bark. 😎
still dont think this kind of chaotic conversation makes much sense to random readers. ^^
i have miRack and havent encountered any issues thus far.
Hi @godrejparkretreat . Not sure about the relevance of your post. Is it maybe in the wrong thread? Or are you just making a point about an aimless discussion?
Thanks for the ideas folks!
I thought I'd post in this thread as it was the first result I came across when originally searching for a solution for microtuning in Drambo:
I recently finished putting together a set of tools for creating custom tunings using a variety of methods including ratios, exact cent values, EDO, etc. The most interesting part is probably the ability to not only work with pitch CV but also output these tunings as microtonally tuned MIDI to any synth you like, using the appropriate pitch bend messages and with optional support for polyphony via MPE. All CV modules are fully polyphonic.
Hopefully this comes in handy for someone wanting to explore microtonal/xenharmonic tuning systems, I think Drambo could be a really powerful tool for this. The modules I've included can be combined in some pretty interesting ways, for example morphing smoothly between two different just intonation systems, or translating ideas from one EDO to another.
Thanks to @rs2000 for the great idea of feeding an N-1 switch with a self indexed poly signal, I ended up using this in several of the modules.
yes please!