Harold Fortuin

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Harold Fortuin (born 1964 in Mount Clemens, Michigan [1] ) is an American composer, pianist, and designer of hardware and software for electronic music.

He has written both traditional instrumental and vocal music as well as electronic and computer music, and has a number of performances and recordings to his credit. His work has often been in the realm of microtonal music. Aside from the standard 12-tone equal temperament, he has composed in equal temperaments of 19, 22, and 31 notes to the octave. He has also published research in the area of software and hardware design and development. [2]

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Equal temperament The musical tuning system where the ratio between successive notes is constant

An equal temperament is a musical temperament or tuning system, which approximates just intervals by dividing an octave into equal steps. This means the ratio of the frequencies of any adjacent pair of notes is the same, which gives an equal perceived step size as pitch is perceived roughly as the logarithm of frequency.

Musical tuning umbrella term for the act of tuning an instrument and a system of pitches

In music, there are two common meanings for tuning:

Program, programme, or programming may refer to:

Meantone temperament musical tuning system

Meantone temperament is a musical temperament, that is a tuning system, obtained by slightly compromising the fifths in order to improve the thirds. Meantone temperaments are constructed the same way as Pythagorean tuning, as a stack of equal fifths, but in meantone each fifth is narrow compared to the perfect fifth of ratio 3:2.

Computer engineering discipline integrating computer science and electrical engineering to develop computer hardware and software

Computer Engineering (CpE) is a branch of engineering that integrates several fields of computer science and electronic engineering required to develop computer hardware and software. Computer engineers usually have training in electronic engineering, software design, and hardware-software integration instead of only software engineering or electronic engineering. Computer engineers are involved in many hardware and software aspects of computing, from the design of individual microcontrollers, microprocessors, personal computers, and supercomputers, to circuit design. This field of engineering not only focuses on how computer systems themselves work but also how they integrate into the larger picture.

Microtonal music Use in music of microtones (intervals smaller than a semitone)

Microtonal music or microtonality is the use in music of microtones—intervals smaller than a semitone, also called "microintervals". It may also be extended to include any music using intervals not found in the customary Western tuning of twelve equal intervals per octave. In other words, a microtone may be thought of as a note that falls between the keys of a piano tuned in equal temperament.

Xenharmonic music

Xenharmonic music is that which uses a tuning system which neither conforms to nor closely approximates the common 12-tone equal temperament. The term xenharmonic was coined by Ivor Darreg, from xenia, "hospitable," and xenos "foreign." He stated it as being "intended to include just intonation and such temperaments as the 5-, 7-, and 11-tone, along with the higher-numbered really-microtonal systems as far as one wishes to go."

Programming is a form of music production and performance using electronic devices and computer software, such as sequencers and workstations or hardware synthesizers, sampler and sequencers, to generate sounds of musical instruments. Programming has been used in most electronic music and hip hop music since the 1990s. It is also frequently used in "modern" pop and rock music from various regions of the world, and sometimes in jazz and contemporary classical music.

Quarter tone Musical interval

A quarter tone is a pitch halfway between the usual notes of a chromatic scale or an interval about half as wide as a semitone, which itself is half a whole tone. Quarter tones divide the octave by 50 cents each, and have 24 different pitches.

Piano tuning process of tuning a piano

Piano tuning is the act of adjusting the tension of the strings of an acoustic piano so that the musical intervals between strings are in tune. The meaning of the term 'in tune', in the context of piano tuning, is not simply a particular fixed set of pitches. Fine piano tuning requires an assessment of the vibration interaction among notes, which is different for every piano, thus in practice requiring slightly different pitches from any theoretical standard. Pianos are usually tuned to a modified version of the system called equal temperament.

Richard Devine is an Atlanta-based electronic musician and sound designer, currently employed by Google. He is recognized for producing a layered and heavily processed sound, combining influences from glitch music to old and modern electronic music. Devine largely records for the Miami-based Schematic Records, which was founded by Josh Kay of Phoenecia. He has also done extensive recording and sample work with Josh Kay under the name DEVSND. As a result of praise of his music from Autechre as well as a remix of Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy", Devine recorded an album for Warp Records which was jointly released by Schematic and Warp.

Twelve-tone equal temperament is the musical system that divides the octave into 12 parts, all of which are equally-spaced on a logarithmic scale, with a ratio equal to the 12th root of 2. That resulting smallest interval, ​112 the width of an octave, is called a semitone or half step.

Easley Blackwood is an American professor of music, a concert pianist, a composer of music, some using unusual tunings, and the author of books on music theory, including his research into the properties of microtonal tunings and traditional harmony.

A microtuner or microtonal tuner is an electronic device or software program designed to modify and test the tuning of musical instruments with microtonal precision, allowing for the design and construction of microtonal scales and just intonation scales, and for tuning intervals that may differ from those of common Western equal temperament. The term also indicates a high-precision mechanical tuning device found on some vintage Conn brand brass and reed instruments. These were first introduced with their 1918 catalog and manufactured until about 1954. Such devices were also offered with some vintage saxophones manufactured in Europe by Beaugnier, Dolnet, Hüller, Keilwerth and other famous makers in the same period.

Electronic tuner musical instrument part

In music, an electronic tuner is a device that detects and displays the pitch of musical notes played on a musical instrument. "Pitch" is the highness or lowness of a musical note, which is typically measured in Hertz. Simple tuners indicate—typically with an analog needle-dial, LEDs, or an LCD screen—whether a pitch is lower, higher, or equal to the desired pitch. In the 2010s, software applications can turn a smartphone, tablet, or personal computer into a tuner. More complex and expensive tuners indicate pitch more precisely. Tuners vary in size from units that fit in a pocket to 19" rack-mount units. Instrument technicians and piano tuners typically use more expensive, accurate tuners.

Zhu Zaiyu Hereditary Prince of Zheng

Zhu Zaiyu was a Chinese mathematician, physicist, choreographer, and musician. He was a prince of the Chinese Ming dynasty. In 1584, Prince Zhu innovatively described the equal temperament via accurate mathematical calculation.

Mayer Joel Mandelbaum is an American music composer and teacher, best known for his use of microtonal tuning. He wrote the first Ph.D. dissertation on microtonality in 1961. He is married to stained glass artist Ellen Mandelbaum, and is the nephew of Abraham Edel.

Generalized keyboard

Generalized keyboards are musical keyboards, a type of isomorphic keyboard, with regular, tile-like arrangements usually with rectangular or hexagonal keys, and were developed for performing music in different tunings. They were introduced by Robert Bosanquet in the 1870s, and since the 1960s Erv Wilson has developed new methods of using and expanding them, proposing keyboard layouts including any scale made of a single generator within an "octave" of any size.

<i>The Well-Tempered Clavier</i> Collection of keyboard music by J.S. Bach

The Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 846–893, is a collection of two sets of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys, composed for solo keyboard by Johann Sebastian Bach. In Bach's time Clavier (keyboard) was a generic name indicating a variety of keyboard instruments, most typically a harpsichord or clavichord – but not excluding an organ.

Peterson Electro-Musical Products, Inc. is a music-electronics company founded by Richard H. Peterson in 1948. The Peterson company introduced the first commercial handheld electronic tuner for musicians, the Model 70, in 1964, and later its models of strobe tuners became popular among touring and studio musicians such as the Grateful Dead, The Who, Pink Floyd, Queen, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, and Neil Young. Since its inception the company has also contributed notable inventions and innovations to the electronic organ, and its products are in use in many thousands of pipe organs, and hundreds of thousands of electronic organs, worldwide.

References

  1. Cummings, David (2000). International who's who in music and musicians' directory: (in the classical and light classical fields) (17th ed.). Routledge. p. 206. ISBN   0-948875-53-4.
  2. Harold Fortuin: “A Modern, Compact Implementation of the Parameterized Factory Design Pattern”, in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 9, no. 1, January–February 2010.