William Sethares

Last updated
William A. Sethares
Born (1955-04-19) April 19, 1955 (age 67)
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Cornell University
Known for Consonance
Scientific career
Fields Signal processing and music theory
Institutions University of Wisconsin–Madison

William A. Sethares (born April 19, 1955) is an American music theorist and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. In music, he has contributed to the theory of Dynamic Tonality and provided a formalization of consonance.

Contents

Consonance and dissonance

Among the earliest musical traditions, musical consonance was thought to arise in a quasi-mystical manner from ratios of small whole numbers. (For instance, Pythagoras made observations relating to this, and the ancient Chinese Guqin contains a dotted scale representing the harmonic series.) The source of these ratios, in the pattern of vibrations known as the harmonic series, was exposed by Joseph Sauveur the early 18th century and even more clearly by Helmholtz in the 1860s.

In 1965, Plomp and Levelt [1] showed that this relationship could be generalized beyond the harmonic series, although they did not elaborate in detail.

In the 1990s, Sethares began exploring Plomp and Levelt's generalization, both mathematically and musically. His 1993 paper On the relationship between timbre and scale [2] formalized the relationships between a tuning's notes and a timbre's partials that control sensory consonance. A more accessible version also appeared in Experimental Musical Instruments as "Relating Tuning and Timbre" [3] These papers were followed by two CDs, Xenotonality and Exomusicology (some songs from which can be freely downloaded here), which explored the application of these ideas to musical composition.

In his 1998 book Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale, [4] Sethares developed these ideas further, using them to expose the intimate relationship between the tunings and timbres of Indonesian and Thai indigenous music, and to explore other novel combinations of related tunings and timbres. Where microtonal music was previously either dissonant (due to being played with harmonic timbres to which it was not "related"), or restricted to the narrow range of harmonically related tunings (to retain sensory consonance), Sethares's mathematical and musical work showed how musicians might explore microtonality without sacrificing sensory consonance.

As one reviewer of the second edition [5] of this book wrote, "Physics had built a prison round music, and Sethares set it free." [6] Another reviewer wrote that it "is not only the most important book about tuning written to date, but it is the most important book about music theory written in human history." [7]

Musica Facta

Sethares' conception of consonance is one of the foundation-stones of a new research program called Musica Facta. [8]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Equal temperament</span> 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harmonic series (music)</span> Sequence of frequencies

A harmonic series is the sequence of harmonics, musical tones, or pure tones whose frequency is an integer multiple of a fundamental frequency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harmony</span> Aspect of music

In music, harmony is the process by which individual sounds are joined together or composed into whole units or compositions. Often, the term harmony refers to simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches, or chords. However, harmony is generally understood to involve both vertical harmony (chords) and horizontal harmony (melody).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harmonic</span> Wave with frequency an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency

A harmonic is a wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the fundamental frequency, the frequency of the original periodic signal, such as a sinusoidal wave. The original signal is also called the 1st harmonic, the other harmonics are known as higher harmonics. As all harmonics are periodic at the fundamental frequency, the sum of harmonics is also periodic at that frequency. The set of harmonics forms a harmonic series.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timbre</span> Quality of a musical note or sound or tone

In music, timbre, also known as tone color or tone quality, is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voices and musical instruments. It also enables listeners to distinguish different instruments in the same category.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pitch (music)</span> Perceptual property in music ordering sounds from low to high

Pitch is a perceptual property of sounds that allows their ordering on a frequency-related scale, or more commonly, pitch is the quality that makes it possible to judge sounds as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies. Pitch is a major auditory attribute of musical tones, along with duration, loudness, and timbre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perfect fourth</span> Musical interval

A fourth is a musical interval encompassing four staff positions in the music notation of Western culture, and a perfect fourth is the fourth spanning five semitones. For example, the ascending interval from C to the next F is a perfect fourth, because the note F is the fifth semitone above C, and there are four staff positions between C and F. Diminished and augmented fourths span the same number of staff positions, but consist of a different number of semitones.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Limit (music)</span>

In music theory, limit or harmonic limit is a way of characterizing the harmony found in a piece or genre of music, or the harmonies that can be made using a particular scale. The term limit was introduced by Harry Partch, who used it to give an upper bound on the complexity of harmony; hence the name.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xenharmonic music</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bohlen–Pierce scale</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Consonance and dissonance</span> Categorizations of simultaneous or successive sounds

In music, consonance and dissonance are categorizations of simultaneous or successive sounds. Within the Western tradition, some listeners associate consonance with sweetness, pleasantness, and acceptability, and dissonance with harshness, unpleasantness, or unacceptability, although there is broad acknowledgement that this depends also on familiarity and musical expertise. The terms form a structural dichotomy in which they define each other by mutual exclusion: a consonance is what is not dissonant, and a dissonance is what is not consonant. However, a finer consideration shows that the distinction forms a gradation, from the most consonant to the most dissonant. In casual discourse, as German composer and music theorist Paul Hindemith stressed, "The two concepts have never been completely explained, and for a thousand years the definitions have varied". The term sonance has been proposed to encompass or refer indistinctly to the terms consonance and dissonance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">19 equal temperament</span>

In music, 19 Tone Equal Temperament, called 19 TET, 19 EDO, 19-ED2 or 19 ET, is the tempered scale derived by dividing the octave into 19 equal steps. Each step represents a frequency ratio of 192, or 63.16 cents.

<i>Genesis of a Music</i>

Genesis of a Music is a book first published in 1949 by microtonal composer Harry Partch (1901–1974).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Regular diatonic tuning</span>

A regular diatonic tuning is any musical scale consisting of "tones" (T) and "semitones" (S) arranged in any rotation of the sequence TTSTTTS which adds up to the octave with all the T's being the same size and all the S's the being the same size, with the 'S's being smaller than the 'T's. In such a tuning, then the notes are connected together in a chain of seven fifths, all the same size which makes it a Linear temperament with the tempered fifth as a generator.

An isomorphic keyboard is a musical input device consisting of a two-dimensional grid of note-controlling elements on which any given sequence and/or combination of musical intervals has the "same shape" on the keyboard wherever it occurs – within a key, across keys, across octaves, and across tunings.

Dynamic tonality is a paradigm for tuning and timbre which generalizes the special relationship between just intonation and the harmonic series to apply to a wider set of pseudo-just tunings and related pseudo-harmonic timbres.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Erlich</span>

Paul Erlich is a guitarist and music theorist living near Boston, Massachusetts. He is known for his seminal role in developing the theory of regular temperaments, including being the first to define pajara temperament and its decatonic scales in 22-ET. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Yale University.

In music, 23 equal temperament, called 23-TET, 23-EDO, or 23-ET, is the tempered scale derived by dividing the octave into 23 equal steps. Each step represents a frequency ratio of 232, or 52.174 cents. This system is the largest EDO that has an error of at least 20 cents for the 3rd (3:2), 5th (5:4), 7th (7:4), and 11th (11:8) harmonics. The lack of approximation to simple intervals makes the scale notable among those seeking to break free from conventional harmony rules.

References

  1. R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt (October 1965). "Tonal Consonance and Critical Bandwidth". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 38 (4): 548–560. Bibcode:1965ASAJ...38..548P. doi:10.1121/1.1909741. hdl: 2066/15403 . PMID   5831012. S2CID   15852125.
  2. Sethares, William (September 1993). "Local consonance and the relationship between timbre and scale". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 94 (3): 1218–1228. Bibcode:1993ASAJ...94.1218S. doi:10.1121/1.408175.
  3. Sethares, William (September 1992). "Relating Tuning and Timbre". Experimental Musical Instruments. IX (2).
  4. Sethares, William (January 1998). Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale (1st ed.). New York: Springer. ISBN   978-3-540-76173-0.
  5. Sethares, William (November 2004). Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale (2nd ed.). New York: Springer. ISBN   978-1-85233-797-1.
  6. Luca Turin (September 2004). "The sound of impossible objects". NZZ Folio.
  7. Scott, X. J. "nonoctave.com / tuning / book reviews" . Retrieved 2009-09-20.
  8. Musica Facta: http://musicafacta.org

Further reading

External resources