Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale

Description

The author, while experimenting with a synthesizer, discovered that some kinds of scales sound good with some timbres and not with others, and likewise some kinds of timbres sound good in some scales and not in others. He set out to find out why, and the result was this book. The book examines these types of questions by looking at psychoacoustics and produces a model of musical perception that can predict what you will hear when you put certain timbres in specific musical contexts. The first few chapters examine the issues of tuning, timbre, spectrum, and scale in nonmathematical terms. Only in later chapters does the author introduce the math behind the modeling. A CD accompanies the book that allows you to listen to the sounds and the various tunings recommended in the book and verify that the model works correctly. This book is a good companion to Perry Cook's more basic book on psychoacoustics entitled "Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound", which is a much less mathematical work. I enjoyed this book because I'm interested in multimedia computing and I'm always looking for texts that explore the relationship between images, sound, and mathematics. You'll need to be familiar with music theory before you tackle this book, since the author makes some assumptions there about his audience. However, he is fairly gentle with the mathematical portion.