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Re: [microsound] pitch/harmonics, math and perhaps samples too?



Phil Thomson notes;


> If that doesn't work, I've always heard that middle C is 261.6256 Hz
> (given an A of 440). To calculate other frequencies relative to this
<snip>

Indeed you can do all the math yourself for example because you might need
something far off the regular charts or because you abosulutely need to know
the 20th decimal for some obscure reason. If that is the case I would always
base my calculations on A4 because A4 is supposed to be 440Hz, without any
rounding errors. Your middle C is bound to be correct (didn´t check) but a
aproximation while 440Hz is supposed to be absolute and thus more suitable
to base further calculations on. Apart from the convetion of calling C the
beginning I see no advantages of starting with C for math.

This is of cource a very minor nit-pick but I thought I´d point it out
before anybody started doing a lot of rather boring math. If anybody is
dedicated to tuning and has a project where any of this actually matters he
probably won´t be using equal tempered tuning; the 20th decimal doesn´t
realy matter if everything is ever so slightly out of tune and notes far off
the regular scale are bound to be either not very pitch sensitive (in which
case it doesn´t matter) or very long (in which case other tunings make a lot
more sense).

By the way, Is anybody aware of a pitch shifting implementation that can
work based on arbitrary tunings? preferably easy to use ones? I´ve done some
very minor dabeling in tunings and would love to take it a little further
but sample based methods of working generally don´t considder tuning while I
think that for extreme time streching tuning becomes very signifficant
indeed because beatings will become far more prominent. Since beating chords
are at the treshold between the structure of tones and that of the
composition I would count these as a part of microsound, yet a quick glance
at the index of Roads´s book reveals no trace of this.

Any thoughts on this subject would be apreceated as I´ve been facinated by
these matters for a while now but am not quite sure how to proceed.

Yours,
KAs.



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