ThumMusings

About Me

Name: ThumMeister

Location: Austin, Texas, United States

In the late 1980’s, I tried to write insanely great code for the Mac and help others do so, too. When Windows swept through the Valley in 1991-2, I realized my great code would become worthless if the Mac platform sank. I became very interested in knowing how to spot winning platforms. Since Microsoft clearly knew how to make its platforms succeed, I joined its Systems Strategy Group. While designing and executing practical "technology evangelism" campaigns, I studied the theory behind the practice, eventually teaching mandatory "how-to" seminars to Microsoft's new evangelists. I left Microsoft in 2000, looking for a new industry to disrupt. When my wife quit her piano lessons after six months of diligent practice, saying that “music is just too hard,” I knew I’d found it. Hammering the Web relentlessly, I found a novel combination of old ideas which could make music dramatically easier to teach, learn, & play, more emotionally expressive, and expand the frontiers of tonality. This blog tells the story of my bringing those innovations to market.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Dynamic Tuning, Mark I

Bill Sethares has recently implemented a demonstration of Dynamic Tuning & Timbres, running on top of Max/MSP. You can try it for yourself!

To run it, you need to already have the Max/MSP Runtime installed.

Then, right-click and "Save as..." this WickiSynth.zip file, unzipping them with WinZip.

Run Max/MSP, and open the wickisyn~.MXF file. There's a volume button to the lower-left; click it to activate your sound. Your QWERTY keyboard is now a QWERTY Thummer, with the Wicki note-layout. On the right-hand side, you'll see a slider controlling the width of the tempered perfect fifth. With your mouse, click and drag it up to increase the P5's width; drag it down to decrease the P5's width.

While playing (say) a major triad, drag the slider up and down. The pitches of the triad's notes will be adjusted automatically. So will the pitches of the partials that make up the tones sounded at those pitches.

The QWERTY keyboard is not an expressive instrument, nor are the timbres produced by with WickiSynth impressive. We don't expect that anyone is going to use this implementation in public (although, if you do, please post a video to YouTube and let me know!)

But...when you mess with this stuff, you are changing tuning and timbre dynamically, baby, using the Thummer's tuning-invariant note-pattern. That has never been done before.

Labels: Dynamic Tuning, Max/MSP, QWERTY Thummer, WickiSynth