Combination Study 1 by Dave Seidel

Over a bed of sruti-box-like drones, a slow chord sequence plays through twice, first in closed voicing, then in open voicing.

This piece was inspired by a section of David B. Doty’s excellent book The Just Intonation Primer. Chapter 2, “Acoustic and Psychoacoustic Background”, pages 17-19, discusses the phenomena of difference tones, summation tones (collectively referred to as “combination tones”) and the periodicity pitch. They describe pitches that are synthesized by our ears and/or by our higher-order neural processing in response to hearing a set of two or more simultaneous tones. These tones are not always perceivable by the listener, but are always present.

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