Microtonal Podcasts: Podcast1024: Bill Sethares

Microtonal Podcasts

This is a blog designed for Podcasting New Music by contemporary composers. While I favor microtonal music on this website, I also post music by other composers as well. I believe that composers should spend ten minutes a day, every day, making music. You can skip composing on those days you don't eat. Listeners should also spend ten minutes a day listening to music that is totally different from what they usually hear. This site is a good source for that kind of different music.

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Podcast1024: Bill Sethares - Maple Manytet

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Today's episode is a work in progress by Bill Sethares. From his description:

I've been working on mapping procedures to take the partials (overtones) from a sound (the source) and move them somewhere else (the destination).
The application is to create sounds (currently planning on using Kontakt [from Native Instruments]) that have spectra specially designed for particular tunings.

As I've been playing with the algorithms, I have been "trying them out" on complete mixes and have some interesting sounding results... for these two
pieces, the destination was set as all integer multiples of 65 Hz. So all of the "notes" are squished down to one big harmonic sound.

The source in this piece is Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. See if you can hear it through the rush of harmonic partials. Neat stuff.