D minor is the saddest key, and make no mistake about it!
if the thing is 'color', color as an abstraction outside the expression of it doesn't get any traction with me.
ET as an ideal doesn't get a lot of traction here either. It's designed to get intervals that aren't out of tune the further you get from all white keys, so you can have more keys available to 'the composer'. that much is ideal. beyond that there are things to look at in the concrete.
rhetorical question: why is that? There is a reason I posted things from that particular thesis. It was believed, following the differences in intervals as you stray from white keys, different keys had different qualities. However, when the move to 12ET came about, it was still argued. Why do people want there to be a difference per se? What's the story behind a push to get MORE keys into play vis a vis a system which reduces the difference between keys 'ideally'?
There's a great middle ground here, which is explored in that thesis, the point behind it.
I don't think the idea is driven by singer's range. I think different keys have different feels. I think there is more to it than an individual's subjective response, too. I pose eg., 'by its very F-ness' expecting it to be knocked down. But why would a particular object not have its color? Elsewhere I talked about a difference in tuning and JJF wanted to get rid of it as relative. "higher" has only meaning relatively. But does the higher or lower basis have nothing of its own? That is asking language to do more than describe something. I am always suspicious of this. If no one has ever seen the color red, what is it? We are in a very dodgy area now.
To refuse 'timbre' automatically out of 'we don't hear linearly' is demanding the idea as a cart will pull the horse of reality. What is timbre then? Objectively, if you activate the string by picking it or bowing it at the bridge, why is it 'more trebly' than at the neck? Because of the overtones spacing. This has been shown to be true, I'm sorry.
Is F Major the most hateful chord? (AKA what chords do you least like to use...)
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- KVRAF
- 5223 posts since 20 Jul, 2010
I'm not refusing timbre, I'm simply saying that to my limited knowledge, transposing a tone doesn't change it's timbre, the harmonics are more spaced out but we notice less of this space. A D and an E on some ideal oscillator do not have different colours because the harmonics appear more spaced out on a sonogram.
Thinking about it, though, over the span of octaves, perhaps you are right. A basic PWM patch playing in the bass register sounds objectively different than one playing very high up, where the PWM effect is all but wasted. High pitched notes tend to sound thin and have fewer harmonics, so in a way higher tones are sort of lowpassed because less of their detail fits into our hearing range.
Ok, so here's what I think - all other things being equal - on a small scale pitch doesn't affect timbre noticably, but on a large scale it does. Which means that yes, I may be admitting 'defeat' or rather, accepting that there's more to it than I originally thought. Which is a nice feeling, actually. New vistas and all that. Maybe my prior model wasn't factoring in the human element.
Overall the topic is quite confusing to talk about though, since to be thorough you'd probably have to have some formal and mutually agreed-on technical definition for "timbre" and other words, instead of just a casual discussion.
Thinking about it, though, over the span of octaves, perhaps you are right. A basic PWM patch playing in the bass register sounds objectively different than one playing very high up, where the PWM effect is all but wasted. High pitched notes tend to sound thin and have fewer harmonics, so in a way higher tones are sort of lowpassed because less of their detail fits into our hearing range.
Ok, so here's what I think - all other things being equal - on a small scale pitch doesn't affect timbre noticably, but on a large scale it does. Which means that yes, I may be admitting 'defeat' or rather, accepting that there's more to it than I originally thought. Which is a nice feeling, actually. New vistas and all that. Maybe my prior model wasn't factoring in the human element.
Overall the topic is quite confusing to talk about though, since to be thorough you'd probably have to have some formal and mutually agreed-on technical definition for "timbre" and other words, instead of just a casual discussion.
http://sendy.bandcamp.com/releases < My new album at Bandcamp! Now pay what you like!
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- KVRAF
- 26033 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
transposing it changes it objectively; ie., demonstrable per an instrument. for instance take a tuba: it's practically impossible to take anything but ITS fundamental as a fundamental, since its very construction is about harmonics/partials. EG: First tuba I can find was built on 'F1'. The valves construction makes partials from there, technically. So, we say 'from the PEDAL of' and look at timbre. It may not be perceptible to someone but to whom is it, and to what degree is the test going to rely on that? The paper I linked to shows timbre as a product of harmonics. That paper is going to redundant per everybody else's paper, it's academic; this is known. So, that is not 'casual chatter', that is a definition of timbre.
"A D and an E on some ideal oscillator do not have different colours because the harmonics appear more spaced out on a sonogram." I guess 'ideal oscillator' is rhetorical. 'colours' seems to be an abstraction here, and I'm trying to float the idea that something that is not being perceived is not something you'd use terminology such as 'color' for. We will observe the components of 'red' because we have experienced 'red'. We are looking on a scope or graph for confirmation of timbre/to verify it in order to have a 'technical definition' of 'timbre', not to come up with the idea of timbre.
I guess you're coming from synthesizer more purely than I am. I went into that vis a vis instruments. The 'instrument' you posed as an answer to my rhetorical question you called 'boring'. Yeah, there's not a of interest for me in this 'equal' abstract state. It doesn't quite happen with physical things that cause disturbations in the air molecules. I guess you can make circuits or numbers more or less do it in an electronic machine.
"A D and an E on some ideal oscillator do not have different colours because the harmonics appear more spaced out on a sonogram." I guess 'ideal oscillator' is rhetorical. 'colours' seems to be an abstraction here, and I'm trying to float the idea that something that is not being perceived is not something you'd use terminology such as 'color' for. We will observe the components of 'red' because we have experienced 'red'. We are looking on a scope or graph for confirmation of timbre/to verify it in order to have a 'technical definition' of 'timbre', not to come up with the idea of timbre.
I guess you're coming from synthesizer more purely than I am. I went into that vis a vis instruments. The 'instrument' you posed as an answer to my rhetorical question you called 'boring'. Yeah, there's not a of interest for me in this 'equal' abstract state. It doesn't quite happen with physical things that cause disturbations in the air molecules. I guess you can make circuits or numbers more or less do it in an electronic machine.