Tempered Music Experiments [theory, music, 2d space]
While trying out different ways for representing musical structures on an interactive 2d surface I made some experiments as part of my thesis and client works. Three systems were created as “side effects” for my current research interests:
“Harmonizer” is a simple musical instrument for studying traditional scales through harmonic movements. Traditional scales are the basis of folk songs, jazz, classical music, including modal scales, pentatonic, different minor / major structures. Harmonic motion is based on simple trigonometric pendulums (sinus, cosines, etc) that describes really organic motions. The goal of Harmonizer is to collide these two concepts and see what happens.
Then, there is the more chaotic sounding “Fragmenter”. It is “temporally tempered”: a sound sample is cut up automatically into slices based on onset events. These snippets are then mapped to different elements in space. The observer can listen through them by simply drawing over them. The drawing gesture is repeating itself so every unique gesture creates a completely different loop.
The last experiment is a “Verlet Music” machine where freehand drawings are being sonified with an elastic string. The physical parameters of the string can be altered by dragging it around on the surface. The string is tuned to a quasi comfortable scale, each dot on the string has a unique pitch. When they come over a certain shape, they become audible.
You can try out Harmonizer here . The synthesis is built with WebPd using WebAudio API, sound might not work clearly on slower machines.