.pdf papers
Here are links to a number of the original technical articles that make up the core of the ideas presented in Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale. These can be found in the pdf/ directory on the CD. In addition, there is a .html version of an article that originally appeared in Experimental Musical Instruments that considers many of the basic ideas. It's called Relating Tuning and Timbre.
"Local consonance
and the relationship between timbre and scale", Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America. vol. 94, no. 3, pp. 1218-1228, Sept. 1993. [An explicit
parameterization of Plomp and Levelt's consonance curve leads to a family of
optimization problems which are used to answer two complementary issues: Given
a scale, what timbre is most appropriate? Given a timbre, what scale is most
appropriate?]
"Adaptive tunings
for musical scales", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,
vol. 96, no. 1, pg. 10-19, July 1994. [Describes an adaptive, consonance based
approach to the problem of forming scales that can match a desired set of intervals
and can simultaneously be modulated to all keys. One reviewer stated that this
paper "sweeps away about five centuries of useless arguments about scales."]
"Specifying
Spectra for Musical Scales", J. of the Acoustical Society of America
in 102(4), Oct. 1997. [Presents a method of specifying the spectrum of a sound
so as to maximize a measure of consonance with a given desired scale.]
(with John Sankey) "A
consonance-based approach to the harpsichord tuning of Domenico Scarlatti",
J. of the Acoustical Society of America, April, 1997. [Applies psychoacoustic
measure of "total dissonance" to the problem of reconstructing musical
scales that best fit the extant work of Scarlatti.]
"Consonance based
spectral mappings", Computer Music Journal 22:1, 56-72, Spring 1998.
[Presents a method of mapping the spectrum of a sound so as to make it consonant
with a given specified reference spectrum. One application is to transform nonharmonic
sounds into harmonic equivalents. Alternatively, it can be used to create nonharmonic
instruments that retain the tonal qualities of familiar (harmonic) instruments.
Musical uses of such timbres is discussed, and new forms of (nonharmonic) modulation
are introduced. A series of sound examples demonstrate both the breadth and
limitations of the method]
"Real-time adaptive tunings using MAX", Journal of New Music Research, Vol. 31, No. 4, Dec 2002. [Details the simplifications needed to implement an adaptive tuning algorithm in real time. Introduces the notion of a "context", which imparts a kind of memory to the adaptation.]
"The Forms
of Tonality", by Paul Erlich. [Illustrates the concepts of tone-lattices,
scales, periodicity and notational systems for 5-limit and 7-limit music.]
"Tuning, Tonality,
and Twenty-Two-Tone Temperament", by Paul Erlich. [Considers notions
of generalized diatonic scales, with great figures and comparisons of a number
of tunings.]
"The Hermode
Tuning System", by Werner Mohrlok. [Detailed discussion of the inner
workings of the hermode system of adaptive tuning.]