DISSONANCE CURVES AS GENERATING DEVICES FOR DEALING WITH HARMONY

Juan Sebastin Lach Lau Composer Morelia, Mxico

http://web.me.com/jslach lachjs@gmail.com

ABSTRACT Dissonance curves are the starting point for an investigation into a psychoacoustically informed harmony. The research comes from the development of tools for algorithmic composition. These tools aid the composer by extracting pitch materials from sound signals, analyzing them according to their timbral and harmonic properties and putting them into motion through different rhythmic and textural procedures. The tools are useful either for generating instrumental scores, electroacoustic soundscapes or interactive liveelectronic systems. 2. TIMBRAL VS. PROPORTIONAL HARMONY

1.

INTRODUCTION

Two perceptual aspects are normally subsumed under the term harmony: one which has to do with proportion, ratio, number, which we'll call its proportional side, and another that involves sensation and acoustic constitution, which we'll call its timbral facet. These two sides of harmony are interconnected, without one of them being able to persist on its own without the other. It is rather the perspective brought by their setting into context which can make one aspect stand out from the other and to this extent, they are both active to different degrees in different musics and the thresholds and contexts that produce their mixtures or separation are composable. This dual aspect has a long history, one of conflict between proportion and spectrum, stemming from different orientations towards intervallic qualities. They are homologous to the divide in mathematics between the study of the continuous and the discrete, its history going back to the Greeks harmonists, having on one side a discrete approach in arithmetic with the Pythagoreans and on the side of the continuous, Aristoxenos and geometry. These divisions live up till today, emerging as different approaches to the problem of explaining consonance and dissonance or the perception of pitch, its mechanisms being divided into those of pitch-height and pitch-chroma, for example. These different approaches represent a polarity or inherent tension that is specific to pitch relations. Broadly speaking, it can be said that throughout different genres of contemporary and electroacoustic music, the principal pitch techniques deal mostly with aspects of pitch having to do with higher or lower, that is, with timbral rather than proportional harmonic relations. Spectral, atonal and most electroacoustic approaches to pitch tend towards this timbral aspect. Even most properly harmonic music, does not go much further from the harmonic procedures of the early modernist period. 3. DISSONANCE CURVES

During the 20th century harmonic theory almost came to a halt due to the saturation, around 1910, of tonal harmony, which gave way to a multitude of approaches for composing music based on aspects of sound other than pitch relationships. This lead to a broadening of compositional materials and aesthetic experiences in which new pitch relations took a secondary role to that of timbral, textural and rhythmic explorations. Since the 1970s there has been a silent but gradual reawakening of interest in harmony in a sense that is not limited to the materials and procedures of the diatonic/triadic tonal system but that incorporates the widened range of musical materials and aesthetic concerns of today. The present study approaches aspects of microtonal harmony through algorithmic composition tools that spring out of psychoacoustic research and, through a practice-based compositional approach, develops insights into the features of the pitch materials produced by the tools. It delves into theoretical aspects of harmony, surveying concepts such as harmonic space, harmonic fields, harmonic islands and rhythmic harmony, which provide avenues of exploration for the discovery of new harmonic possibilities. The theoretical journey is done at three harmonic levels: the micro level usually understood as timbre, the meso level of texture and rhythm and the macro level of form. The tools are available as a library for SuperCollider, a sound synthesis and algorithmic composition objectoriented language. It is called DissonanceLib and is available as an extension package (a quark in SuperCollider parlance, see [8]).

Dissonance curves go back to the psychoacoustics of Hermann von Helmholtz in his book Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen of 1862, whose translation and extension into English as On the Sensations of Tone in 1885 by Alexander Ellis, another important

psychoacoustician, is one of the most influential books in the history of acoustic physiology and one of the few scientific books from the nineteenth century which is still being published and read in the twentyfirst. (See [4]. For a comprehensive survey of dissonance curves, see [7] as well as [2]) Dissonance curves are based on the phenomenon of roughness or sensory dissonance. Roughness is related to beatings between sounds, that is, fluctuations in dynamics produced as a result of interferences between the amplitudes of two periodic sounds. Furthermore, it also refers to those interferences that happen between the partials of a single sound (which is the case of intrinsic roughness). When these beatings are slow, they are heard as amplitude modulations; a common example occurs when tuning a guitar. At these speeds the beatings are known as tremolos and their speed, for pure waves, is the difference between the frequencies of their fundamentals in cycles per second. When two sine waves coincide in frequency there are no beatings. As the frequency of one moves upward, little by little beatings are produced at progressively higher speeds. When the two waves are more than 16Hz away from each other the tremolo is fast enough to become a continuous vibration, giving rise to an emerging sensation of a (low) tone, without loosing the rough and raspy character for which this timbral quality has been named sensory dissonance. Helmholtz showed that the interference does not happen exclusively in the sounding waves themselves, but that the phenomenon is also produced in perception: it is a product of translation, as a consequence of mechanical processes in the physiology of the ear. He also showed how roughness reaches a maximum at around 33Hz for tones of around 100Hz. At higher speeds, roughness diminishes till it disappears completely; as the tones move further away from each other the beatings seem to cease their mutual influence as they begin to be heard independently. If instead of interpreting this in cycles per second (Hz) we see them in the logarithmic scale of cents (invented by Ellis), we begin to see a pattern: for almost all the auditory register the interferences happen within the interval of a minor third. This interval is the limit between melodic (steps) and harmonic (jumps) intervals. Even more, if we study this with the bark scale, which is calibrated to the resolution of the ears physiology, we see that the interval in barks is the same for any roughness and in any register. Helmholtzs theory of hearing models the ear as a bank of resonators. This model is one of the two types of psychoacoustic pitch perception theories: those based on spatial processing (like this one, physiological and dependent on spectrum), and those based on temporal processing (which are psychological and depend on

waveform and periodicity, being more relevant to the proportional aspect of harmony). Some of the current spatial theories are refinements on Helmholtzs, derived from discoveries made in the twentieth century, related to the basilar membrane in the cochlea and known as the critical bandwidth model. (See [6]) Helmholtzs theory of consonance and dissonance is timbral, based on the spectral content of sound and on the specific registers in which the partials occur. This is why timbral harmony depends on register and spectrum; however, proportional harmony is independent of both ambitus and timbre. In a theory based on resonators it is possible to measure the roughness happening between all partials of a sound against those same partials transposed by a certain interval in order to obtain the total roughness contributed by them all. In terms of barks, the maximum roughness between partials happens between a quarter and a third of a bark. Sweeping the intervals (in the manner of a glissando), where for each new intervallic step the total roughness is calculated, we get a dissonance curve, which is the roughness profile for the sound as transposed against itself within a certain range. The ultimate aim of dissonance curves, at least for our compositional purposes, lies not so much the measurement of roughness as in the further analysis of the curves, which yield, out of their local minima, intervallic pitch sets with interesting properties (See Figure 1). These intervals are not only limited to the partials of the sources spectrum, being more and of various types and also dependent on the sweeping interval over which the curve is made. All of them have the property of being points where the timbre is minimally rough with itself, which makes them more or less compatible or concordant with the timbral character of the source spectrum. It also happens that they coincide with important harmonic points which is the reason why a rationalization is performed on the frequency ratios in order to match them to musically useful ones. Therefore, they can be used either in spectral as well as harmonic ways, and this is why they are further classified and separated by means of an analysis over the pitch-distance continuum as well as inside harmonic space. The pitch sets produce irregular microtonal scales having variable distances between their intervals with a different structure for every octave register. The sets are interpreted in various ways: each interval is represented as a distance in cents, as a ratio, as a harmonic vector with a harmonic metric (to choose from harmonicity (Barlow [1]), harmonic distance (Tenney [9]), gradus suavitatis (Euler) and geometric norm). On top of this, each interval stores its roughness measure, which can be useful for dynamic balances. As pitch sets, they are partitioned into timbral and harmonic subsets and a probability and ranking matrix is created, from which their stochastic harmonic field can be constructed. The

separation into harmonic and timbral sets is done according to the periodicity block to which they belong. (More on harmonic space and fields below. For more on periodicity blocks, see Fokker, [3]) Different roles can be assigned to the separated interval sets (and there are many parameters to fine tune the results). Timbral intervals, holding a close spectral relationship with the source sound are susceptible, for example, of being used on top of recorded concrete sounds, to either reinforce or color them as well as for instrumental synthesis. Intervals falling within a periodicity block are prone to be used in a harmonic setting and can be correlated to certain (12, 19, 22, 31, 41 and 53-tone) equal divisions of the octave which approximate them and allow for a permutational use of the intervals by treating them as degrees of those temperaments. Harmonic intervals are also compatible with the original source but in a more abstract way and their settings involve longer time and rhythmic frames than timbral ones, which focus on the transitory present; they are less immediate and can function as fundamentals, tonics, pedals and drones, depending on their duration1.
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perception will be called harmonic space. (James Tenney, [9]) Harmonic space can be seen to go as far back as Leonhardt Euler in the XVIII century, when he proposed visualizing harmonic relations in two dimensions, arranged by fifths and thirds. Alexander Ellis, in his appendixes to Helmholtz, devises a more complete harmonic duodenarium. Later composers such as Harry Partch ([6]) and Ben Johnston, or scientists such as Adriaan Fokker and H. C. Longuet Higgins will also deal with pitch relations in terms of some kind of multidimensional discrete lattice of points. Tenney, however, is the first to make a call for arms in order to rehabilitate harmony from a compositionally insightful perspective. He also develops the topic from the standpoint of experimental music, not involving nostalgia for past musics, though attempting to include them as well. He proposes this new approach to harmony basing it on the unlikely figure of John Cage, who is well known to have disliked harmony because of its connotations with the German symphonic tradition and because it forced an a priori (that is, logical and thus arbitrary) thinking upon sounds themselves. However, it is by using Cages ideas regarding composition with any possible sound that the ground is set for rediscovering a harmony able to link sound- and note-based composition, capable of incorporating and pertaining to any type of sound, beyond the worn-out opposition between noisy and musical sounds. The axes of the lattice correspond to fundamental harmonic intervals, defined by prime numbers. Just as they are of chief importance in arithmetic, prime numbers play a determining role in harmonic qualities, defining their primary colors or chromas from which chords and tonal zones are constituted. Number 2 defines octaveness, number 3 the quality of fifths, number 5 thirds, and 7 sevenths, a dimension which has been little explored yet because it is not well approximated by 12 tone temperaments. It is debatable to which extent chromas higher than 7 (such as 11 and 13, a fourth plus a quartertone and a high minor sixth) can be perceived without them being confused with close relationships which are expressible in terms of lower primes. Each new chroma is weaker than previous ones and an intervals coordinates define its mixture of chromas and its relative distance from others. These relationships also depend on contextual elements to become audible. It is well known that an interval does not have to be exactly tuned in order for it to be identified as belonging to a certain pitch class. This little understood mechanism of fault tolerance is at work in chroma perception and keeps the dimensions in harmonic space from proliferating indefinitely. It also makes approximations by temperaments possible. In this mechanism lies the key for the creation of adequate contexts for composition with higher and ever stranger chromas.

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Roughness

7/6 6/5
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7/5 8/5 5/3 3/2 7/4

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Figure 1. A dissonance curve taken from a mathematical (as opposed to an empirical) spectrum (that of a sawtooth wave) over an octave. The yielded ratios are shown beneath each minima, corresponding to just-intoned intervals.

4.

HARMONIC SPACE

[C]urrent acoustical definitions of pitch [conceive it] as a one-dimensional continuum running from low to high. But our perception of relations between pitches is more complicated than this. The phenomenon of octave-equivalence, for example, cannot be represented on such a one-dimensional continuum, and octave-equivalence is just one of several specifically harmonic relations between pitches i.e. relations other than merely higher or lower. This suggests that the single acoustical variable, frequency, must give rise to more than one dimension in sound-space that the space of pitch perception is itself multidimensional. This multidimensional space of pitch-

Giving a review of possible experimental harmonic strategies is beyond the scope of this article, though it is a very interesting field of exploration, still in a compositional more than a theoretical stage at the moment.

5.

HARMONIC FIELDS

6.

CONCLUSIONS

In stochastic harmonic fields the probability of choosing a note in a pitch set is determined by its harmonicity. The fields strength is variable and continuous, with three main zones: at zero all notes have the same probability (atonal), at one only the most consonant notes are chosen (tonal) and at minus one only the most dissonant are chosen (antitonal). This implies the creation of harmonicity matrixes where the harmonicity between all intervals is measured. From this matrix all probabilities are calculated: there is a tonic mode where only a column of the matrix corresponding to a certain interval (the tonic) in the pitch set is used; it works as a sort of mode of the set. An atonic mode is also possible, using the whole of matrix. It can be though of as making each new chosen interval the new tonic and then calculating the probabilities of the next interval based on this new mode. It has a distinctly different sonority from the tonic modes. Other compositional aspects intervene in a harmonic field, such as the spectral constitution of the generated notes (which can traverse the consonance and dissonance polarities of the timbral dimension) as well as the size and density of the notes (which can be though of as grains or particles more than traditional notes, although they do intersect). When the density is high and size is small, the aggregates tend towards fusion and coalesce into timbres (harmonic timbres), while with lower densities/larger sizes the aggregates tend towards fission and the individuals are heard as components of chords (timbral harmonies). There are a few applications built on top of the basic tools that are used to explore these fields. They have yielded quite a few pieces and algorithmic improvisations already, although there is still much more to discover about this approach.

The qualitative and the quantitative, at least in the realm of perception and the audible, are closely related. In the case of sonic harmony, consisting mainly in periodic or quasi periodic sonorities, colors and harmonic qualities are determined by numeric quantities. These quantities and qualities correspond formally, not causally. Although causal factors intervene, the numbers are not reducible to biophysical processes. The appearance of numbers does not happen during perception, only after reflection and theorization (as well as during composition). These and other aspects of this research, such as the relation between rhythm and harmony, have not been dealt with in the present paper. They have to do with philosophical (and even metaphysical, in an almost literal sense of the study of that which is common to all things (Leibniz), beyond the physical realm, but springing out from specifically musical questions) and mathematical issues which are beyond the scope of this article but which are being pursued as an important aspect of the authors PhD dissertation, which is in the writing. Further work is needed in order to develop the tools towards rhythmic/textural directions in order to help achieve a generative composition of timbre-pitchtexture-form. It is also important to let these experiments permeate and influence aesthetically all aspects of musical organization in a coherent and integrated way.

7.

REFERENCES

[1] Barlow, C., Musiquantics, Royal Conservatory, The Hague, 2006. [2] Carlos, W., Tuning at the crossroads, Computer Music Journal 11/1, 1987. [3] Fokker, A., Unison vectors and periodicity blocks in the three-dimensional (3-5-7) harmonic lattice of notes, Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences, Amsterdam, Proceedings, Series B 72, No. 3, 1969. [4] Helmholtz H., On the Sensations of Tone as a Psychological basis for the Theory of Music. Dover, New York, 1960 (1862). [5] Partch, H., Genesis of a Music, Da Capo Press, New York, 1979 (1949). [6] Plomp, R, Levelt, W., Tonal Consonance and the Critical Bandwidth Journal of the Acoustical Society of America #38, 548-568, 1966. [7] Sethares, W., Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale. Springer, Berlin, 1999. [8] SuperCollider: http://supercollider.sourceforge.net [9] Tenney, J., John Cage and the Theory of Harmony Soundings 23, 1984.

Figure 2. Schematic diagram of harmonic fields. The horizontal axis pertains to harmonicity, the vertical to roughness (timbre) and the (supposed) 3rd dimension to the aggregate dimension of fission/ fusion.