- Analyze consonance and dissonance of a given timbre playing your scale -- using a perceptual model of hearing.
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What It Does
The
thermometers estimate the average amount of consonance
and dissonance within the scale.
There is only one thermometer panel available. When visible it shows the temperatures for the
top-most Oven.
The thermometers are updated every time the Scale Pattern or Repeat Ratio is edited.
How It Works
The sonance calculation is performed by mathematically simulating the architecture
of the human brain’s neural networks which amalgamate frequency band information
coming from the cochlea. The neural model is assembled using data from physiological
experiments.
Tips & Techniques
It took years to come up with an accurate way to actually model the
human perception of both consonance and dissonance, with each one treated as separable
and differing phenomenon. But once I got it figured out, I was quite
underwhelmed by its usefulness beyond that of curiosity. I didn’t get
much use from this feature for a long time. It’s because consonance and
dissonance are somewhat overrated and you can do a lot with just about
any tuning no matter what sort of psychoacoustic measurements you make
of it.
But lately I have discovered a really useful technique. In the field of
scale stretching, being able to see the relative temperatures of
consonance and dissonance is amazingly useful for finding the little
niche in which a tuning really has a unique impact. Take a strange
tuning you’ve made up or found and convert it to Srutis in the Scale
Pattern menu; either Absolute or Difference is fine. When in srutis mode,
you can stretch a whole scale merely by changing the Repeat Ratio.
Change the Repeat Ratio to cents. You can do this by looking at the
vaule in the description given in cents, then typing
cents2ratio(value) for the Repeat Ratio, where value is the
cents. So for an octave, cents2ratio(1200) and for a fifth
cents2ratio(702). Now, with the temperature gauges open, click
on the number and then use either the up and down arrows on your
keyboard, or if you are on OS X, the mouse wheel, to quickly and easily
modify the number of cents, scrolling through a range of nearby values.
As you do this, observe the effect on the Consonance and Dissonance
Temperatures. There will be certain points at which the gauges hit
maximums and minimums and then reverse directions. The tunings at these
inflection points I find to be particularly interesting; maybe you’ll like
them too.
Typically you’ll end up with a lot of intervals that have a lot of pleasing
pleng to them by using this technique. The method seems to work
especially miraculous results with nonoctave tunings.