Conceit is at the root of the whole idea of the Harmonic Sequencer, which is in fact partly inspired by my desire to humour my same conceits about metronomic pulse. As composers we all make subjective decisions and for me, this is one of them. This is merely an aesthetic preference, the way I might tend to prefer certain music to other music, or wool to nylon. I have always found the clockwork regular beats of, say, dance music to be musically claustrophobic. I am not trying to imply some sort of hierarchy of rhythmic feel, where say a ‘natural’ drummer is ‘better’ than a drum machine (after all, drum machines can be programmed in very sophisticated ways, as well). A personal motivation in exploring the fluidity or continuum of rhythm that the Harmonic Sequencer facilitates is due to the fact that I have always been distinctly annoyed by metronomically regular beats or pulses. Such thinking has its origins in Stockhausen’s well-developed ideas about the continuum of duration and pitch (Stockhausen, 1957). The thinking behind the Harmonic Sequencer is a conceptual development of taking equal temperament as a standard unit and other temperaments as deviations from this but expressed now in the domain of rhythm. Certainly as singer, I find micro-intonation to be one of my most sophisticated tools of expression (even disregarding my extensive work with overtone and throat singing, which relies on very specific use of the overtone scales and all the intonational issues involved in that). Our intonation changes, depending on which other instrumentalists we are playing with. Furthermore, as every practicing musician knows, compromise is very much part of our everyday practice. The music that interests me demonstrates that the world is nothing if not abundant with local, historical and personal systems of intonation. There is something pure and appealing as a composer about this tuning as its inherent simplicity yields an increasingly complex harmonic system.Īs a composer that uses their voice as the primary source for all of their work and has studied singing techniques from many cultures, I am used to many different means of vocal production and intonations, having no preference for any one system.
It is the mathematical simplicity and elegance of Pythagoras’ original concept of a tuning based solely on the 3:2 ratio that is so appealing in which exact doubling of the frequency gives the next pitch in the series. The consideration that kept coming to the fore was the impurity of equal temperament with its carefully calculated compromises.
#Harmonic series series
1953, NYC, USA) who works with a tuning system based on the harmonic series, I started speculating about what could be the reason that the harmonic series has continuously intrigued composers. Working recently on a project with the Berlin-based composer Arnold Dreyblatt (b. The new tuning system sacrificed the perfect consonance of certain intervals for an acceptable compromise consonance across a wider range, thereby extending the use of all intervals across all keys. Arguably this was devised in order to accommodate evolving instrumental and compositional practice. It is generally agreed that equal temperament was developed independently in both China and Holland in the 16th century. This series is a naturally occurring phenomena of and not a subjectively determined idea. The harmonic series - also sometimes referred to as the natural overtone series, (giving rise to just intonation or ‘Helmholtz’s scale’) is a simple formula yielding the frequency of the overtones of any given fundamental note. However, over the past three centuries equal temperament has become dominant and all different temperaments and tunings tend to be regarded as deviations from this norm. Although Harry Partch, LaMonte Young and Pauline Oliveros are some of the most recognised, the list of composers using just intonation or other tuning systems in the last 100 years is as long as it is illustrious and varied. It is common in certain fields of contemporary music practice to experiment with tunings that deviate from equal temperament. This concept of the Harmonic Sequencer has its origins in my thinking about the relationship between equal temperament tuning and the harmonic series.
#Harmonic series software
I will discuss the theory underpinning the software and its implementation. I have created a sequencer that mimics (in reverse) the relationship between the harmonic series and the equal temperament tuning in terms of temporal timing. This paper discusses a software tool created by the author in MAX.