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Harmonics Explorer
- mikewarot 3y agoWell, that was fun, I've got headphones on, so I heard it all the way down to 16 Hz sine wave. Getting a triangle wave with 4n+1 harmonics wasn't easy.
- mcqueenjordan 3y agoThis is really cool. I used to do a lot of overtone ("harmonic") throat singing and playing with this tool reminded me of those days. For anyone curious, vowels are mostly just how we perceive different harmonic distributions. Put differently, harmonics are the basis of what it means to pronounce a different vowel. The human voice is basically just a harmonic chord, with different distributions of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. harmonics. e.g. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/health-sports-psychology/health/from-sound-meaning-hearing-speech-and-language/content-section-2.3 https://www.open.edu/openlearn/health-sports-psychology/heal...
- lioeters 3y agoThat reminds me, I saw a video recently of a choir practice where they sang "brighter" and "darker" based on the conductor's hand position. It was fascinating how the singers could control the brightness of their voice while holding the same note and frequency. When they went bright, it sounded closer to "eee" or "iii". When they went dark, it sounded like "uuu" and "ooo". From that, I learned that the lyrics of a song, in particular the vowels, can be chosen consciously (or not) for their harmonic effect.
- xeonmc 3y agoYou may find this interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9Qh709gas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9Qh709gas EDIT: also this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdldD0-kEcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdldD0-kEcc
- brk 3y agoYou may also find this interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oxe4mlsQos&t=120s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oxe4mlsQos&t=120s
- divan 3y agoThanks for sharing! Didn't know human voice can do this.
- mkesper 3y agoOr maybe this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxMmaygEYP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxMmaygEYP8
- AlecSchueler 3y agoA lot of great music has been written with this in mind, I would highly recommend Stimmung, for six vocalists and six microphones, by Karlheinz Stockhausen. Really the whole piece is created from a framework of phonetics, loose vowel sounds as well as names taken from the "magical of otherworldly" traditions of various cultures as well as words taken from the composer's own poetry.
- lioeters 3y agoOoh nice. I'd heard of Stockhausen - attended a performance of his works once - but this is new to me. Very strange music with a wide range of harmonics produced by vocalizations of vowel sounds. Sometimes nasal, other times chant-like, machine-like, and even reminiscent of insects at night. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hPkJW95jsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hPkJW95jsw
- kevindamm 3y agoReminds me of pink trombone. https://dood.al/pinktrombone/ https://dood.al/pinktrombone/
- kmarc 3y agoFunnily, this is how Hungarian appends suffixes at the end of the words. The "brightness" of the suffix has to match the brightness of the stem. We'd call e/i/ö/ü "high" tone class while a (as in the word calm) / o / u "low" tone.
- klysm 3y agoIs this related to formants? I don’t actually know what that term means but I’ve heard it used in this context
- Perenti 3y agoAs I understand it, the formant is the difference between the interval from the harmonic series, and the interval using whatever temperment you're in. Piano-notes are in equal temperment. String players, and some wind instruments allow you to play the "in-between" notes selectively (like a true major third, unlike the horrid thing a equal temperment produces) giving you a powerful emotional tool
- klysm 3y agoI wouldn’t go as far as to say the major third from equal temperament is a horrid thing, but it sure doesn’t hit as well as a true major third
- srcreigh 3y ago90 second video demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnC8I3d2MXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnC8I3d2MXQ Lots of different notes present. Perfect 5th, major 2nd, major 3rd, major 7th are all found in the harmonic series. In addition there's some beautiful non-piano intervals, notably the 7th harmonic (slightly flat minor 7th) and the 11th harmonic (flat tri-tone)
- waqf 3y agoStrictly speaking they're all non-piano intervals, just some are more non-piano than others. (Or you can retune your piano …)
- d--b 3y agoMy tinnitus does not thank you
- dr_dshiv 3y agoThe earliest known scientific hypothesis test was a Pythagorean investigation of whether the mathematical model for consonance in stringed instruments generalized to chimes — so rather than 1:2 as a ratio of string length, whether a ratio of 1:2 in chime thickness also produces an octave. It does. (This experiment was conducted by Hippasus and recorded by Aristoxenus, a student of Aristotle) But interestingly, we still have big open gaps in our scientific models of consonance and dissonance. Consonant tones involve a large number of shared harmonics. That alignment appears to be important in the perception of consonance and dissonance. Yet, harmonic alignment is not currently a mechanism used in the algorithmic detection of consonance/dissonance, so far as I know. This tool looks like a good way to generate stimuli for experimentation, thanks!
- mrob 3y agoWilliam Sethares developed a model of consonance and dissonance based around alignment of harmonics (or partials; it generalizes to inharmonic sounds). Original paper: https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf Informal explanation: https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html
- Prcmaker 3y agoI like the thing, but it misses what I enjoyed teaching about these most: phase. Many people know white noise is nominally 'all frequencies at the same intenisty', yet those taught Fourier mathematics are also taught that the same recipe makes a pulse. The difference is all in the phase information, and why I maintain to this day the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, as typically applied, is incorrect.
- laszlokorte 3y agoYes phase information is really important. Try this: 1. Fourier Transform an Image 2. Set all magnitues the the spectrum to 1.0, but do not change the phase 3. Inverse Transform and look at the result 4. Now try the same, but this time keep the maginutes unchanged but change all phases to 0° Spoiler: When changing all amplitudes the image is still regocognizable, when changing all phases, it is not. See example: [1] But in what sense are you saying the Nyquist-Shannon theorem is incorrect (when applied)? It only says something about the most general case of perfectly reconstructing a signal. For getting an playful and intuitive understanding of time/frequency transformations my fourier-cube visualization might be useful [2] [1]: https://static.laszlokorte.de/phase.png https://static.laszlokorte.de/phase.png [2]: https://static.laszlokorte.de/frft-cube/ https://static.laszlokorte.de/frft-cube/
- rcxdude 3y agoI'm not sure the original poster meant, but the sampling theorem is often misunderstood, there's a good article I recommend to most anyone who has the choose a sampling rate which goes into those misconceptions: https://neuron.eng.wayne.edu/auth/ece4330/practical_sampling.pdf https://neuron.eng.wayne.edu/auth/ece4330/practical_sampling...
- roelschroeven 3y agoPhase information is important, but as far as I understand it, it is not important in audio: our ears are insensitive to phase. (Phase is important when combining different sinuses of the same frequency, because the sum of those will be different depending on their relative phase, but that's a different matter and not relevant here.) Changing the phases of the different frequencies will result in a waveform that looks different, but it will sound the same. Our ears are like a spectrum analyzer that only records the volume of each frequency, and is unable to record the phase.
- _nivlac_ 3y agoI love these. My favourite part is that you can hear the fundamental frequency when you add up the non-octave frequencies (i.e. increase all harmonics except 1, 2, 4 and 8). Even though the fundamental frequency isn't "there", your ears can still hear it.
- xeonmc 3y agoIf you want to go above 13 overtones or make other waveforms, I quickly whipped this up for square/triangle/sawtooth/impulse trains: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/eioaj93rzr https://www.desmos.com/calculator/eioaj93rzr
- djmips 3y agoVery nice.
- edoardo-schnell 3y agoNice. Would be even nicer to be able to move the base frequency
- quercusa 3y agoLook for the arrows on either side of C4 on the top bar.
- quercusa 3y agoThe effect when switching from sine to square wave, as the harmonics are added, is very nice.
- elevaet 3y agoThis is very cool. If the creator is reading these comments, my one piece of feedback would be that I think it would be more interesting/useful if the harmonics were expressed as multiples or ratios of the fundamental.
- waffletower 3y agoNice visualization! A few improvement suggestions -- I noticed that it is easy to clip the 'master' output, a 'master fader' to control its output (or a checkbox to rescale visualization based on maximum value). Also, implementing a phase control for each harmonic would also be interesting for visualization. Finally, why not add a wavetable synth to allow you to hear the resulting waveform?
- chankstein38 3y agoMaster volume fader, please. This is cool but I have to change my computer volume to adjust the volume and that's not a very great experience. Especially when I click Square and it just starts screaming at me.
- jbl0ndie 3y agoIt's in the top left, labelled master or sawtooth. Defaults to 0.500.
- tonetheman 3y ago[dead]
- superb-owl 3y agoThis is great. I wish the left side showed the frequency ratio as well as the raw frequency
- KyleBrandt 3y agoIt might be interesting if there is more fine tuning towards the lower end of the volume. So the higher harmonics can be present but much softer.
- jefurii 3y agoI thought this might be a map of the positions of various harmonics on e.g. guitar strings, but still very interesting and cool.
- miggol 3y agoWow, what a lucky find. This is incredibly useful to me for equalizing speakers to match a room. I was using Websynths Microtonal before but this almost seems designed for the purpose. All it might need is the ability to manually enter the base frequency yourself or do an automatic sweep. But I could probably bodge that into the source myself. Lovely!
- chaosprint 3y agoshould check Tero's other works: https://teropa.info/ https://teropa.info/ another comment: if you want to use any number of sine waves of any freq, you can use code to do this: https://glicol.org/tour#mixjs2 https://glicol.org/tour#mixjs2
- jbl0ndie 3y agoI really love the https://teropa.info/musicmouse/ https://teropa.info/musicmouse/
- merelysounds 3y agoMy similar project, with a bit of a spirograph mixed in: https://merely.xyz/waves https://merely.xyz/waves
- yamadapc 3y agoNice, I built a similar toy with RNBO - https://knobs-gallery.vercel.app/harmonics https://knobs-gallery.vercel.app/harmonics https://rnbo.cycling74.com/ https://rnbo.cycling74.com/
- vermarish 3y agoIt's wonderful when an interaction makes you question that which you thought you knew. My understanding was that, in order to produce a triangle or sawtooth wave, you need to have a phase control. This is because of the (-1)^k term in the Fourier expansion, as seen in Wikipedia. After seeing this site produce a sawtooth wave with no phase control, my mind is blown apart, into tiny little pieces.
- T3RMINATED 3y ago[dead]