"Paul Stamler" wrote in message ...

I think one of the things you'll find, investigating these real-world
sounds, is that most of them differ drastically from the sound made by most
musical instruments in that they are inharmonic; in other words, musical
instruments produce sound consisting mostly of a fundamental and harmonics,
at integer multiples of the fundamental frequency. Real-world noises, to a
great extent, have mixtures of frequencies that aren't integer multiples of
one another.

This is something I've always wondered about. I thought everything
obeyed the 1st harmonic, 2cnd harmonic, etc., rules. Is it possible
for a sound to have no overtones? I thought that even computer
generated sounds that have no harmonics on screen, produce them
automatically when they come out of the speaker. I thought the
harmonic series was just part of the physics of sound. Yes, real
world sounds often contain dissonant and un related intervals, but if
we broke down the overall sound to a set of sounds, wouldn't these
sounds in themselves produce the natural overtones?

The implication of that, of course, is that in trying to score instruments
to sound like real-world noises, you'll have to suppress their natural
tendency to play with integer-multiple harmonic series. In other words,
you'll need to force them to stop behaving like musical instruments.

How about microtones? I imagine the sound of an F#+ coming out of an
oboe would create some funny interactions with the harmonics. But I
could be wrong.


Thus,
for example, the suggestion of the light-pressure bow producing extraneous,
"non-musical" sounds in the Schickele recording. Contemporary composers have
been doing things like this for a while, with varying degrees of success --
I think back to the string snaps in Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion
and Celesta, in effect making the fiddles into percussion instruments.

Interesting project, and quite a challenge.

Peace,
Paul