Three Dollar Quill

Okay, I didn't have the focus to look at Impliciula-related stuff today, but I did mess around with coding related to audio processing. I've managed to put together some stuff just by typing a lot, but there are some very obvious limitations in the interfaces I have currently, so I'm trying to figure out how to address them.

The actual musical content is some xenharmonic nonsense that I might as well try to describe. Basically, I've been reading about dissonance curves and thinking about the implications of them. I realized that if the disonance minimum around the third is shallow instead of steep, then there won't be a strong draw to a precise value, which means that a spectrum that lacks fifth harmonics won't have a specific, preferred third, and would allow for neutral thirds; building a scale from neutral chords ends up suggesting 7TET instead of 12TET. Now, I didn't really like the sound of "basically a sawtooth wave but with certain harmonics suppressed", so I ended up switching to using undertones instead of overtones in my additive synthesis. This results in a sound that... is a sound. I like it, maybe I'll try messing with it a little later, but that's not the priority currently. I slapped together an ADSR implementation, and, like most of this project, got Numpy to do the heavy lifting; I don't know if the parameters I'm currently using are the greatest, but I can mess with those some other time, as well.

I initially assumed that the use of undertones in the synthesis meant I would need to put the melody in the bass and invert chords from 12TET (ignoring that it's not possible to make a 7TET chord sound "different", per se), but putting the melody all in the bass was too subtle for my taste (or maybe just for my laptop speakers; it was fine-ish over headphones), so I switched everything back.

At this point, I technically have what I need to try out more ambitious compositions than "the 7TET chromatic scale" and "pop music loop but it sounds weird because all of the thirds are different and also the fifth is even flatter than 12TET, like by a decent amount", but. Important concepts like "an instrument" are not meaningfully surfaced, and I'm going to need to do something about that in order to have a chance of moving from "arduous copy and paste" to "handy functions" or even "algorithmic composition".

Anyway, my focus petered out there, so we're done for tonight.

Good night.