The state of the world, 2008.11.10:

Further awesome


All of me by Chris Chameleon; Shotopop; WIZZ
(higher res at shotopop.com)

Windows 7 taskbar

My feature is finally disclosed to the public! Behold the taskbar of tomorrow:

Windows 7: Welcome to the Windows 7 Desktop

For actual Windows 7 blogging, please visit the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

Mrs. Culter's Digital Classroom

Behold!

Harmony: A Psychoacoustical Approach

This book is freely available for download. Here's the preface:
My first encounter with the theory of harmony was during my last year at school (1975). This fascinating system of rules crystallized the intuitive knowledge of harmony I had acquired from years of piano playing, and facilitated memorization, transcription, arrangement and composition. For the next five years, I studied music (piano) and science (physics) at the University of Melbourne. This "strange combination" started me wondering about the origins of those music theory "rules". To what extent were they determined or influenced by physics? mathematics? physiology? conditioning?

In 1981, the supervisor of my honours project in musical acoustics, Neville Fletcher, showed me an article entitled "Pitch, consonance, and harmony", by a certain Ernst Terhardt of the Technical University of Munich. By that stage, I had devoured a considerable amount of (largely unsatisfactory) material on the nature and origins of harmony, which enabled me to recognize the significance of Terhardt's article. But it was not until I arrived in Munich the following year (on Terhardt's invitation) that I began to appreciate the consequences of his "psychoacoustical" approach for the theory of harmony. That is what this book is about.

The book presents Terhardt's work against the broad context of music perception research, past and present. Music perception is a multidisciplinary mixture of physics, psychology, and music. Where different theoretical approaches appear contradictory, I try to show instead that they complement and enrich each another. Readers are assumed to be acquainted with basic princples of harmony, acoustics (including spectral analysis), and computer modelling.

For a contrasting, more accessible approach see The Psychoacoustics of Harmony Perception from American Scientist.

Please, go ahead and e-mail me! @microsoft.com is the best address, if you know it. If I get a decent response, I might even start updating this page more than once a year!

© Christopher Culter