William Sethares
William A. Sethares is an American music theorist and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. In music, he has contributed to the theory of Dynamic Tonality and provided a formalization of consonance.
Consonance and dissonance
Among the earliest musical traditions, musical consonance was thought to arise in a quasi-mystical manner from ratios of small whole numbers. The source of these ratios, in the pattern of vibrations known as the harmonic series, was exposed by Joseph Sauveur the early 18th century and even more clearly by Helmholtz in the 1860s.In 1965, Plomp and Levelt showed that this relationship could be generalized beyond the harmonic series, although they did not elaborate in detail.
In the 1990s, Sethares began exploring Plomp and Levelt's generalization, both mathematically and musically. His 1993 paper formalized the relationships between a tuning's notes and a timbre's partials that control sensory consonance. A more accessible version also appeared in Experimental [musical instruments |Experimental Musical Instruments] as These papers were followed by two CDs, and , which explored the application of these ideas to musical composition.
In his 1998 book , Sethares developed these ideas further, using them to expose the intimate relationship between the tunings and timbres of and indigenous music, and to explore other novel combinations of related tunings and timbres. Where microtonal music was previously either dissonant, or restricted to the narrow range of harmonically related tunings, Sethares's mathematical and musical work showed how musicians might explore microtonality without sacrificing sensory consonance.
As one reviewer of the second edition of this book wrote, "Physics had built a prison round music, and Sethares set it free." Another reviewer wrote that it "is not only the most important book about tuning written to date, but it is the most important book about music theory written in human history."
''Musica Facta''
Sethares' conception of consonance is one of the foundation-stones of a new research program called Musica Facta.External resources
Category:Academics from Massachusetts
Category:American music theorists
Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty
Category:Living people
Category:Electrical engineering academics
Category:Cornell University alumni
Category:Control theorists