"The Harmonic Series: A path to understanding musical intervals, scales, tuning and timbre" is a suite of instructional Web pages designed to allow musicians to explore the harmonic series and acoustical concepts related to it through text, diagrams and animations with integrated audio. JavaScript calculation tools for frequency ratio to cents conversion and a 12TET frequency table generator are also available.
This is not alpha, beta, or gamma software. "Then what is it?" you ask. As it stands right now, it's a bunch of Web pages organized around a single theme: musical applications of the harmonic series. I teach music composition, theory and technology at the University of South Carolina. In all my courses we always seem to run head-first into the harmonic series (whether we want to or not). My students wanted to hear what it sounded like. For that matter, so did I. Actually, what I really wanted to be able to do is generate audio examples demonstrating a wide variety of basic acoustical principles.I figured it would be worth my time to do this because if my students could hear it, they might be more likely to be able to integrate it into their musical experience.So I set off on the very difficult journey that is learning Csound. I figured my students could download a free copy of Csound and other freeware/shareware tools available on the Web so that they could render the examples I created for them on their own computer. This worked well for awhile. However, while working with my students one-on-one, I noticed that if I could integrate the text, diagram and audio into a single multimedia presentation I would have a much more persuasive instruction aid. Of course, that would be a lot of work, but I decided to do it anyway.
The Web seemed like the perfect way to distribute the media elements. I begain to create examples and Web pages "on the fly," usually right before class. This is something I enjoy doing and my students seem to appreciate the work I put into it. So I just keep doing it...
Reginald Bain, Assoc. Prof.
University of South CarolinaYour comments and suggestions are welcome. Please e-mail them to me at rbain@mozart.sc.edu.
This site, when finshed, will allow users to with QuickTime to hear/view all audio and video content. QuickTime is a cross-platform (Win/Mac) digital video engine. You can download QuickTime for free at www.apple.com/quicktime/download/.
A couple of the animations currently require the Shockwave/Flash. These animations are distinguished from the others by a swf link. You can download the Shockwave/Flash plug-in at www.macromedia.com. I will eventually convert these to QuickTime 6 videos.
Most of the audio tracks on this site were created using Csound. Csound template files are available for download for users who would like to create their own examples. Please visit my 1998 ATMI Presentation Page for more information.
These pages are optimized for an 800x600 display using 256 colors. Higher resolutions will work as well, however, smaller display sizes like 640x480 may require the user to have to do some creative scrolling.