2020-09-30

Orbital Resonance Synth

Polyrhythmic Resonance Harmony Generator

Audio

Alpha

Technical Details

Wikipedia:

In celestial mechanics, orbital resonance occurs when orbiting bodies exert regular, periodic gravitational influence on each other, usually because their orbital periods are related by a ratio of small integers.

What is this application?

Polyrhythmic Harmony Generator 🎶🥁
A proof of concept for a Synthesizer Application.
Generates harmony based on Orbital Resonance 🔘

Polyrhythmic ratios can be sped up to a degree so we can perceive them in melody/harmony. 🎵

Based on Adam Neely‘s talk “New Horizons in Music: Polyrhythms”.
Check it out below!

Explanation

In music theory, polyrhythms are two or more rhythms that are playing simultaneously. A ratio of 3 notes to 2 notes (3:2) is considered an 'easy to understand' polyrhythm. However, there are multiple commonly known ratios of polyrhythms such as 3:4, and 15:8.

Now the experiment:
With digital audio workstations you can speed up certain polyrhythms to a melodic frequency range. Due to our ears, we have a gap between our perception of rhythm and pitch.
So what happens when you use 2 different metronomes (a polyrhythm), while increasing the BPM. Eventually, depending on the polyrhythmic ratio you will get harmony. In a vague sense, rhythm = pitch and polyrhythm = polypitch / harmony.

What's even more interesting is that 'simpler' polyrhythmic ratios appear to sound more pleasant to our ears (consonant), and the more difficult the polyrhythm is to feel, the more dissonant the resulting harmony sounds.

This project uses the following under an MIT license:Unity-Audio-Sequencer by Nidre (Erdin Kacan)

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