William A. Sethares (born April 19, 1955) is an American music theorist and professor of
electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
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. (For instance,
Pythagoras
Pythagoras of Samos ( grc, Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος, Pythagóras ho Sámios, Pythagoras the Samian, or simply ; in Ionian Greek; ) was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His poli ...
made observations relating to this, and the ancient Chinese
Guqin
The ''guqin'' (; ) is a plucked seven-string Chinese musical instrument. It has been played since ancient times, and has traditionally been favoured by scholars and Scholar-bureaucrats, literati as an instrument of great subtlety and refinemen ...
contains a dotted scale representing the harmonic series.) 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
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (31 August 1821 – 8 September 1894) was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields, particularly hydrodynamic stability. The Helmholtz Associatio ...
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 pape
''On the relationship between timbre and scale''formalized the relationships between a
tuning's notes and a
timbre
In music, timbre ( ), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voices and musica ...
's partials that control sensory
consonance. A more accessible version also appeared in ''
Experimental Musical Instruments'' a
"Relating Tuning and Timbre"These papers were followed by two CDs
Xenotonalityan
Exomusicology(some songs from which can b
, which explored the application of these ideas to
musical composition
Musical composition can refer to an original piece or work of music, either vocal or instrumental, the structure of a musical piece or to the process of creating or writing a new piece of music. People who create new compositions are called ...
.
In his 1998 boo
''Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale'' Sethares developed these ideas further, using them to expose the intimate relationship between the tunings and timbres o
Indonesianan
Thaiindigenous music, and to explore other novel combinations of related tunings and timbres. Where microtonal music was previously either dissonant (due to being played with harmonic timbres to which it was not "related"), or restricted to the narrow range of harmonically related tunings (to retain sensory consonance), 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''.
[''Musica Facta'': http://musicafacta.org]
See also
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Dynamic tonality
*
Isomorphic keyboard
*
Syntonic temperament
References
Further reading
*
External resources
Webpage of Professor William Sethares at the University of Wisconsin
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sethares, William A.
1955 births
People from Massachusetts
American music theorists
University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty
Living people
Electrical engineering academics
Cornell University alumni
Control theorists