[HacktionLab] Music workshop for this year's hacktionlab.

[Mike Harris]

Hi all,

Wow, just a few weeks till HacktionLab again!  Am so happy to be 
returning to the Sumac and to see your familiar faces and hopefully meet 
some new.

I've updated my workshop/talk with a refocus on it being about 
understand how music works, rather than something heavy about Go code, 
which I think will go over most of our heads (including mine, and I 
wrote it!).  Yes, it's music again, but I thought it would be fun and 
interesting, and I aim to keep it really accessible and as practical as 
I can.

See you there :)


Mike.


      The Harmonic Series and the development of musical scales

Format
    talk, demonstration
Proposed by
    Mike Harris
Length
    60 minutes
Equipment
    projector, speakers, amplifier for trichord
Description
    Following on from last year's talk about the difficulties of tuning
    in twelve-tone equal temperament
    <https://hacktionlab.org/Why_is_it_so_hard_to_tune_me_guitar%3F>,
    this workshop goes back to the basics and looks at a resonating
    string (or pipe) and the harmonic series. It goes on to introduce
    5-limit just intonation, how it works mathematically to build a
    scale, overtones and undertones, reciprocals, and what the issues
    are with building a polyphonic instrument in just intonation. If
    there's time it'll have a brief review of tempered tunings and some
    of the different historical European approaches, such as meantone,
    Bach's well-temperament, 12-tone Equal Temperament (the most common
    these days), and Harry Partch's 43-tone scale. 

    To aid our understanding, we can play with a trichord that I built
    for the purpose. I hope it's therefore as hands on as possible.
    We'll also see this fret-placement calculator tool
    <https://mbharris.co.uk/music/theory/fretboard.html> in action. It
    uses a Go library that models musical scales
    <https://github.com/mikebharris/music>, which I'm happy to nerd
    about with anyone who's interested, but this won't be part of the
    core talk.
Nerd gag
    Musically, I'm going to try to make it accessible for those who no
    nothing about it. In fact, it may help to not have a load of
    concepts in your head. To understand the harmonic series, it helps
    to understand ratios and reciprocals in maths. An understanding that
    frequency is inversely proportional to wavelength is essential. I'll
    cover all of these concepts in the talk/workshop.



-- 
Mike Harris
+44 07811 671 893
https://mbharris.co.uk -https://hacktionlab.org -https://xtreamlab.net
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