[sdiy] Harmonic bandwidth

[Ian Fritz]

At 10:35 AM 1/5/2008, Tom Wiltshire wrote:

>On 5 Jan 2008, at 14:51, Ian Fritz wrote:
>
>>At 07:44 AM 1/5/2008, Tom Wiltshire wrote:
>>>Do you know of any
>>>instruments that use this technique?
>>
>>Piano.
>
>Yeah, thanks for your input, Ian...;)

Well, I have to say it isn't very clear to me what is going on 
here.  Irregularities in musical sounds have been studied extensively in 
the past. (I have mentioned the Keefer paper on clarinet unsteadiness 
several times before).  My old Roland rompler has an "analog feel" control 
that adds some nice variation to the sounds. But can you understand why you 
would look at this in terms of the individual harmonics?

I'm especially unclear on "Put random phases to each frequency of the 
spectrum".  Is this really how acoustic instruments work? It's true that 
nonlinearities can introduce anharmonicities, as in piano strings, but I 
don't see how this leads to random phases.

Oh well. <shrug>

   Ian