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On David Wessel's Spectral Analyses of Instruments

OpenMusic
#1

Hi,

Either in a lecture or interview of Murail — I can’t remember exactly which one, — I read about David Wessel’s Fourier analyses (of the sounding notes) of several instruments while at IRCAM… Are these available as a database somewhere, somehow? And are there any such databases available, perhaps even more recent and exhaustive ones?

Any hints or insights on this issue would be much appreciated.

All the best,
António

#2

Hi,

I don’t know if this exist anymore, since the format of these analysis should be on an old digital support . But here is an article discussing it i found on the net:

http://cachescan.bcub.ro/e-book/Adriana%20C_3_e-book_12000-13000/580710/113-169.pdf

#3

Hi Karim,

Thank you. My interest, although highly related to the paper you linked, is not in trying to develop or apply a specific model of Timbre, it’s in trying to develop something akin to Esquisse’s harm-series but specific to instruments on the basis of their measured spectra (across dynamics and register.) That’s the reason I asked about databases in my original post, without those it can’t be done.

All the best,
António

#4

Hi,
Perhaps this report by David Wessel found in my archives is the one you are looking for?


Enjoy

#5

Hi pboivin,

Thank you, after a bit of ping pong with sources (including yours and Karim’s), I was able to trace the original source of the analyses, it’s John Grey’s experimental work for his PhD — his thesis can be found here: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/papers/exploration-of-musical-timbre

His work later inspired, and developped into, (the same) Grey, Moorer, Snell and Strawn’s “Lexicon of Analyzed Tones” published in the Computer Music Journal from MIT Press, in three installments from April 1977 to September 1978.

But here’s the bittersweet twist at the end, as Moorer himself explained in an interview with Curtis Roads:

There is another musical project we talked about but never done. It is an enormous project, the fabled “Lexicon of Analyzed Tones.” […] I would like to see someone go through the entire pitch range of each orchestral instrument at several dynamics and articulation styles and analyze and categorize each tone.

And this is it, as far as I could gather, they never made such a database.

All the best,
António