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William Sethares

Field	Value
name	William A. Sethares
birth_date
birth_place	Massachusetts, U.S.
field	Signal processing and music theory
work_institution	University of Wisconsin–Madison
alma_mater	Cornell University
doctoral_advisor	Yao Leeh-ter
known_for	Consonance

William A. Sethares (born April 19, 1955) is an American music theorist and professor of electrical engineering 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 made observations relating to this, and the ancient Chinese Guqin 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 in the 1860s.

In 1965, Plomp and Levelt{{cite journal | hdl-access = free

In the 1990s, Sethares began exploring Plomp and Levelt's generalization, both mathematically and musically. His 1993 paper On the relationship between timbre and scale{{cite journal

In his 1998 book Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale,{{cite book

As one reviewer of the second edition{{cite book | author-link = Luca Turin | access-date = 2009-09-20

''Musica Facta''

Sethares' conception of consonance is one of the foundation-stones of a new research program called Musica Facta.

References

External resources

Webpage of Professor William Sethares at the University of Wisconsin

References

''Musica Facta'': http://musicafacta.org {{Webarchive. link. (2014-05-17)

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

1955-births academics-from-massachusetts american-music-theorists university-of-wisconsin–madison-faculty living-people electrical-engineering-academics cornell-university-alumni control-theorists

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