Designing Sound

Art and technique of sound design

Sunday Sound Thought 14 – Sound’s Golden Mean?

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As the year continues, many of these posts will be philosophical in nature. Some will be in contradiction to previous postings. These are not intended as truths or assertions, they’re merely thoughts…ideas. Think of this as stream of consciousness over a wide span…

This week, I have a question. While I may occasionally ponder the idea, I’ve never devoted a significant portion of brain power to it for a substantial period of time. That might sound lazy on my part, but it’s actually a hard question and I always have higher priority items on my plate.

…and now I’m just creating excuses. ;)

In case you didn’t notice it in the past (or haven’t been visiting the site as long as some other people have), you may have missed the fact that I’m kind of a nerd when it comes to psycoacoustics. Many of the Gestalt principles or “rules of organization” that describe how we perceive visual stimulus have direct corollaries with the way we perceive sound. There’s one that’s difficult to translate though, because there’s such a stark difference in the way we perceive space through our eyes and ears…the Golden Ratio (sometimes referred to as the Golden Mean).

So what say you sound design community? How do you think the Golden Ratio can be related to sound, or can it not?

Comments

  1. The golden ratio is also used in dramaturgy and composition. And there I think sound and visuals could be pretty similar, right?

    I really appreciate your blog, especially much this more philosophical approach :)

  2. this made me think…..golden ratio could be used to create intervals or harmonic series…

  4. This is an interesting point, and it fits well in the “Inspirations and Distraction” theme of this month too.

    If we think of sound like a combination of circular dimension events (waveform cycles) with a linear dimension event (time), we could imagine a vast land for various Golden Ratio appliances.

    Yet probably due to its “spatial” (i.e. linear) nature, the Golden Ratio already got various applications in music history, specially in the time-related domain.

    On the wake of former attempts to search for new harmonic contexts, overcoming the classical tonal system in music (think of dodecaphony), composers like Bartók, impressionists like Debussy and Satie, and unfailingly Stockhausen experienced with Golden Ratio for melodic relations, in notes occurrences and in the overall structural form of a musical composition.

    I remember how, in a composition class, we analyzed the exploitation of Golden Ratio at the climax point of Bartók’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta”.

    We can read an excellent dissertation on the use of Golden Ratio in music, in this paper released on the Academia site, look here: http://www.academia.edu/3569720/The_Golden_Section_as_a_Source_of_Consistency_in_20th_Century_Music

    Now, why not think of using Golden Ratio at the “circular” level (the dimension of waveforms) and at the micro-scale of sound itself?
    We already have the tools to synthesize and manipulate every possible parameter of sound generation, so we could really experiment with new harmonic/enharmonic ratios and frequency content relations.

    We could also try and apply Golden Ratio rules in hundreds of modulation parameters (think of phase modulation or modular synthesis), in pattern sequencing, in modeling spiral shapes of grains generation as the curves of evolving textures, and so on…

    I guess, there’s really a lot of space for experimentation, whether one wants to.
    So, to end with a joke… maybe one day we’ll get the plugin of our dreams, sort of this funny thing, popped out in the “April fools day”:
    https://www.facebook.com/wavesfactory/photos/a.10150594409348181.382653.235396943180/10153545390543181/?type=3&theater

    Greetings,
    diz.

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