Awesome book exploring the relationship between timbre and musical consonance/disonance. The core idea is that dissonance is not about “scales”, but more about timbreal relationships. All sound examples are online. The author, Prof. William Sethares, is an electrical engineer, who has also written about rhythym. Some notes…

Kind of un-related, but contemporaneously read: Playing melodies on a single string by exciting harmonics using the Lorentz force We show how a single metal guitar string of fixed length can produce a musical scale. The string is placed near a permanent magnet, and by applying an AC to the string at the frequency of the desired musical note, the Lorentz force creates vibrations in the string at that frequency. The tension of the string is set so that its harmonics correspond to the desired notes. A one-octave scale can be approximated by using these harmonic frequencies, allowing several melodies to be played using our non-contact monochord. This project could be adopted for demonstration or laboratory projects.

Ideas