Sound Benches

a note is a fast rhythm · for comment

A loudspeaker seen edge-on, lit by a strobe. The cone is one bar sliding between { and }, and the strobe catches it in the same place every flash — so a note stops dead. A second note at a whole-number fraction lands in exactly as many places as the fraction’s bottom number, and joining the flashes in order draws a polygon or a star. Switch the tuning to the way a keyboard actually does it and nothing closes: the figure creeps round the rim, once per audible throb.

Michael’s proposal, and it works. Above every window is the circle the bar is a shadow of, which is a sine wave’s content without a sine wave — and the shadow visibly throws information away, so the caption reads e.g. “4 places · 3 shadows”. Fills the standing gap: a true ratio against equal temperament, seen as well as heard, with the drift rate equal to the beat rate to two decimals. Carries its own warning: 7:5 draws a clean pentagram and 45:32 a mess, and they sound identical — a picture of the arithmetic, not of the sound.

added 2026-08-31

Twenty-Four to Forty-Eight

Eight click tracks at 24 : 27 : 30 : 32 : 36 : 40 : 45 : 48. Sped up, that is a whole major scale — and switched on three at a time it is one small chord, 4:5:6, planted in three places. A sieve of the numbers from 24 to 48 shows why those eight and no others; a floor readout falls out of hearing when you switch all eight on at once; and a walk mode steps the voices one at a time so the scale sounds like a scale.

Michael’s question, days after the fact: is there a simple rhythm that gives an entire scale? There is, and it is a sieve rather than a list — the numbers in one octave built from nothing but 2s, 3s and 5s, no two crowding each other. Two things fell out that were not designed: a chord has an audible floor and a scale does not, and the three scale notes carrying a 5 are exactly the three the keyboard misses. Design: Sound-Counting-Bench-Aug25.

added 2026-08-31

Six Against Five

Two click tracks at a fixed whole-number ratio and one speed knob. At two a second it is a rhythm you can count; at two hundred it is a chord. Both voices lay down the identical click — only the rate differs — so nothing changes across the sweep but speed. A piano strip under the rows says where the two rates land on the instrument everyone already knows, to the cent: tap a key with 3:2 selected and the faster voice reads +2¢, which is equal temperament announcing itself without a word of explanation. Brightness is a lowpass and turns out to be the roughness control; click pitch is its own knob, and moving it shows that the note is the ticking rate and not the tick.

Bench for the Sound Series (Sound-Rhythm-Roll-Aug21): can the ratios be delivered by counting rather than by waves? No sine, no spectrum, no pressure — the wave material is deferred to timbre, where it is actually wanted. The reading below the bench is the first sample of the child voice for this material, and it was rewritten the same day after a listening pass disproved three things the page had asserted with confidence: 7:5 and 45:32 are one sound eight cents apart, so the simple fractions are where the sweet intervals live and not why; two notes a fifth apart stay two notes rather than fusing into one; and the roughness lives in the harmonics, which is what brightness is really moving. A ringing at high brightness turned out to be a click truncated at the loop seam, now wrapped. Open: no tapping, and whether 3:2 stays clean at full brightness on the fixed build.

added 2026-08-25

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