William Sethares
title: "William Sethares" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1955-births", "academics-from-massachusetts", "american-music-theorists", "university-of-wisconsin–madison-faculty", "living-people", "electrical-engineering-academics", "cornell-university-alumni", "control-theorists"] topic_path: "arts" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sethares" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::data[format=table title="Infobox scientist"]
| 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 |
| :: |
| 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 | author = R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt | date = October 1965 | title = Tonal Consonance and Critical Bandwidth | journal = Journal of the Acoustical Society of America | volume = 38 | issue = 4 | pages = 548–560 | url = http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=JASMAN000038000004000548000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes | doi = 10.1121/1.1909741 | pmid = 5831012 | bibcode = 1965ASAJ...38..548P | hdl = 2066/15403 | s2cid = 15852125 | 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 | author = Sethares, William | date = September 1993 | title = Local consonance and the relationship between timbre and scale | journal = Journal of the Acoustical Society of America | volume = 94 | issue = 3 | pages = 1218–1228 | url = https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/papers/consance.html | doi = 10.1121/1.408175 | bibcode = 1993ASAJ...94.1218S | author = Sethares, William | date = September 1992 | title = Relating Tuning and Timbre | journal = Experimental Musical Instruments | volume = IX | issue = 2 | url = https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html
In his 1998 book Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale,{{cite book | last = Sethares | first = William | title = Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=KChoKKhjOb0C | edition = 1st | date = January 1998 | publisher = Springer | location = New York | isbn = 978-3-540-76173-0
As one reviewer of the second edition{{cite book | last = Sethares | first = William | title = Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=KChoKKhjOb0C | edition = 2nd | date = November 2004 | publisher = Springer | location = New York | isbn = 978-1-85233-797-1 | author = Luca Turin | date = September 2004 | title = The sound of impossible objects | journal = NZZ Folio | url = http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/21b625ad-36bc-48ea-b615-1c30cd0b472d/showarticle/c2dd2d93-cfb9-442c-9ef2-58b5241f6da1.aspx | author-link = Luca Turin | url = http://www.nonoctave.com/tuning/book-reviews.html | title = nonoctave.com / tuning / book reviews | access-date = 2009-09-20 | last = Scott | first = X. J.
''Musica Facta''
Sethares' conception of consonance is one of the foundation-stones of a new research program called Musica Facta.
References
External resources
References
- ''Musica Facta'': http://musicafacta.org {{Webarchive. link. (2014-05-17)
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