HARMONYNC: a Dynamic Harmonics Calculator

[Walter Mantovani]

Hi everybody,

I am an overtone singer and some years ago I needed an interactive table of reference to hear the harmonics and how their intervals sound.

This software was born for my personal use and it is a prototype.

What is this?

The Harmonync is a platform that allow the user/musician to play the Harmonic Series and changing its fundamental tone in real-time. Just like the overtone singers do with the polyphonic overtone singing technique.
The idea is to play a fundamental-variable harmonic series on electronic and electro-acoustical instruments retuned via MIDI and in real-time.
The name come from the union of the words “Harmonic” and “Sync”.

The Harmonync can retune MIDI instruments via Pitch Bend Change messages or using the MIDI Tuning Standard (SysEx) protocol.

Actually the Harmonync is prototyped as a patch for Pure Data using the Extended Libraries. The first release was developed with Pd-extended 0.43.4 for Mac OS X but it should run on other platforms.

How to get and use it?

I know that the patch is difficult to use. It requires a knowledge base about the Harmonic Series, microtonal music, math of music and MIDI protocol.

I'm working on a comprehensive guide and a video tutorial, But it will take some time.
In the meantime, to be faster, I am publishing the training material that I produced as textual tutorials on the project website.

Visit harmonync.org for the updated Download links and the Tutorials. For any questions, you may discuss here or contact me on the project site.

Demo

Now, to understand the potential of the program I quickly produced a demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONYW7D32JQU

This is an exploratory session originally recorded on March 2014 to test the software under development. I quickly arranged the original performance and I released it as a demo to show how you can use the Harmonync.

Pure Data is a bit slow in updating the graphical interface. Sometimes, some tones are not displayed in the H-Stack because they are too short and quick.

I post it also on the video section of OMN: link

Further developments

The patch is published under the Afffero General Public License v.3.0 (AGPLv3).
So... if someone wants to help me improving the software, the repository is available on GitHub. Contributors are welcome!!

Screenshot