A note on the strength of note onset strength
A note on the strength of note onset strength and the mystical transformative healing power of number theory When we invent algorithms that write music, our research often focuses on pitch, rhythm, timbre, melody, harmony. Note-strength [ 1 ] is typically not the direct focus of research, and is thus often neglected. However, any rendition of music that does not vary note-strength will be tiresome. Here we present a quirk of number theory that can be used as a quick and dirty way to apply a default strength to each note as a post-processing step, for music where the beat locations are known. Let us assume that the notes that are on the beat should be the strongest; those that fall on the half-beat should be the next-strongest, and on the second and fourth quarter beat to be somewhat weaker than that, etc… Assuming the beat occupies times 0 ≤ t < 1, this implies that the strength is inversely proportional to the denominator of the rational representation [ 2 ] of the...