Home▸Acoustics▸Spectral Music: Building a Sound One Overtone at a Time

🎼 Spectral Music: Building a Sound One Overtone at a Time

Interactive 3D harmonic-series visualizer where adding or removing individual overtones with sliders shows how the combined waveform and timbre change as spectral composers would sculpt them.

Acoustics2DEasy60 FPS

A 3D harmonic-series rack of glowing overtone bars plus a live waveform ribbon showing how adding, removing and detuning individual partials reshapes a sound's timbre — the raw material spectral composers work with directly.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Each bar is one partial in the harmonic series; its amplitude and detuning combine into the ribbon waveform in front, exactly as additive synthesis builds a complex tone from simple sine waves.

🎮 How to Use

Set the fundamental, how many overtones are active, the spectral tilt (brightness) and inharmonicity (stretch), then press Play tone to hear the additive-synthesis chord you built.

💡 Did You Know?

Spectral composers like Grisey and Murail analysed real instrument spectra with sonograms and orchestrated the overtones themselves — turning acoustic analysis into a compositional method.

⚙ Under the hood

Interactive 3D harmonic-series visualizer where adding or removing individual overtones with sliders shows how the combined waveform and timbre change as spectral composers would sculpt them.

spectral-musicovertonesharmonic-seriesmusic-compositiontimbreacoustics

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install