Octave Equivalence Tool
The tool was written in September 2006 to assist in the aural modelling of planetary orbits.
For information on the initial musical application of this technique, see my CDs in the "Carmen of the Spheres" series here.
The completed tool accepts input of periodic systems (ie. lengths of time which repeat) such as planetary orbits and then generates octave values so that the original object can be brought into the human audible spectrum.
To clarify, you give the computer a length such as 570.84 days and the computer gives you:
1. The nearest western chromatic pitch-class, eg. G#
2. The range of exact frequencies within the audible spectrum, eg. 78.341hz
3. The range of musically useful durations (defaulting to between 1/10th of a second and 30 seconds)
4. The equivalent frequency of light in terahertz and the name of the colour-band into which this places the light
So in other words you could start off with the orbital period of the Earth round the sun, and the database would tell you that this is broadly a C#, is equivalent to a particular colour of green, etc. and there is the option to generate a detailed printable report.
Please bear in mind that I am not saying that the Earth IS green, nor that Mars IS blue : simply that the orbit of those planets around the sun is octave-equivalent to those frequencies of light.
The main form looks like this:
The printed report looks like this:
To download the tool, click here - it is in Access 2000/XP format and is 383KB zipped.
The tool comes with no explicit warranty, but since it was developed using only MS-Access and very simple VBA scripting, there's no reason why it should cause any harm to your system. I do not know how likely it is that it will run under operating systems other than Windows 9X and XP but in principle it should run on MacOS if Office 2K/XP is installed.
To run the tool simply extract the MDB file from the zip archive and run it. No registry entries will be made.
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