Ok, I put together a series that some of you may find interesting - quite a few pics so be patient.
http://soonlabel.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1231472075
http://tinyurl.com/9hzzlt
I did what Carl Lumma from the making micro and microtonal tuning list suggested and played around with pure sines, and also with pure triangles.
I only had time to do this in 12 TET.
By using an oscilloscope program I captured the FFT spectrum of C major C minor and C suspended 4th.
There is a music example as well.
I also did the same with a triangle wave.
From a screen shot of cool edit you can see the beating or roughness of the chord. However, the lack of harmonics do not make a difference to me in the perceived consonance. In fact if you load the sine example in cool edit it looks pretty much the same as the triangle version.
Yep, interesting. And the cool shots indeed shows the beating of the chords.
someone proposed that major and minor chords would sound the same if it were played with pure sine waves. this is not the case.
The beating is interesting... I'd presume one can calculate the rate... but I'm to lazy to do so :-)
listened, have no additional comment. =)