This is possibly a non-trivial problem! If you have timbrally rich sounds (even
if fully harmonic), drifting apart in pitch, you are bound to get beats, as
partials shift in and out of critical regions. As far as basic harmonic tuning
is concerned, forget about equal temperament, and look at 'mean-tone' pure
intervals, derived from the simple ratios of the harmonic series (ocatve = 2/1,
perfect fifth= 3/2, major third = 4/3, and so on). If you want to build up
complex harmonies, you might need to remove certain harmonics from one sound,
which would otherwise clash with one or more in another sound. Unless you are
using fully-determined additive synthesis, this will not be easy!

Richard Dobson

David Schuyeteneer wrote:
> 
> Since I don't have a visacard to order those wonderful books on
> computermusic over the net, I wonder if someone of you know some basic
> methods to calculate harmonic freqs from a given freq....Assume I have
> a sound with most emphasized freq is a 440Hz....Ok. Now I want to add
> some other sound, how can i alter the sound's main pitch so that it
> sounds harmonic with the previous sound ???
> 
> Most of my Csound time goes to constructing dronal, rich layered,slow
> ambient. A *HUGE* problem is that mostly my sounds are extremely
> overlapping, with (besides also in amplitude) slow changes in frequency,
> causing very annoying 'false'tones sometimes due to the pitch changes..
> 
> I HAVE to find a way that I can tell Csound to take care that my
> overlapping sounds never sound false...How ???
> 
> David.