Distress Signal Melody

Los Doggies — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 17:03:13 +0000

When you hear a high G, does it Stress Out your Shit?

The international distress signal melody is a monotonal song in 7/8 time, written in the key of Morse Code, consisting of three quavers, followed by three crotchets, and another three quavers. Normally, the telegrapher is supposed to rest the equivalent note duration in between dits and dahs, but in an especially distressful signal, the beat is kept pulsing at the odd time of seven.

At a radio frequency of 500 kHz, the equivalent tone would be an high G7 (50175.4 Hz), an annoyingly high-pitched tone, and so is transposed down two octaves to a G5 in the widget above.

Here is a 45-second rock cover of “The SOS Song”. It is partly in free time to mimic the distress of a tattooing telegrapher, and features a 7/8 section as rescue efforts get mobilized. The choruses are rendered sailor-style, if not piratically derivative.

Morse code, like written music, is for the most part a dead language. While the commercial use of Morse code is just about obsolete, it is still a very powerful musical language that encodes simple rhythmic patterns into letters (and vice versa), and can be refashioned for much more esoteric forms of communication than relaying the massive bustling missives of business.

Tabla players, African Dummers, and other drumming cultures, speak in Percussionese dialects. However, rock drummers haven’t really much of a rhythmic vocabulary for their beats. We can refer to the style of the beats themselves―up-beat, down-beat, and possibly the African beat that they are based upon―the time signatures and tempos, and that vague quantifier of “feel”. We can speak in specifics―Dave Grohl flams and John Bonham triplets. But what if you were to describe a certain drum fill to someone? You’d be forced to dispense with all symbols, and just sing what it was you meant to say.

No longer friends. Now you can just say “Gimmie the D” in drumorse code.

Epilogue:

The Spring Peepers sing the same tone as the distress signal melody. Could they have provided the inspiration for SOS, in the way that the rhythms of the railways have been said to inspire Jazz beats?

The formula:

Frogs (G) + Railroads (Jazz) = Morse Code

Dah, Dah, Dah, Dit. Here’s some old timey porn.

Spring Has Sung

Los Doggies — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 23:48:54 +0000

As the Winter white noise fades, the peepers emerge from their silent hibernation to once again sing the sexy song of Spring. Choruses of these pinkletinks take the stage of wetland venues all along the Eastern seaboard to jam on a single note; a slightly rising G tone. This is the highest G found on a piano. If you ever find yourself singing songs around the campfire without a tuning fork, use the peepers’ G to tune your singalongs. The peepers’ song was probably the inspiration for Morse Code, also a high G. (Watch yo volumes! Frogs are forte!)

That’s their monotonal and staccato song. Drag rapidly over the score above to rev up an entire chorus of peepers.

The sine-like timbre and hi-pitch of their choruses make them sound a lot like an insect jam. The males are the only ones who peep, making them yet another species that display musical dimorphism.

Peepers also sing a trill like song when another male gets too close. It lands on the same G note as above. This is their aggressive territorial song. The subtleties of batrachian genre might fall on deaf human ears, but the trill song below is clearly more rocking than the mellow mating ballad above.

Biomusic! Biomusic! Biomusic!

Please be kind to your froggy friends!

» Frogs

Distress Signal Melody

Spring Has Sung