The home microwave oven is yet another dubious musical instrument—like the television and the car horn—that is tuned completely wrong. Dead flat wrong. It drones the same flat tone below, as it beeps octaves above—the “flattened B” of the groaning grid tone, the same tone most machines moan. These ‘psych-out sounds’, or ‘made-ya-listens’, sure make [...]
Archive of posts tagged Industrial Music
Baby’s Got Bars and Tones
The television test screen, known as “bars and tones”, is used to calibrate color and sound on a TV screen or computer monitor. The accompanying tone—the soundtrack to this minimalist music video—is a high sharp B that stations use to tune TV’s. But at 1000 Hz, the bars-and-tones tone is a quarter-tone sharper than the [...]
Car Arm Alarm Bug Nuts
The popular Car Arm Alarm is a duplet of flat B’s that bend upwards. Within this short mechanical musical phrase, one can hear the ten thousand voices of nature crying out for an audience. Like the quick stridulation of an insect or the glissando of a bird, the Car Arm Alarm is followed by long [...]
The Train in Spain Falls Majorly on the Fade
Trains are in major keys, just like cars. The rhythms of the railroad helped shape Jazz and Rock music, like the shuffle of the human heart and the swung gait of a walking horse, major trains in 4/4 paved the way for the dominance of drumming in all music (after a brief buoyant classical period), [...]
Beep, Beep
Traffic is the biggest brass band on the streets. In between swelling swooshes of many mediums, vehicles of every key sing onomatopoeic songs―car horn honks, backup truck beeps, klaxon awoogas, train choo’s, and bicycle bell brrngs―all day and all night and all afternoon, fading in and fading out, with timbres thrown back to the Jazz [...]
Elevator Music
The Industrial Music that surrounds us is bellful, horny, and white with noise. Dings and blares come from every clock and car, the electric B-flat hums from every outlet, and the streets are seldom silent. If one were to form a SimsBand, covering the music of each day, it would have plenty of brass and [...]
iFart computer sounds :) (o)- – -
What are the most popular sounds around us? Are they musical or noisy? Artful or aleatoric? Do you hear more birdsong than pop song? Is the human speech around you monotonal, monotonous, or musical? Do you wear headphones all day, or does your own cortex hallucinate music for you? Friends, there are no more insidious [...]
