They call to you in 1-note songs like crickets, then disappear every time you are near. It’s almost a 4/4 beat―keeping time like a heartbeat and other natural metronomes, sometimes approaching clockbeat click-track perfection if only for a measure, but usually tempoless and free like laundromat rhythms.

In a field of crickets, their staccato chirps smear together into one thick wavering drone. Imagine the male citizens of your country all singing together like this, in a field.

This is a field cricket who chirps in D, the kind I usually hear out my window. They play with their wings and hear with their legs. They dig amps into the Earth, all to impress the ladies.

Trill, rest, trill, rest, like Verse-Chorus-Verse. Each trill is perceived as a single tone, sometimes a D, sometimes flat or sharp. Sometime D natural straight-up. Concert D.

If we slow down their song 2 octaves, we can see each trill hovers around D and C#. Crickets fire off a quick burst of staccato wingtones and then rest for about the same amount of time, creating a pulsing beat.

If we slow it down yet another 2 octaves, we can see each single tone in the trill actually bends down from D to C#, and sometimes back up again. Plus, there are even smaller rests between these individual tones of the trill.

So not only is he hitting D’s and C#’s in lickety-quick trills, but he also bends each single tone between these two tones. There is a kind of holophonic [sic] principle at play here, whereby each tone contains the whole. While we hear a collection of single tones jumping up and down a half step, each perceived tone is made of many shorter tones that also jump up and down a half step, and finally, each of these shorter tones also bends up and down a half-step―a triple-tiered semitonal holophonic bug song of love.

Like any chirp tune enthusiast, I keep a cricket in a cage…
Can I play.

Sadly, there are no Cyndi Lauper widgets to be found here, although her syncopated breath and synth-drums carried many scenes of The Goonies (1985). Nor will David Grusin’s film score be featured, other then his false notation for One-Eyed Willie’s bone organ. No, this here has little to do with traditional music, for the most memorable Goonie Tune isn’t a tune at all per se, but it sure is a melody―an inadvertent movie melody that will go down in history with such classics as Mrs. Doubtfire‘s “Heeee-llo!” and A League of Their Own‘s “Has anyone seen my new red hat?”. Listen to Lotney belt it out below.

Sloth’s famous battle cry occupies the interval of a Whole Tone. Beginning on F# with the “Hey”, the melody bends down two steps to resolve on the E with the “Guys”. If we take his first note as the Root, and the latter as Dominant 7th, we can fit Sloth’s melody into the key of F# Mixolydian. The guitarist’s chord F#7(add11) will work nicely underneath the first and last tones of “Hey You Guys”. Try dragging over the chord above, and clicking the melody on in time.

When I remember this melody, it seems smaller than it actually is, and whenever I hear someone quoting it, it usually only covers a Half Tone interval. This melodic compression of our memories mirrors our natural development as an atonal-talking culture, whereby the giant intervallic leaps we once took as children, are squished and flatted out to a monotonous droning in our adulthood. As you can see and hear above, Sloth’s interval is huge, and can most accurately be transcribed into our 12-TET tuning as a Minor Third (Between the G and the E on “Guys”). Minor Thirds are big child-like intervals, found in Nana Nana Poo Poo and the like, but seldom appear in our conversational tones, except perhaps in flirtation and sarcasm. Sloth, is of course, protector of the children, and sole adult Goonie, though his deformity preserves his child-like mind, and his battle cry of love beseeches our melodic pasts. For more, read about the development of playground melodies.

Now, on to Willy’s bone organ.

The Musical Death Trap scene above is full of flubs, perhaps to evoke Andy’s musical illiteracy. Then again, Willy’s score is preposterous (pictured atop) and looks like some simple C-Major piano exercises. Yeah right! We know Willy only gets down with Flatted Major Chords (and synth-drums). Drag over the chords below. Keep in mind, that Willy’s organ is a few cents flat, as is expected from shoddy Pirate Tuning. Arrrr…

Andy gets the first chord right―a Db Major, but she misses the B-flat Major twice. It sounds like she hits a Bb7(b9) instead, which is basically the same as a Bb Major except it includes a sharpened root up top. Andy nervously shouts “A-flat” right before she hits a B-flat Major. Was their some miscommunication on set, or did Spielberg meddle with this scene?

Despite the growing popularity of death traps in modern cinema, there is a surprising lack of the musical variety. Most of our musical torture is reserved for animals (See the Cat Organ, see Catgut, see Every Musical Instrument’s ingredients). Even the Saw heptalogy failed to include one Musical Death Trap―a tom-tom drum stretched of human skin, or even an FAO Schwarz-sized Piano of Pain. I suppose, just being exposed to musical education in school, and these shitty little black noteheads like so many insects aswarm, was painful enough.

In closing, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the Ballad of Jake Fratelli, affectionately known by fans as “Nim Bob Da”.

Ok. So what did we learn today?

1) Lauperian breathing is a lost musical device that desperately needs resurgence.
2) Sloth sings like you used to when you were a child.
3) Musical Death Traps are the best way to seek mastery in the tonal arts, so strap yourself in and play to the pain!

It’s the 25th Anniversary of Super Mario Bros. and so I’ll dedicate this lucky 71st Blog to Mister Miyamoto and Koji Kondo―my two favorite Nintendos―and the tonal world they created and continue to inspire. SMB 1 has a samba, jazz bass, a waltz, and the most recognizable first measure of any song in the world. Click on the score, paesano.

The famous “Ground Theme” begins with this cadence above, a turn-around, that resolves to the root. In this example, the secondary dominant D Major 9 moves to the dominant G, which ultimately resolves to the root, a C (not played). The Super Mario Trilogy is almost entirely in C Major. The sound effects in the game are also in key and made of quick arpeggios. Take the 1-Up for a roll.

This heavenly little arpeggio is a C Major (add 9) chord. It rises upwards like the 1-Up it accompanies. It twinkles like a newborn baby in your soul.

Another mushroom―the amanita muscaria―makes you larger. It’s a power-up with a powerful arpeggio that plows through three chords in a second.

The “Mushroom Power-up” is like the flag pole song condensed into a second. It’s not exactly the same but follows the same basic chord progression. The three chords Ab, Bb, and C, are also found in the bridge of the “Ground Theme”, (Duh, duh, duh, da, da, da, da, da, doh). The above example is in 4/4 to show how wacky the changes are in the Mushroom’s ascension. Krazy Koji Kondo changes.

And speaking of ascensions, here’s the jumpy sound. It’s got a Concert A attack, that leads into a lower A, that bends up to a much higher A. This kinda bend is known as “portamento”, what the Italians call a carriage.

Jumps are nice, and so are coins jumping into the air. Coins have an appoggiaturra on them. The appoggiaturra is a little note that jumps before another note in a melody. The appoggiatura in the example below helps create the “bling” sound.

The B acts as an ornament to the E. Together, they form an interval of a Perfect Fourth. In relation to C Major, the tonal center of Mario, they are a Major 7th and a Major 3rd respectively. What kind of world has Major Thirds erupting out of reality? Oh yeah, our world has that. Major Thirds are found in car horns, bells, telephones, door bells, convenience stores, pop music, and every other kind of music. And now coins.

Another Perfect Fourth is found in the “Kill” sound. It’s got a certain air of frogginess to it, like frog mario, but this sound, is no mating call; it’s a death rattle. I fear what our world would become, if killing were as tonal as this:

The Perfect 4th in the “Kill Sound” is between the C and the F, a semitone above the “Coin Sound”. While the Coin 4th was intended to harmonize with “Ground Theme” and the C-Major tonalities of other Stages by providing a Major Third (and Maj.7th), the Kill 4th is much more dissonant by asserting it’s own tonic―the F, over the C-Major Ground.

You see, Fourth’s and One’s are always competing with each other, because of their likeness (just 1 tone difference). They each assert themselves as tonics, trying to usurp each others’ scales and make them their own. So much harmonic progression consists of this Battle between the I and IV (See the Blues, see Hymns, see Everything on the Radio Ever). Throw a V in there, and you just about summed up all Music.

So if we return to the game for a second and allow the musical metaphor to play out, it goes like this: The World is in C Major―a happy tonality that even babies like. Your Sprite also loves C Major, for his dear power-ups make harmonious tones when ingested. Other Sprites have their own tonics, that sound dissonances when they die. Analogously, our World hums in B-Flat. The Electric Tonic of the Earth is also a B. Our electric minds also resonate with the Earth at around the same frequency. Though our deaths seem dissonant if we selfishly try to isolate our tonics from the Tonic of the World, they actually adhere to a higher-order Tonality that sounds from all things―clouds to bushes―and knows no dissonances. And oh yeah, Mister Miyamoto is also a God here.

Last, but not least: the humble fireball. The fireball is a quick glissando that burns through three G tones. The staccato G-fireball is dominant and perfect fifth to the C root of the game.

What a chord! It’s like three chords in one! This reminds me of the way religion used to scare me as a child (or how this movie use to scare me). The Mystics sing an octochord, each sustaining a single tone to form a chord made up of 8 unique tones, and yet this mantric auming doesn’t fit into any clear-cut tonality. No, this octochord is modernist all the way―a kind of serial tone row that suggests many tonalities. It begins seemingly in the scale of B Harmonic Minor, the first tones of which form a B Minor Augmented 7th, but soon changes to a C Augmented formation, which further muddies the harmonic structure, until it resolves on a strong G# Power Chord. Click on the play button, drag over the noteheads, or push the square button for a musical analysis.

If we arrange the tones in order, they form a very interesting synthetic scale. How does one make a synthetic scale? Well, take an ordinary B Minor Scale and add accidentals (sharps and flats) wherever you feel like (except the root), and you’ll come out with something suggestive of B-like Tonality, except with a completely novel tonal character.

The Mystic’s Scale is like a B Minor Scale, with the 2nd and 4th are flatted, and the 6th and 7th sharped. This creates a chromatic environment surrounding the root, with the 7th and the 2nd only a semitone away. This kind of dissonance is the essence of a ‘synthetic scalar’ sound, for they are not found in the popular major/minor modes. It is the chromatics, the major/minor ambiguity, that make the Mystic Scale highly dissonant and other-sounding.

There is another popular Mystic Chord used by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. This chord is similar to the Mystic’s Chord, in that it features many unrelated chord’s stacked atop one another. The dissonances inherent in synthetic scales are mitigated by sounding adjacent tones in different octaves.

It has been said that “a chord is a melody stretched to the size of a moment”.

Indeed, a melody is a chord that’s been unraveled from within.

For Jupiter’s sake, how did musicians ever invoke the mystical before Standard Tuning when Synthetic Scales were born, incubating in their cradles for a 100 years to be rocked!

There is a lesser known sister satellite scream―the “Billy Dee Wilhelm Scream”. This soundbite is heard in the same scene as the Wilhelm from Return of the Jedi, but it is no stock sound, for this scream is issued from the lips of actor Billy Dee Williams.

Where as the Wilhelm is more of a classic “Ahhhhh” kinda scream, the Billy Dee Wilhelm is like an “Eeeeeyaaaah” which contains all the Wilhelmic horror, mixed with a little soulful disgust.

The telephone uses DTMF (Dual Tone Multiple Frequency) signaling―the most commonly used signaling system today. Each signaling digit (1-9, *, O, #) consists of two tones played together. Thus, a touch-tone phone is actually a touch-chord phone. These frequencies are notated above with the nearest note in Equal Temperament Tuning. Take a look at this handy graph!

Arranged just like a telephone in a 3 x 4 matrix. The rows form an F Minor Scale, while the Columns form a D Major scale. The simultaneous sounding of two distinct scales is known as bitonality. Bitonality is a staple trick of modern classical music. Each scale is tonal in of themselves, but harshly dissonant when sounded together, and yet we are able to split them up in our mind’s ear, and follow the separate scales simultaneously―a kind of schizophonia [sic] as it were.

I’m not sure how intentional this bitonality was, but certainly the dial tone being a perfect Concert A at 440 hz is no coincidence. The lower F was most likely selected to create a Major Third interval―an open consonance that would sooth the caller while they hung on the line. Major thirds are also found in bells, car-horns, convenience stores, and all around the American soundscape.

I suggest you click this dial tone on, and go take yourself a touch-tone solo above. Call your childhood home. Call your lover’s land-line. Call Loveline. It’s almost intentional how aleatoric this phone jam is. Is this Life, or Music? Feel the awfulness of the bitones and their schizophonic dissonances. (For instance, it’s much easier to ignore the lower tones, and just play “Hot Cross Buns” on the top tones.)

And don’t forget about the busy tone Tyrone! The busy tone is somewhere between a B and a Bb, with a D# on top―a Major third interval just like the dial tone, except the busy tone pulses.

As we can see, there is an ‘empirical song’ emerging here. Imagine you call up a friend on your land-line, and instead of talking like usual, you have a kind of phone jam. Below is such a jam. You dial through the digits 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,*,0,# and forget whether you’re calling or singing, just like a bird.

“I’m Gettin’ Busy (But you ain’t Home)”

This song has dual sine-waves for the touch-tones, Nintendo bass, FM drums, and Bell Lab samples. It is in 12/8 time, because there are 12 tones, each played for the length of an 8th note. There is a progressive rock section in honor of the strange tonality of telephony, as well as a Nerd-core outro, because ‘phone songs’ are always lame like that. Enjoy!

Know yo’ tones! It may just save yo’ life!

The root of Skruv is a low C# provided by the Glassworks, and the Cardboard Factory makes a perfect fifth with its G#. The D# Metalworks provide the 9th. At the top of the chord, is the Shopping Centre’s A# octave―the 6th of C#. Skruv is such a sharp place to live this time of year!

Yeah, you don’t hear that chord too often, unless you circle around Sweden in a helicopter, though I imagine the rotors might get in your ear’s way.

The above map is from the World Soundscape Project, a musical initiative started by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer. In the 1970′s, the WSP research group documented the acoustic ecology of various European cities, from the sounds of nature, to the sounds of human beings and their machines. Schafer was especially concerned with noise pollution in the industrial soundscape in Vancouver. His work sought a musical homeostasis for modern society through awareness of town tonality.

This sacred syllable, discourse particle, wordless melody, or what have you, is said to be the background microwave radiation from the Big Bang, the tinnitus tones that ring endlessly in our heads, the buzzing of machines and insects, and the 1-note Song of the Universe. Whatever it is, humming this “aum” is good for you, as it allows for the free flow of Cerebrospinal Fluid―the elixir in which our nervous systems swim. Trying humming this low C at home now, and take it down as far as your throat length will allow.

In the beginning, there was the Tone, and the Tone was with Chord. For you see, every tone that you hear is made up of a ton of barley audible tones, called Overtones. These overtones form a little scale, which is the secret scale lying at the heart of all music.

Behold the Overtone Series, also known as the Harmonic Series. If you struck a low C on a piano, all of these other tones would sound as well, coloring the timbre of the piano.

Why are some chords pleasing and others not so? The Series is the key to unlocking the mysteries of music. Consonances are found between the tones at the beginning of the Harmonic Series, which are more audible than the dissonances, located at the end of the Series. In actuality, the Series keeps going for a while, with increasingly smaller intervals, less audible and more dissonant.

The tone, and its relation to other tones is called an Interval. In our western system of tuning, there are 12 intervals, just as there are 12 unique tones. Drag over the notes below, to hear each interval sound one by one. The idea behind breaking the 12 Intervals down into these categories of consonance and dissonance is borrowed from the book Twentieth-Century Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practice by Vincent Persichetti (not a book I’d recommend for introducing Music Theory).

The most consonant intervals are the unison and the octave as they feature the same tone. Tones right next to each other are the most dissonant when sounded together. This is the opposite of colors on a color wheel, where analogous colors when mixed produce consonances, and complimentary colors produce dissonances. But hey, let’s not get too lost in the synesthesia of it all!

Think of the above interval score like a bell curve (or maybe more like a sine wave), with the most consonant intervals in the middle―the perfect fourth and fifth―and the most dissonant intervals towards the ends.

This system for analyzing consonances can be applied to chords with more than two tones, to help us understand the subtle harmonies that makes us feel the way we do. Take your basic, garden-variety C Major chord. This chord is composed entirely of intervals located at the beginning of the Harmonic Series, making for a naturally pleasing harmony.

There’s nothing but consonances in this chord. It’s perfectly suitable for babies.

The guitar is designed to easily play these ‘Harmonic Series’ chords. They are called “bar chords” because of the bar-like finger-formation it requires to play them. This is how guitarists visualize their music.

The 5-line stave of traditional notation (see scores above) is traded out for a 6-line tab and finely mimics the vectors in a guitar’s design. Not only does the left to right movement show the linear flow of time, but it also represents the neck of a guitar as seen while playing it. The system of Musical Notation is more like a written language―which is to say arbitrary in its symbols―while Guitar Tablature is more like a drawing.

Notice that the C Major on guitar sounds a lot more dissonant than the piano version above. That’s cause of all the awesome distortion, which colors the timbre of the instrument, and makes for different overtones.

Thus, consonance is a product of many things, but mostly harmony and timbre. At which point, can timbre tip an ugly tone into consonance? When do the weight of dissonances bar any noticeable change in timbre?

There are other things too, less easily quantifiable, like context and attitude, that play their part. Why, just the “sexiness” of a lead vocalist alone can make you forgot all about dissonances.

Luckily, my own tinnitus is quiet enough that it only annoys me. Besides, these days there’s so much external noise around to mute our inner music, that I doubt anyone would mind a girl with an audible mind.

Now, before you start thinking that I drummed my ears into oblivion playing in rowdy rowdy rock bands for too long, I’ve always had this tinnitus, and it’s always the same sustained nerve note―a high-pitched D. Check it out!

Annoying right? Like a cricket. Long after my aging ears can no longer detect this frequency, it’ll still be in my head.

Under careful auscultation, my tinnitus is composed of a tsunami of sine waves. The root is a distant D tone, as if sounding over the cerebral horizon, backed by an ugly Ives chord of insect spectrals, coming in jerky crescendos. Underneath it all, the blanketed bass drumming of my heart kicks out of time.

Oh tinnitus―fated fermata―prepared by the Great Conductor, who with downbeat baton, denotes the ictus of death. Will it resolve on the one? Or slowly decay into black noise.

If no known marine beast is capable of producing the Bloop—not even the giant squid, krakken, leviathan, or Nessy—then it’s gotta be Cthulhu. To me, it sounds like any other slightly tonal bubble playing from the brine, but NOAA experts have been unable to match the Bloop to the spectogram of any ocean sound—natural, biological, or industrial. Whatever it is, the Bloop is a D Tone, or at least this sample is. For some reason, all of the NOAA samples are sped up 16 times. Here’s what it sounds like normally (Watch your woofers!).

Another unknown ocean sound is nicknamed “The Train”, recorded on March 5, 1997 on the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array. This is the most tonal of the unknown NOAA sounds. It mostly warbles around Concert A—440 hz.

Every once in a while, the Train bends up a half-tone or a whole-tone, from G to A, or G to G# to A. Remember though, that this sound, like the others, has been sped up 16 times.

“Julia” is yet another mysterious underwater sound, recorded on March 1, 1999 on the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array. It sounds like a Cthulhu voice, saying the name “Julia”.

So let’s review this all: In the 1990′s, mysterious sounds are being recorded in our oceans. Scientists suggest that they belong to an animal, but far larger and louder than any known animal. Half a century earlier, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft writes of a sea monster living in the exact latitude of the Bloop—a squid-faced alien named Cthulhu.

Two kinds of loud sounds in the natural world have been growing on the earth since time immemorial. One is the roll of thunder, the other the sound of volcanic eruption. Both of them were feared by mankind for many centuries as the anger of God. However, the roll of thunder has been proved to be the sound caused by an electric phenomenon—that is an electric sound. Volcanic sound, on the other hand is produced by the eruption, impact and rubbing of the substances involved; later such dynamic sounds were made by tools—hammers, bellows to make fire, etc. With the passage of time some of these tools were gradually transformed into musical instruments. At present the methods of blowing, beating, rubbing, etc. are incorporated into many musical instruments in the symphony orchestra.
Electric musical instruments, on the other hand, did not come into existence until the present century. In 1927, Leon Theremin devised the first electric musical instrument, whose pitch was controlled by placing the hand near to or away from its vertical rod. In 1928, Maurice Martenot, a French musician, invented the ondes martenot, which is considered the father of the present music synthesizer.
It has been said that electric sound is not expressive because it is not a natural sound but an artificial one made by a machine. However, I think that natural sound implies the rustle of the leaves by the wind, the murmur of a brook and the sound of the waves beating upon the shore. In pianos, violins, flutes and other instruments the determination of their musical scales and the methods of their resonance are made by the art of mankind, so their sounds are not intrinsically natural but mechanical.
Compared to the traditional instruments with a history of many centuries, electric musical instruments have a history of only 50 years. In addition, their shapes are not yet established, so the player is apt to become disoriented. Players of these instruments equivalent in ability to virtuosos of the piano or violin have not yet appeared. I think we must make more effort to study electric musical instruments for the future.
I have used a great variety of electrical sound-producing and -controlling devices, as in my previous album Snowflakes are Dancing, I have been encouraged to believe that my efforts have produced music that is truly expressive, evoking the emotions of a high musical experience. It is very rewarding.

Here’s an example. The key of D Major has always struck me as a green sort of fellow. There’s also some strong yellowness inside his heart. And the whole thing kinda explodes, like a firework. Click on the chord below for a simulation of synesthetic phenomena.

Kaboom! Music is so violent and colorful. The sounds you hear are little explosions, like in the quantum world where everything is exploding all the time. They attack, sustain, decay, and finally release, but not without a bang. Artistic noise—that is to say Music—is like a controlled demolition, or a fireworks display. Ya know, the kind of explosions people like, as opposed to bombs and volcanoes.

So it would seem that Music absorbs much of the violence of the human race. Like a touretter’s drum circle, like the beating of a gorilla’s chest, crazy aggressive energy can be channeled into Music. As background, Music can hypnotize us, lock us in step with its beat, sooth our savage hearts, and entrain our minds along a peaceful path into sleep, sex, or sociability. As foreground, Music spars with us, hijacking our thought trains with its melodies, reaching directly into our cockles like an odor, shredding upon our heartstrings like Yngwie Malmsteen.

What does all this interplay of light and sound tell us? Is this Life Reality? No. Colors and sounds are the same. They’re both waves, that are sensed in two unique ways, due to both cultural nurturing, and natural brain development. Color is an electromagnetic wave, and sound is pneumatic. A 60 cycle wave sounds like the Flat B hum of a refrigerator, guitar amp, or anything else plugged into the Grid. A 60 cycle wave of light is invisible. Now take the 7 Classical Colors (ROYGBIV) and transpose them down 40 Octaves into the audible spectrum of sound. Each Color falls into the region of the 7 Classical Notes (GABCDEF).

A Supersynesthete would be the rare individual who sees the ‘correct’ colors while listening to the analogous tones. For more on synesthesia and music, check this out.

Behold the Elevator Bell Ding! How many times have you heard this little tone in your life? Just take the amount of times you rode a lift, and multiply by two, because this bell dings up and down, open and closed—twice in one ride. It only takes two notes to make a melody after all.

Unlike the door bell, which covers the interval of a Major Third, the Elevator Ding is monotonal, right on the edge between noise and tone. (Click on the the wave to the right for frequency analysis.) The most dominant tone seems to be an F, but the spectrum is very messy. There are strong spikes in the G# range, as well as an E. Most importantly, there is a very high piercing C#, as well as a lower one, that make a musical tone out of an otherwise noisy sound.

Add up the dominant tones in this messy noisy wave, and you get a C# Minor chord. Try dragging over the chord below, quickly scroll back up, and ding the elevator bell to see how close they are (The elevator bell is actually a quarter tone less than a C#).

The American sing-along is dead. Once upon a time, there was a baby Steinway in every household, and American families sang together in perfect nuclear harmony. Pa was an operatic baritone, and little Timmy had chosen to forgo puberty to carry on the castrati legacy. The sing-along was the musical hearth of the home, warming our spirits each holiday with all-night medleys fake-booked on the spot.

Sadly, the patriot songs, hymns, and drinking songs that inspired the group sing-alongs of yesteryear will stay in those fake-books, abandoned by a war-wearied atheistic public who still like to drink, but now to the tune of a digital jukebox. Is there anything more terrible than the obligatory Happy Birthday sing-along? Even the National Anthem is a little too sing-songy, to perform in public.

However, embarrassing sing-alongs can still be found in contemporary films—a quaint artifact of our Atlantean musical culture—as if it required a great deal of special effects and movie-magic to get a group of people to sing together.

Below, we have Jerry O’Connell belting out David Cassidy’s “I Think I Love You” from Scream 2. Somehow they even got the key of this song right—E Flat Major. Either O’Connell has perfect pitch, or Wes Craven respects the Partridge.

The really interesting thing about this clip is how beautifully it illustrates the phenomenon of Clapping on the Ones. The audience actually keeps their clap on the same beat the entire time, as if they were cued and synched for this scene. It is Jerry O’Connell who compromises the rhythmic integrity of the sing-along song. Around :20 seconds in, O’Connell is late on his melody, and the audience finds themselves unwittingly clapping on the ones. While the clap begins on the Two’s and Four’s, Jerry misses a beat, and forces the audience to clap on the One’s and Three’s, so that what was once Up-beat, is now Down-beat.

All I’m sayin’ is: Clapping on the One’s would never even be happening like this, if the people would be stomping on the One’s instead. Not that it’s such a bad thing. It’s a wonderful thing really.

The above lunchroom sing-along scene was borrowed from an earlier film—Top Gun—wherein Tom Cruise sings “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” accompanied by a bar full of fellow air jocks singing unison. As in the clip above, these guys are dead-on C# Major—the original key of The Righteous Brothers song. Such respect for the classics!

Of course, people still have serendipitous sing-alongs at sporting events and church. And the children still sing nursery rhymes and play double-dutch. Leave it to the kids to keep the song alive, while us atonal adults fade into the black noise.

Friends, there are no more insidious sounds out there than the perpetual music of our machines. Along with the Grid Hum and corporate earworms, the synthetic sounds of personal computers earn their place in the Industrial-Musical complex. These are the most popular sounds around us – neither words nor lyrics, nor melodies, nor even our own effluvia surround us so much as these perverse atonalities. The computer literacy involved in turning these presets off, combined with the hopeless habituation of users to their presence, makes the following samples some of the most played sounds on Earth ever. Unlike the B-flat hum, which will drone on into the twilight of humanity, we have the choice right now to silence this digital flatulence.

Behold the Mac fart!

This farting sound is actually attached to the volume controls on an Apple computer, so that every time you turn it up or down, it fires off a fizzle of these pathetic robotic imitations of our beautiful body score – that big ass brass, like a Spike Jones concert, perfectly blending comedy and music.

There is an analogous sound on a Window’s machine, the so-called “System Notification” that resembles a lip-pop – another offensive natural sound that emerges from our bodies. Now why would a Gates, or a Jobs, want to make machines that reproduce our flatus for us? The answer lies in the Doomsday Seed Vault.

For all their irksome qualities, these body-based synths are nothing compared to the truly tonal variety, such as the Window’s “Asterisk”. This is another of a million alarms that come ready to rock each PC. Like the Hum of American machines, it is a B tone.

What kind of instrument is that? Does it sound like any instrument you can even name? It’s pure computer tone.

Please, people: Get in your control panels and turn this shit off. I can shut my eyes from the horrors of this world, but I ain’t got no earlids!

Such pacing and portamento! Drag over the noteheads below to hear the rooster played on a rhodes.

I hear it in 3/4 time, like the heartbeat. Afterall, cocks are known to waltz. The notes of the rooster’s crow fit neatly into one obscure scale – F Half Whole, also know as F Octatonic for its 8 notes, 1 more degree than the usual Diatonic 7-note Major/Minor scales.

The rooster hits the first four notes. The F is his tonic root which he begins and ends on. The A and Ab flirt with Major to Minor modulation – the picardy. Though the Octatonic scale is almost absent from Pop Music (with a couple of Los exceptions), the Half Whole interval movement is found in the Radiohead song “Just”. Just listen for the ascending lead guitar line in the intro. It actually follows the reverse of the above, rising a Whole Tone and then a Half-tone.

Why do roosters crow? Why do wine glasses sing? Where do Rock ‘n’ Roll babies come from? All of these questions and more will find their answers here at the Los Doggies Musical Literacy Foundation.

And please do be kind to your chicken friends!

The wren’s song is a lot like other birdsong, with its choppy frantic pacing, modulating phrases, and rhythmic suprises. The first two notes form a Major 6 interval, and sound very similar in pitch and feel to the cardinal’s “purdy”. Below, you can hear how the wren sounds with a musical instrument playing along – a veritable ‘cover’.

On the right, is a sonogram of the song. This is how scientists visualize it. The blue lines denote the males, and red lines denote the females. A double-line is the double-tracked vocals of two wrens in synchronicity. In typical scientific fashion, the authors attempt to reduce these beautifully complex duets to sex and violence.

This must be one of the most complex singing performances yet described in a non-human animal…Why then do the members of a group join to produce a complex chorus? The two hypotheses most commonly put forward for duetting are mate guarding and mutual territorial defence (Hall 2004)…The latter is more plausible, particularly as playback leads chorusing birds to gather round the speaker. The close presence of several birds singing in a coordinated fashion is then very obvious to a human observer and could be especially intimidating to intruding wrens.

I wonder how we would fare under such scientific inquiry, were the motives of human artists reduced to “fucking” and “fighting” or any of the other Biological F’s? A famous pop singer who only plays sold-out stadium gigs, could said to be “only in it for the money”, but this says nothing of the enjoyment of performing music. If these birds suffered alone with their songs, starving and friendless, Vincent van Gogh-like, would their musical motives be more admirable?

Wrens aren’t mere Darwinian machines. They sing for the fuck of it. Just like us. At least I think we do. To be sure we might just have to kidnap little Justin Bieber, puncture his brachial vein for blood samples, color-ring his neck for easy gender recognition, and then show up at his house with boom-box held overhead, blaring out his enemy’s music.

“All My Friends are Insects” by Weezer is in the key of E. It starts off with E Major for the “earthworm” and “butterfly” verses, but then promptly switches to E Minor for the “dragonfly” verse. The subsequent guitar solo keeps rocking the E Minor key in Munsters style, until the song modulates once more back to E Major for the remaining bridge and verse. Thus, it uses a reverse picardy in switching from E Major to E Minor, and then picardies again back to E Major. The structure is: Major-Minor-Major.

Thanks to Weezer for their picardy contribution, and also for correctly using gender-specific pronouns in reference to non-human animals. “It” is sung for the gender-bending earthworm, “She” for the pretty butterfly, and “He” for the colorful powerful dragonfly.

In the example above, the Mediant is the note in the middle – the Third. In C Minor the mediant E Flat, gets sharpened up to an E for a C Major. C Minor picardies to a C Major and it feels goods. To discover why, we turn to the dreaded Harmonic Series!

A picardy used as a musical device not only makes us happy by switching to Major, but because it changes key on the same degree, has an extra triumphant boost. The tonic C overcomes his sad minor self, sharpening his third to an E, and becomes consonant, major, and awesome.

Aye picardies! Radiohead do it, The Beatles did it, J.S.Bach did it so cheesey, but no one do it like Lionel:

“Hello” Picardy by Lionel Richie
It begins on A Minor with a “Hello”, down to G, then F, then picardies up to an A Major for the “looking for!”





Picardy also has plenty of cheeky potential. Take the example from “Roundabout” by Yes, a Minor classic that resolves in a picardied E Major chord.

Very cheeky. Or is it pretentious?




Here’s a cheeky picardy of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” written on the Casiotone mt-46.

Less common is the “Reverse Picardy” where a Major song turns Minor. It seems that the Harmonic series pushes human music ever and ever Major.

Here’s a version of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Minor – a reversed picardy of its former self. The usual “I V vi iii IV I IV V” is now minored where major and majored where minor, making it “i v VI III vi i iv v”.

Surely this is both sad and pretentious!