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Lost Sound

2 April 2023, 2:24 pm

Lost was peak Hollywood television. Long before the bulimic formula of consuming entire seasons in a sitting, viewers would have to wait an entire week in between cliffhangers, discussing single episodes around the watercooler like rats. The average TV-goer would’ve thought about an episode the next day and possibly envision in their mind’s eye what would happen on the next episode.

People in those days were quasi-conscious beings with a rich internal life made up of movie and television scenes. There was no streaming on-demand, no infinite feed, or phantasmagorial reel. This was boomer TV. Now everything happens at the same time, everywhere all at once, so nothing really matters.

Lost was notable for its musicless opening. Sure it was an electronic Kubrick ripoff, but it did its job in timely fashion. The in-show music was of the orchestral tugging-on-the-heartstrings variety, but the intro and outro were noise-based. And based they were!

Every Lost-appreciater knows well the ending thud. In the first few episodes, it was more of a timpani, but they eventually settled on this little beauty.

Like the sound of J.J. Abrams blowing on his glasses to clean them. Or the sound of J.J. Abrams blowing hot smoke up your ass. Or the soft fart of a smoke monster?

Lying under all that noise, there is a low C2. This is the same ominous note that Mike Tyson composed his entrance music out of. Perhaps the Lost sound-designers were inspired by Tyson’s leitmotif.

I think this sound starts with a “P.” How would you write it phonetically? Let me know in the comments.

J.J. Abrahams is known for his “mystery box” formula of TV writing, a means of dragging viewers along on a wild goose chase, because we all know it’s not about the goose so much as the wild chase that leads to nothing.

This was before J.J. killed Star Trek and Star Wars. Who knows what franchises he’ll kill in the future? The Wings reboot? Regarding Henry the Second? Somehow this guy keeps getting work in Hollywood and it’s nigh impossible to say why.

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Mike Tyson Entrance Music

29 March 2023, 1:40 pm

Mike Tyson was a hero to many Gen X kids as the end boss from Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! until he raped a girl and bit off Holyfield’s ear IRL. Then he became vegan and everyone really hated him. But now, he’s back eating meat and appearing on all the bro-tier podcasts. Iron Mike is once again in the good graces of the NPC public.

For the purpose of this blog, Tyson had legendary entrance music. There was no bombast or cheese, no pop song, no “Living in America” or “Ride of the Valkyries,” just one ominous note.

The one note in question was a low C2 and there were actually ambient synth drums behind it. I defy you to identify the downbeat in this monster music. What time signature even is this?

The TV commentator said of the music:

This heavy metal sound you hear is Mike Tyson about to make his way in, I believe. The sound is deafening here in the arena so I won’t try to yell over it … It’s interesting to note that Mike Tyson selected his pre-fight music just noise. Every once and a while you hear the clanging of chains. I think that’s what he’s got in mind to do to Mike Spinks’s head, but we’ll wait and see. Everything that Tyson does is intimidating. There he is; he comes out; he doesn’t wear a coat in; he’s worked up a full sweat. I want to tell you: the electricity in this crowd is awesome!

By contrast, Michael Spinks’s entrance music was “This Is It” by Kenny Loggins, a yacht-rock classic. The stark change from an upbeat pop tune to a singular menacing drone is one of the most memorable moments in sports music history. It would be like if Kenny Loggins opened for the psychedelic stoner-rock band Sleep. Or Hall & Oates opening up the mouth of hell.

I’m the best ever. I’m the most brutal and vicious, and most ruthless champion there’s ever been. There’s no one can stop me. Lennox is a conqueror? No, I’m Alexander, he’s no Alexander. I’m the best ever. There’s never been anybody as ruthless. I’m Sonny Liston, I’m Jack Dempsey. There’s no one like me. I’m from their cloth. There’s no one that can match me. My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable, and I’m just ferocious. I want your heart. I want to eat his children. Praise be to Allah.

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Clown Horn

12 February 2023, 4:25 pm

Clowns used to be the height of children’s entertainment, but after Pogo and Silly Billy, clowns fell out of fashion. They survive today as horror-movie villains and meth-bands for adult entertainment. Kids would rather see sexy-ass drag queens than some stupid clown.

I knew a girl in college whose parents were both clowns. She had gone to clown college to study the family trade but found it just wasn’t for her. She switched to a worthless liberal arts degree, and I suspect her clown parents were very disappointed. Still, she spoke of their profession with the utmost seriousness. There was not an ounce of humor in the fact that she came from a family of clowns, which I assume went back for generations all the way to founding-stock American clowns.

Clowns appear to be happy, but on the inside, they are quite sad (and possibly pedophile child-murderers). Just like the classic clown horn, it sounds funny, but it’s actually a minor third interval—the saddest of all intervals.

The D in the above example is a quarter-tone sharper than a minor third, but we’re not too concerned with musical cents here—mere chump change. I’m practically deaf with chronic tinnitus, so one semitone is enough for me.

In human speech, the clown horn is translated as “waka waka.” If you don’t have your horn on you, just say that instead. You’ll be very popular, just like me. Spreading strife is my greatest joy. 🤡🌎

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Verifone Melody

31 January 2023, 10:07 am

The old sounds of money were so pleasing they could fill a symphony, or a psychedelic blues song. From the cha-ching of old timey cash drawers to the bling-bling of the petrodollar, money used to spread euphony like disease. Cash registers rang like slot machines and everyone had dollar-signs in their eyes. It’s enough to make you nostalgic for the Reagan era when money would trickle down like rain. Cash was king, and coins his jingly jester.

Today, in our cashless society, where money is non-physical, there is a sonic need for some kind of signal to let the customer know they are actually spending real fiat currency. What sound does crypto make? Or NFTs? Even GIFs can have sound. You’d hope Bitcoins would klup like in Super Mario. But it’s all silent, and silence is sleazy.

Boomer credit card machines were nothing special, but they did make a satisfying noise, if they didn’t slice your fingers off in the process.

The sound of an imprinter is intuitive: it chomps and devours your bank account.

Sometime in the nebulous 2000s, the ruling-class banksters once again turned to classical melodists for real-life foley. Behold and hearken, the Verifone melody:

This melody asks a question. Are you happy with your purchase? Would you like to buy more? Is corporate-branding an adequate substitute for your true spirit-self?

The Verifone melody is one of the most popular sounds in the world, heard millions of times a day, much more than Westminster Quarters. Shopaholics hear this Pavlovian chime and salivate. Of course, it’s in the universally pleasing key of C. Although no C is sounded in the above melody, it is implicitly there. Perhaps you are the C, gentle consumer. With every sale and dopamine hit, the consumer is ever seeking more melodic transactions to resolve their atonal insatiability.

Don’t forget: Usury is a sin! It’s one of the first things God banned after murder and pagan key-parties.

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Ahwooga

25 January 2023, 3:54 pm

Ahwooga is a popular sound made by old timey cars, lusty cartoon wolves and construction workers. Even old timey submarines were submerging to a loud loop of ahwoogas. The guy who invented the Klaxon horn also invented hearing aids, so you do the math there. In the early aughts, the City was just beginning to bustle with automotive traffic, and New Yorkers were using discarded jazz band instruments as car horns. There was a need for something sexier and deafening.

The ahwooga is the next step up from a wolf whistle. Not just for any old lass on the street, the ahwooga is reserved for those birth-givers who are particularly well-endowed, possibly callipygous. It implies a honking of another kind, and also maybe a motorboat.

The ahwooga goes up and down an octave. In the example above, the ah sounds a G3, up to the woo, a G4, and back down again for the ga. It is explicitly sexual, like the in-and-out breathing of some crazed sex-beast.

Inside the cylinder housing is a spring steel diaphragm. The top is pressed down, engaging the teeth that are engraved in the metal. They rotate through a cog wheel and an ahoo sound is made; the gha is made as the wheel slows down.

https://sachsehistoricalsociety.com/stewart-warner-ahooga-horn/

Today’s car horns are usually two-tone, in the interval of a slightly flat major third, and go beep, beep. After cartoons and the patriarchy appropriated the ahwooga, nobody on the road could take the vintage horn seriously anymore. Other drivers mistook your rage for a sexual invitation.

Remember: It’s always a good idea to give people a courtesy tap, because you never know when an unhinged madman will add you to his list of things to do that day.

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Ba Dum Tss

23 January 2023, 8:27 pm

Ba dum tss is a popular drum fill used to punctuate a bad joke that dates back to the early 1900s, around the same time as the birth of the drum set. Back then, drummers sat behind the curtains or screen, providing live foley for cabaret or silent films.

Ba dum tss has been around so long that it’s only used meta-ironically today, but imagine a time when the comedic sting was done in full ironical sincerity.

Ba dum tss sounds like the dum is on the 1, so I’ve notated it thusly:

Whether you prefer ba dum cha (with a rim shot) or ba dum ching (with a ride bell), the figure is often played as ba bap with two snares, although the ba dum implies it was once a snare and a kick drum combo. That’s how Wikipedia notates it. Sometimes drummers get lazy and just play a flam. In the Goodfellas clip above, each joke gets a different variation like a deconstructed drum solo.

In ba dum tss, the cymbal is played without a kick drum underneath, which I consider to be a heresy. This was common in the classical era when all the drum beats sucked. A cymbal should pretty much always have a kick drum, unless you’re doing a cymbal swell, or if you want to invoke a sucky classical feel. But hey, the ba dum tss originated from a time when drummers were like little babies with a brand new toy and didn’t know what they were doing.

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Pong Sounds

11 January 2023, 12:04 pm

Pong wasn’t the first video game, but it was one of the first with sound effects. In the movie biz, they say the final product is 51% music, 49% picture. The sound informs the visual, as the soul possess a body. If you take the music away from E.T., it’s as awkward as family dinner. For video games, the sound is probably an even greater percentage. Imagine how awkward Mario would be if instead of happy coins and bendy jumps, you just heard the sound of your own slow breathing and intrusive thoughts.

Just like real ping-pong, the sound effects of Pong are essential to the game, and they are intuitive. The onomatopoeia “ping pong” implies two tones, the higher-pitched “ping” and the lower “pong.” Clocks have the same pattern with their “tick” and “tock,” doorbells with “ding” and “dong.”

The two tones of tennis are nicely demonstrated in this classic Michael Winslow bit:

Surprisingly, the Pong SFX were an afterthought. According to the game-maker, Allan Alcorn:

So I just tried to make the game better and better, and at the end of the thing he (Nolan Bushnell) said ‘you’ve got to have sound.’ Oh okay, well I’m over budget and three months into this thing and Nolan said ‘I want the roar of a crowd of thousands.’ Cheers, applause. How do you do that with digital circuits? Ones and zeroes? I had no idea, so I went in there that afternoon and in less than an hour poked around and found different tones that already existed in the sync generator, and gated them out and it took half a chip to do that. And I said ‘there’s the sound – if you don’t like it you do it!’ That’s the way it was left, so I love it when people talk about how wonderful and well thought out the sounds are.

Instead of having the two “ping pong” tones for each paddle, there is a distinct “wall” sound and “paddle” sound that are an octave apart to create a realistic table tennis experience. The musical SFX of Pong was crucial to the runaway success of the arcade game. I can’t imagine pinball or slots being popular without the euphonic feedback of bells and whistles.

The Pong arcade game’s got the flat B!

All the Pong sounds are roughly a quarter-tone flatter than a B, notated with a backwards flat symbol (♭).

Readers of this blog may instantly recognize the ubiquitous utility tone, the so-called “loudest note in the world” in the flat B. This 60 Hz. tone is heard emanating from the American power grid, which you can find everywhere from streetlights to microwaves. It is slightly flatter than a B1, the low B on a 4-string bass guitar. In Pong, the tones are a couple octaves higher with a B3 for the “wall” and “point” sounds, and a B4 for the “paddle.”

Just like the utility tone, the Pong SFX were a product of the hardware. Flat B’s are hard-wired into our electronics. It’s too bad they’re not an equal-tempered B, so that musicians could use them to tune with. Proponents of the 432 Hz. conspiracy will see a great evil lurking in the flatness of Pong, a Satanic meddling in our natural harmony in order to torment humanity’s ears, but it’s probably just the work of tired old engineers who have no time for music and consider SFX to be an afterthought.

I recently realized Pong is a stealth top-down POV game. It’s supposed to be a ping-pong table seen from above, but most people probably see it from the side with the paddles floating in space. It is a rare individual who sees the game as its creator intended.

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