The telephone is a tuner, microphone, and synthesizer rolled into one. Its dial tone plays a Concert A for easy tuning, its receiver can blast your singing voice to anywhere in the world, and its 12 tones can play a real dissonant tune. You may recognize the melody of your home phone # among these […]
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A Nice Place to Live
This looks like a nice place to live―Skruv, Sweden. The Cardboard Factory is in G#. The Glassworks are in C#. The Metalworks are in D#. And the Shopping Centre is an octave of A#’s. Add all the tones up, and you get the Town Chord―an incomplete chord, that is best described as a C#6 (add […]
Intervals
In our relentless pursuit of musical education, it is important that we frequently return to the source, and that is the tone at the beginning of all creation―the Om Tone. 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 […]
You Say Somatosounds: The Tintinnabulations of Tinnitus
Not all sounds are ear sounds. Some sounds are beyond ears, like head sounds. These sounds are known as tinnitus, and probably everybody experiences them at one time (as do our animal friends). You may temporarily hear a “ringing in your ears” after being exposed to triple forte rock music. These are just the “phantom […]
The Bloop
In the 1990’s, the Sound Surveillance System—a chain of underwater listening posts in the Atlantic Ocean—recorded a number of mysterious sounds of unknown origin. The most popular of which, is nicknamed “The Bloop”. When sped up, it sounds like a whale call, and yet the Bloop is far louder than the loudest animal in the […]
I Say Tomita
Isao Tomita, the electronic composer famous for synthesizing classical music into bloops in the 70’s, and performing inside giant glass pyramids suspended above the audience, writes the following passage on the back of his 1975 Pictures At An Exhibition album, concerning the nature of acoustic and electric music. Two kinds of loud sounds in the […]
Synaesthesia
Did you know some crazy folks out there have actually seen Music? They’re called synesthetes and often experience what is known as “colored hearing,” or “Sound → Color Synesthesia.” What do these synesthetes say that Music looks like? Well, no two synesthetes ever agree on tone (especially the musicians), but mostly it looks exactly how […]
