How do corporations rule the world when corporations rule the world? Why, with simple melodies played on idiophones like the hand chimes pictured left. Germans call them “ohrwurm,” meaning earworm. A catchy song crawls inside our ever-open ears like a musical parasite and lays egg-songs in our brains. There is no more insidious melody on […]
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A Hard Day’s Chord
The most famous chord in all of rock ‘n’ roll is the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” by The Beatles. If the Galaxy runs anything like in Close Encounters, then the above chord will function diplomatically. I’m sure it already has, here on Earth. If Lewis Carrol were to develop a portmanteau word […]
Hooty Duets
The Great Horned Owl has a semitonal hoot. The male and female display musical dimorphism in their hooty duets. Male hooters usually end up somewhere around the human note E, and female hooters sing something like an A. Though there is much tonal variation in owl pairs, female owls are about a fourth above males. […]
The Eight Hooter
The Barred Owl’s song has 8 hoots and ends in a descending oo-aw. Ornithologists like to sing the mnemonic: “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all?” The song is swung and in the key of B Minor Lydian. Drag over the note heads below. Owls are like upright basses. They hoot in jazzy […]
Guitar-Eyed Lady
Today let’s look at a couple of crazy guitar licks from the song “Green-Eyed Lady” by Sugarloaf. Now, this song ain’t great. The melody and lyrics are throwaways. The bass line is copied right from a book of Guitar Exercises. Still, there are some valid reasons for liking this song – guitar reasons. The two […]
The Heart Shuffle ♥
The Human Heart is our natural metronome. It kicks like a bass drum anywhere from 60-80 beats per minute. In Italian, this tempo is called larghetto. It is no coincidence that the moderate rock tempo (120 bpm) – the cut-time of our heartbeat – is the standard tempo for Pop Music. The pitch of our […]
Spring Has Sung
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 […]
