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Musical Phone Tones

22 November 2010, 9:40 pm

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 black stemmed noteheads. It’s like sonar baby!



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!

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A Nice Place to Live

17 November 2010, 7:35 pm

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 9). It’s basically two sets of perfect fifths―C# and G#, D# and A#―stacked on top of each other.

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.

Look out New Paltz, you’re going to get soundscaped hard!

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Intervals

16 November 2010, 6:33 pm

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 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.

Ya got questions? Crits? Write to us in the comments below.

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You Say Somatosounds: The Tintinnabulations of Tinnitus

15 November 2010, 11:22 pm

triple forteNot 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 frequencies” that are dying inside your brain, never to be heard again. Or you may be like me and experience Chronic Tinnitus―a mildly annoying to deafeningly debilitating condition. Some sufferers have even cut off their own ears in the hopes of exorcising the sound. Of course, head sounds need to be decapitated. There have even been reports of objective tinnitus―nerve noise so loud that it can be heard outside of the head in which it is produced.

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 boy 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.

The openings empty out their last sound. From every mountaintop, let tinnitus ring.

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The Bloop

14 November 2010, 8:19 pm

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 ocean—the blue whale. In 1997, the Bloop was detected by the underwater hydrophone array, from sensors up to 5,000 kilometres apart, deep in the waters off the West coast of Chile.

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.

Secret sounds under the ocean?
Reality, really? Is anyone buying this shit anymore?

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I Say Tomita

13 November 2010, 11:26 am

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 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.


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Synaesthesia

11 November 2010, 4:09 pm

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 you’d expect music to look: Colored lights, flashes, and bangs. Pulsations aflicker. A ferocious phantasmagoria of light and sound blowing through the mind’s eye. Honey combs, spiderwebs, tunnels, cones, spirals. Form constants. “Something like fireworks.”

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; 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).

Mister Roy G. Biv, meet your twin brother, Gab C. Def.

 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.

So there you have it! Light. Sound. Explosions. Synaesthesia is the Sixth Sense. Music is the Fifth Force. Play for peace.

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