Trying to fill in some gaps in my knowledge

The language is largely opaque to me, but I sort of get a hint of what he's talking about. Charles Cornell tries to explain what makes the motion in music.

My ear isn't tuned for this yet, but when he goes through it I can start to hear what's going on.

I get the impression that the categories of major and minor are a bit blurry at the edges.

Bohemian Rhapsody

The East and West mixed choir sang this, as arranged by Philip Lawson. I can see why they left out the part about Why the "poor boy from a poor family" was in such trouble -- singing about random murders is maybe not what you want impressionable youth doing -- but it changes the tone quite a bit. This way the singer seems almost justified in his complaints.

Doxology

I've sung it thousands of times, but had never heard about Thomas Ken before. Maybe he would have liked it that way.

All Praise to Thee My God This Night has as the last verse: "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow" -- the famous doxology.

Ken sounds like he would have been a good man to know.

Wikipedia claims that he wound up crossways with Gilbert Burnet, of whom I had also never heard before, and of whom it was said "Indeed it was not easy to wound Burnet's feelings. His self-complacency, his animal spirits, and his want of tact, were such that, though he frequently gave offence, he never took it." I think I've known a few like that.

Smile

I'm not immersed in music lore, and didn't recall having heard of the never-quite-converged "SMiLE" Beach Boys album. I gather that at least some of the peices existed in multiple versions, and the group hadn't decided on what to pick.

I was curious. It exists on Youtube.

It feels sloppy, and I can easily believe they didn't yet know where they were going. Good Vibrations ends the set--the contrast seems stark. They experimented with all kinds of instrumentation and musical ideas, but it didn't seem confident and ready to me.

Sometimes you need to respect an author's privacy about "unfinished works." There's likely a reason the thing wasn't finished.

Ghost melody

Can you make out the original tune by subtracting notes from a background?

Can you make out any kind of melodic movement at all?

In trying to answer that question I hit two obstacles: I couldn’t hit the notes I needed to reliably, and I already knew what to expect.

To deal with the competence problem I used MuseScore software to compose and play back for me, and as for the bias due to expectation—I can’t solve that for myself unless/until I script something to take a random tune and generate the silhouette tune automatically, but I can solve it for you by obfuscating the title of the tune.

I chose to use as a “background” the collection of all the notes used in a tune. For each note in the original tune I played this background without that original note. I thought of it as like a ghost in the background noise.

Does that ghost, that absence, make something melodic?

Youtube video of Gjvaxyr (I am still learning ffmpeg. Please forgive the video quality. The audio was assembled with Audacity.)

Those who have some musical background will predict that the result will be dissonant, and so it is.

I think I can sort-of hear something, that is vaguely like the original—sometimes.

Later I’ll look into removing chords rather than single notes, though I expect it will still be dissonant.

I wonder under what conditions would the ghost tune not be dissonant. A base song with notes only from a chord, yes--others?

Staying attentive

We got to talking about the difference in preaching between your typical anglo congregation and a black one. I suspect that the more congregation-interactive approach ("Can I get an Amen?") in the latter leads to less of "Beautiful Dreamer".

Distinguishing different types of concerts

Are the "nose-bleed seats" in the Sherpa-guided upper-upper balcony, or down in front by the wall of speakers?

Talking shop

Parties with engineers or scientists seem to have points of difference with parties with musicians and singers. While some of us with technical backgrounds (e.g. managing the relay satellites around Mars for the rovers) swapped stories and discussed the use of teaching gardens, the musicians armed with a guitar and accordian were singing Russian and Ukranian songs (with a few English ones and even Je ne regrette rien) in the other room. One fellow demonstrated Russian dancing. (It looked sort of like Zorba, but what do I know?) Much livelier.

I guess we all had a good time in our own ways.

Music hath charms

When I saw the BBC article on music calming dogs (classical was better), I immediately thought of this: of course. That wouldn't count, though--"Slow tempo (50-60 beats per minute or less), simple compositions with low or no percussive elements are best."

Audiobooks might sound like they'd calm pets, especially with a soothing-voiced narrator, but the theory doesn't hold up in practice. A study Wells co-authored in 2022, which observed the reactions of 60 dogs to either classical music or audiobooks while their owners were briefly absent, found that audiobooks had little to no calming effect. Rather than sit or lie down as they did while listening to the music, most would just stare at the speaker emitting the audiobook recording.

They emphasized that there was a lot of variation, and your mileage with your pet might vary.

Coffee

I see coffee memes regularly. I never really acquired a taste for the stuff. I can drink it if there's nothing else available, and it's useful for the owl shift. Not essential, though for some people it seems to matter a great deal.

I'm old enough to remember a song touting an alternative:

How Long Has This Been Going On?

Your preference? Ace, or Ella Fitzgerald, or Charlie Puth?

Tom Lehrer

My introduction to his work came during study hall in the English class back in '69 or '70. Somebody brought an album and persuaded the teacher to play it. The only song I'm sure was on it was "Be Prepared." We heard both sides, so I guess the teacher liked it too.

I liked it then, but over the years I've had less and less interest in revisiting his works. MLF Lullaby or Folk Song Army hold up pretty well, but I don't take much joy in the deliberately dark these days.

A very talented man. I'd no idea he'd written things for The Electric Company--I hope he had joy in that.

Manipulating bird song

We've probably all heard the novelty Christmas songs with dogs barking or cats meowing the notes; and if we're old enough probably remember Marvin Suggs and his Muppaphone.

A bark can approximate a note in the scale, and if it isn't quite there you can tune it to fit, and with enough samples you could program your synthesizer to bark out whatever tune you cared to. All you need to worry about is the note, duration, and volume, and a good synthesizer will know how to deal with key velocity. You have an alphabet; you can plug in whatever sounds you want.

But what about birdsong? What would you need to take into account if you wanted to compose music using recorded bird chirps, cheeps, chips, warbles, etc?

Bird chirps run faster than human-sung notes. In the time it takes me to sing "la" the bird runs through a trill and a chirp to top it off, even shifting back and forth between notes. Maybe it crescendos, rises and falls. The warbling won't be the same frequency from one species to another.

Matching one "note" to the next isn't like picking letters from an alphabet, but matching textures, speeds, even which sets of notes were used in what isn't a chord. It's more like picking characters from a Chinese typewriter.

You could get around that by slowing the bird calls way down, trimming out a clean part, and "autotuning." It would probably sound interesting, and maybe even good, but I doubt it would sound much like the birdsong it came from.

Maybe the Chinese typewriter is the way to go. To get started, suppose we limit ourselves to 2 octaves of the primary note: 24 primary notes. No warble or warble at a set frequency (we can fiddle with the sound to fit one of our set values): say 8. The secondary note: probably a choice of 8, but some will sound nice together with different ones. Rise and fall shape: 5. Hmm. So far that's 7680 different sounds in the sound bank, with 4 descriptors. I hate to think how many calls you'd have to listen through to settle on that number.

Of course you can take different parts of a single call to represent different ... I can't call it a note, because it's more than just the note ... complexes. Still, even without more descriptors, that's a lot of time somebody (you) has to invest to sort out the complexes, before you start playing.

OK, start simple. Sort out a single type of sound you want to work with (warble type, flat "rise and fall", secondary note difference from the primary). That'll be maybe several weeks of work to get 24 notes (getting a feel for the territory takes a while), and then you program your synthesizer and try it out.

I'd bet that it wouldn't sound quite clean right out of the gate--that attack will be hard to make smooth; and probably some things I didn't think of will jump out at the musician who tries to play it for the first time.

Maybe start even simpler: take some bird chirps, split them into sections, and find the primary frequency for each--if there is one. If there isn't, trying to shoehorn them into notes may not be the way to go. You might have fun trying to assemble your own bird calls, though.

Would it be good enough to be an instrument in its own right, or merely a novelty?

No clue.

UPDATE: birdsong can include ultrasonic notes

An older man's take on the song

I heard "Castles in the Air" along with everybody else back in the day. It struck me at the time was that the singer was a coward. Aside from that, the notion that the "cocktail generation" lived in an emotional desert didn't seem odd--it was in the air, and perhaps even overkill. Nobody I knew was into that kind of social climbing. It wasn't fashionable; easy to disdain. Mountains and forests cool, big city yuck.

I ran across the song today and the cowardice of it fairly screams now, and ... wait a minute, can we hear her side of this? McLean had some issues with wives; maybe there's some connection.

Maybe the sensuous nature of music makes it easier to just take the singer's word for what's going on.

Church Music

AVI relinked his Church Music post(*), the one that generated so much discussion. apparently not directly. Oh well, read it anyhow I had a few views; this is where they came from.

Years ago we joined a large church in the area. It had good preaching, teaching, opportunities to serve -- but the music hurt.

No, I don't mean it offended my aesthetic senses, though it wasn't my favorite style; I mean that the first song was set at roach-killer volume (to remind people to stop talking?), and it only improved slightly from there. It was just too loud. I not only couldn't hear myself (the way musicians who use monitors can hear themselves), it hurt my ears if I sat in the wrong row.

I started to get quietly grumpy about that.

One day I got sat down and inaudibly interrogated about that:

You've got a bad attitude here.

Yes.

You don't like the music. You're starting to spread that dislike out.

I guess so.

I don't guess. Are the band players your enemies?

Well, not exactly. But.

What did I tell you to do with your enemies?

Oh. Love them.

And here that means?

Serve them.

I volunteered to do the monitor board. I dressed in inconspicuous dark clothes and went behind the curtain to run the giant thing during rehearsals and services, and whatever mix they wanted, I tweaked for them. I changed batteries, adjusted the lectern...

After a few years they started up a new service, with more traditional music, and needed people to run that--which is where I am now.

Several years of serving the teams trying to praise God with loud music didn't give me a great love for the style, though I understand it better now. What it did give me was a love for them.

Monitors and resonances

While we tried to get the monitors adjusted this morning, I wondered how old the tool is: pretty recent, as this interesting story shows.

Vitruvius described how Greek and Roman theaters used pots to improve the sound. Generations since have wondered what he meant, since no examples survive, though there are some niches that might hold a bronze container. (Metal was valuable, and re-used elsewhere, while clay pots broke.)

If the resonators made an audible tone, could that confuse the singers and lyre/flute/drum players? The result would be slightly delayed, like reflections in a big hall can be.

Resonators can be used not just to amplify but to dampen inconvenient frequencies too. Reflections off long stone walls can really muddy the sound, making it hard to make out the speaker/singer's words. Some 10th to 16th century churches were built with pots stuffed with sound absorbing stuff built into the walls.

I get itchy when "it is likely" turns up in essays, such as this article:

It is likely that the function of the vases would have been to make some sounds louder than others by allowing them (or the air within them) to sympathetically vibrate when certain harmonics 'hit' them. So, when a singer performs a perfectly intune scale, a number of vases would ring creating a harmonic chord. An artificial reverberation (RT60 time estimated as 0.2-0.5 seconds, Landels) containing only those harmonics listed in the vases pitches would be produced in an open-air theatre that would otherwise have none. There may be another purpose for the vases other than those already mentioned. Some believe the acoustic jars helped singers and those relying on ear for maintaining pitch to keep to proper pitch. As indicated, the resonance of the vases would have given emphasis to important pitches leaving the others silent. If the artificial reverberation concept is difficult to accept, the assisted resonance idea is perhaps a little more attractive. No definitive answer has been found to the question of authenticity and intent with regards Vitruvian resonating vases.

Note that the hypothesis that the singers could hear them and use them to maintain pitch would imply that the singers would hear the slight delay that I mentioned above, which could confuse the timing. Maybe it's true and the drums helped keep the beat. And IIUC an RT60 of 0.5 seconds isn't bad.

So far I haven't found who may tried it out on a large scale: "Ideally, a complete set of vases needs to be made. However, the sheer cost of a minimum of ten bronze vases has presumably prevented most researchers from pursuing the project." Researchers have modeled them in software, and found some enhancement of male speaking voices (the Greeks didn't have actresses, apparently).

The last link lost all its formatting, making it hard to read. In discussing harpsichord resonances it cites Spiteri thus: "the sound of a harpsichord is like two skeletons making love on a corrugated iron roof".

Happy

I follow Sippican Cottage who recently posted on "the happiest songs," with a sampling. The first thing that came to my mind was Apollo 100's Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring, and not just because of the title. I thought it a happy song (OK, instrumental) long before I knew the name. (True. Not sure why, maybe no DJ's to explain.) I've wondered if one could time a fireworks display to it...

Anyhow, what are your suggestions?

Carols

A joyful Christmas to all! And if joy isn't the first thing in your thoughts (a friend died yesterday--the doctors were pretty accurate as to how long he had), Jesus has been there too.

Thinking about carols: we all know that Joy to the World isn't a Christmas song, but we sing it then anyway. Some of the old favorites have grammar that confuses children (I was one) thanks in part to fashions for making English poetry work like Latin. But they are fun; they help us celebrate; they help us remember.

I got to thinking--is there a lack in the Christmas carol collection?

In the Christmas story we have John the Baptist, Elizabeth, Mary, Zechariah, Simeon, and Anna, inspired directly by the Holy Spirit.

We have Joseph and the magi, indirectly informed by the Holy Spirit in dreams.

We have Mary and the shepherds, informed by angels sent from God.

I can't think of any Christmas hymns devoted to the Holy Spirit. They all point to Jesus, and perhaps reference the Father. Perhaps that's appropriate, but it seems a little odd.

Dance and drummer

I wrote about a Gbande man's book in which he said that the dancers follow the drummers rather than the other way around.

This is contradicted by the singer/dancer Madam Yatta Zoe, who said the drummers gave subtle cues to the dancers. I defer to her expertise in the matter, though perhaps the Gbande sometimes do things differently.

"A chat with Madam Yatta Zoe" is a bit hard to follow sometimes--she switches languages from time to time. One of the songs is in English but the meaning is incomprehensible without knowing what "lasso" is (and I didn't). It turns out that the admonition for young women to "not drink lasso" is actually telling them not to poison themselves after they've been unlucky in love.

The interview was done on a porch, and the rain comes and goes in the background.

Grumpiness about lyrics

The song Crown Him With Many Crowns has a line that drives me nuts: "Hark! How the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own." Um... What's the point of creating at all if everything comes out the same? Immortal, Invisible says "in all life thou livest, the true life of all," which seems much more fitting--there are many expressions of life or music with the same enlivening life and music in them all.

I can't complain too much--the rest is great and I've composed nothing comparable. But some lines catch me sideways: e.g. ""And now I am happy all the day!"

A lot of hymns are aspirational, not descriptive; I have to cut some slack.