What Came Before the Phonograph?

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Fantastic Free Folk Music

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Look to the Past For New Sounds

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Instrument Causes Insanity?

Ah, the glass armonica. Is there ever a more pleasantly haunting sound? For those that are unfamiliar with this weird and wonderful instrument it is a super-duper, glass-rub-o-matic, Ben Franklin special. You see, old Benny had the brilliant idea of automating the whole rubbing the rim of a wine glass trick by skewering a bunch of glass bowls and spinning the whole thing like a musical rotisserie.

Try playing one yourself… virtually at least. The Franklin Institute has a fun little online armonica to play around with. But to truly get a sense of what it can do mosey on down to YouTube and just look at any of the dozens of videos of Thomas Bloch working it.

You can hardly ever mention the glass armonica on the net without people going on about lead. See, the glass armoninca has gained a reputation for causing insanity and other forms of psychic distress. The popular explanation among commentboard posters is that lead poisoning is to blame.

There are several reasons why I would discount this theory. First thing is to look at is the supposed vectors of lead transmission. Two possible sources of lead contamination on the armonica are in the paint and the glass. While paint was originally used on the bowls to distinguish the notes, gold banding replaced this practice some years before the armonica fell out of fashion. Paint was used in roughly the first 30 years of the armonica’s existence, a time when it enjoyed immense popularity.  Aside from this, the paint (if indeed it were lead paint at all) would be painted on the inside of the bowls as the whole point of the armonica is that you’re rubbing glass, not paint. The other supposed vector of lead poisoning, the lead in the crystal, is just as unlikely. While it has been shown that lead does leech out of lead glassware, the effect is most pronounced with acidic liquids, and long storage periods. The water an armonica player uses on their fingers is unlikely to leech out a substantial amount of lead, and while we all know musicians love to party, I doubt many armonicas were converted to champagne fountains.

Next we should take a look at the symptoms of lead poisoning. We must concentrate on the symptoms that appear in adults, as it is unlikely that there were many child armonica players. We also must confine ourselves to looking at the symptoms which manifest behaviorally which are: irritability, sleeplessness, nervousness,  and loss of appetite. Even if all these symptoms were present in one individual it would hardly seem like insanity brought on by the spooky tones of a weird instrument.  Moreover, these symptoms would not present themselves in the audience (having not been in physical contact with the armonica) who would presumably be as equally affected by the strange tones of the armonica as the player. Also we must consider the immediacy of the symptoms. The onset of lead poisoning through the culmination of what little one might ingest from trace amounts left on one’s fingers after playing the armonica would take many, many years of exposure. Because the effect would be so far removed from the cause, I doubt many would actually come to blame the resulting cluster of symptoms on the armonica.

I suspect that, as is typical of humans, people are seeing causality where none exists. Both in blaming the armonica for ill effects, and in pointing the finger at lead poisoning. The timbre of the armonica was once described as ‘celestial’. Just one listen and you’re sure to agree that it possesses an other-worldly sound. This makes it very easy for superstitions to grow around it, and become the target of blame for events that are synchronous yet otherwise random.

Check out Finkenbeine’s page on the Glass Armonica if you want more information or to purchase one.

 

5 Big Steps in Music Technology

Here is a neat little list of 5 important developments in modern music technology brought to you by New Scientist. I never new there existed such a machine as the phonautograph. Cool stuff indeed.

The last two hundred years have seen huge advances in music technology, such as electronic music and even home recording software. Here are five of the key advances, in chronological order.

Read more …

 

Ancient Computer Tunes

BBC has a writeup on the oldest known music produced by a computer. My how far we’ve come.

During the session, the temperamental machine managed to work its way through Baa Baa Black Sheep, God Save the King and part of In the Mood.

Following one aborted attempt, a laughing presenter says: “The machine’s obviously not in the mood.”

Read more …

 

Lost Music

I happened on a radio program called “Lost music of the 80’s” not too long ago. It was disappointing when after listening for a time I realised that I had heard before every song they were playing being as they were oft played singles in my youth. And I’ll hear them all again when oldies radio starts becoming a more attractive format to me. There is no danger of these songs being lost and I felt a more accurate title for the program would be “Big Hits of the 80’s”.

What I was expecting, based on the title, would be songs from albums that didn’t have great sales despite the great music they contained. Or early, obscure music from artists that became well established later on in their careers. Or even gems on big albums that weren’t picked as singles, so remaining undiscovered by new generations who don’t own or planning on owning that album. There is a plethora of recorded music lost in the album collections of the general public. Songs that would only be familiar to the completists.

Considering the amount of music that is produced as a ratio to the number of different songs broadcast, we have heard so very little. While, in part, the current function of a radio station is to expose you to new music, the other function is to expose you to it ad infitum, ad nauseum. So even if they do venture to play older songs, it’s older songs we’ve heard countless times before. To that end the modern radio format is not geared towards enriching our collective experience, but then we knew that already.

Not that any of this is to suggest that radio should re-invent itself to bring you ‘all novelty, all the time’. There are many sources to listen to which are esoteric or eclectic. Even more now than were available before the advent of internet, satellite and cable radio. It is naive to expect that the business relationship between recording companies and commercial radio stations will change anytime soon, or even that it should. I would just like to see that when they do try to expand the listeners musical catalogue that it be an honest effort.

And this is just covering the modern recording era. If we venture further back in time there are countless songs recorded on vinyl, wax, paper, clay, etc that never see the light of day again. As a society it is impractical to store every datum that is produced. It is even more impractical to search and review the enormous storehouse of data. At the very least we may make modest attempts to gather a large cross-section of transient works. If for nothing else than to give us a fine-grained picture of the past. This is why I like sites such as Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project or Open Source Audio that dedicate themselves to archiving and distributing ephemeral music. We get to hear what else was going on at a specific time other than much repeated ‘classics’, giving us a fuller view of the landscape.

 

Wire me up!

I went to Seattle recently and while there I took in the Experience Music Project. One of the most interesting exhibits was the history of the guitar. But of particular interest to me was the display of early electric guitars.

Modern music has much to owe the electric guitar. Electric guitars brought with them the opportunity to modify a sound in ways previously unimaginable. Once the sound waves were converted to an electrical signal, that signal could be altered in a manner that would be impractical, or impossible if one were working on the sound waves alone.

If you would like to know more about the history of electric guitars then you can read about them on answers.com as they do a much better job of relating the history than I intend to go into here. My interest lies in how electrification changed the face of music.

Every instrument has an amplifier of sort. Some part of any instrument takes the vibration of the signal generator and amplifies the amount of air it moves so as to make those vibrations more audible. In many stringed instruments it happens to be a box with some sound holes cut into it. Even now, most electric guitars have a solid body and are very quiet when not plugged in as the guitar body make a lousy resonator.

The amplifying element of an instrument is often responsible for the timbre of that instrument. It’s what makes a French horn sound different from a trombone even though both cover roughly the same range of fundamental frequencies.

The configuration and material of the resonator emphasises or attenuates different harmonic frequencies so the final complex waveform produced is of a particular character, distinguishable from one instrument to the next.

Early guitar effects were the result of limitations in the amplifier to faithfully reproduce a sound wave. In the sixties some musicians began boosting the signal from the guitar to the limit of the amplifier. This was accomplished by using pre-amplifiers to overdrive the gain or by simply raising the volume on the amp until it started to distort.

High gain signals would saturate the valves causing the top and bottom of the signal wave to be clipped off. In other words the signal amplitude would actually go higher if it were allowed but limitations of the electronics, or even physical limitations of the speaker being extended or retracted completely, disallowed this. What would normally be a sine-wave ends up looking more like a square-wave (A simplification, I know. Look here and here for a more in depth treatment).

Another way musicians would change the sound coming from the amplifier would be to tear, cut, or punch holes in, the paper cone of the speaker. This would give the guitar a fuzzy quality, a sound that was later packaged up in a stomp box saving countless speakers from such unspeakable horrors.

With the advent of the transistor and its subsequent use in pre-amps and amps, a harder clipping quality was brought to overdrive distortion as the transistor had different saturation characteristics than vacuum tubes. The sharp edge of its clipping meant that the resulting signal contained more of the higher level harmonics than tubes which then translates to a ‘colder’, sound.

In any other application all this would be considered a bad thing. For some reason having an amplifier that doesn’t accurately reproduce the signal it is being fed became a desirable thing. The coloration and tone that was introduced into the signal by the way in which amplifiers distorted the signal represented a shift in what an amplifier’s purpose was to the electric guitar. In effect, the amplifier became part of the instrument in a way that transcended mere soundboard status. Given the nature of the guitar/amplifier relationship you could now change the timbre of the instrument at will just by choosing another amplifier or by turning a dial. This ability was of monumental importance in the history of music. Never before was there such ease and flexibility in choosing the tone of an instrument.

To be sure, distortion in amplifiers was an issue long before it was put to musical use. Seeing as guitars were first electrified in the 30’s and distortion effects were being used in music during the 60’s one may postulate that it was the change in musical styles that informed the listeners as how they should perceive this distortion. Rock-and-Roll emerged in the 50’s at a time when the electric guitar was first mass marketed. Being the musical style that began to capitalise on these effects in the 60’s it only seems fair to place blame on the miscreant youth. The combination of rebellious music, and now a viable instrument that can be made really loud, were the perfect conditions for distortion to be used productively. Rock and electric guitars go hand-in-hand and in part this match is enabled by the effects pedal. Nothing says “I’m rebelling” quite like the harsh tones of an amp that is being used the “wrong” way. It’s certainly nothing that Benny Goodman would approve of.

It seems to me as though the quest for novelty exploded in the 60’s and to stand out above those who employed guitar effects you had to do ever increasingly bizarre things to your sound. It was a blessing that the guitar was electrified as you could now interject devices into the signal flow that could modify the sound in wild ways. The sound of the guitar did not resemble what it was and it was never going back.

New genres of music would rise up as musicians incorporate new effects into their playing. The effect helps define these genres as playing style adapts to maximise or revolutionise the effect and the effect itself becomes part of the signature of that music. Consider the Wah-Wah and its distinctive use by Jimi Hendrix and later adoption by funk and soul musicians, psychedelic rock and funk wouldn’t be the same without it. The variety of musical genres that have emerged out of, and since, Rock-and-Roll are nearly always inextricably tied to the sound the guitarist was trying to produce.

Another form of distortion normally considered detrimental in sound reinforcement has become a staple of Rock musicians. Controlled feedback became a tool in the musician’s repertoire also during the 60’s by such notable bands as: The Beatles, The Monks, The Who, The Kinks, and of course Jimi Hendrix. With feedback another means of playing the guitar was born, one that would have been unobtainable without electric guitars.

There are so many effects nowdays packaged into stompboxes that rarely do we see professional guitarist without them. The cat is out of the bag and you would be hard pressed to put it back in. Once guitarists are given the choice of tweaking their sound they often will not do without. For all the benefits to sculpting your sound there is a downside too: reliance on effects can mask bad playing, preventing you from developing as a player. To that end I wouldn’t recommend starting a kid off with an electric guitar and a pedalboard full of stompboxes. They may not progress past making cool noises.

The next step in sound processing was to take the signal which was modified by electrical components and turn it to digital information. Now sound is unharnessed from the hardware and exists purely as a mathematical construct. As such, the wave may be changed through operations in any way that you could mathematically describe. With the cost of microprocessors having dramatically fallen and a significant history of Digital Signal Processing under our belt, nearly any sort of wave shaping you could possibly want is available. There are limits based on digital to analog conversion hardware, processor speed, and what you can mathematically define, but the plethora of digital effects out today, and those that are possible but as of yet unrealised, we will have no shortage of novel timbres to influence our playing.