5 Methods of the Music Snob

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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.

 

On the Diversity of Musical Production

I was taught music backwards. Like many that toil in the living room after homework at an upright piano I ran my fingers up and down the scale and arpeggios that were photocopied from a book and sent home with me. Tuck in your thumb when you’re not using it. Try with both hands now. While a necessary finger exercise and aid to muscle-memory these scales were also the foundation of all the music I would be plinking through in my journey to becoming a semi-skilled pianist.

I had no real desire to play the piano at that age. I started piano lessons quite young after a mercifully brief stint with the violin; a mercy more likely bestowed on my parents than on me. For me guitar was where it was at. I dreamed of a shiny red axe. I would rock out all amped up just like that hair bands of the day. It wasn’t until three years after the conception of this desire that my mother trotted me down to the basement music school of the local instrument shop. I was presented with a guitar that she bought (a nylon-string classical) and sent in for my first lesson. Like all first music lessons the half-hour was spent showing me where a few of the notes were on the neck, and a discussion of what I wanted to learn. Visions of rock stardom still danced in my 12 year old mind and I answered that I want to play Rock and Roll sir. “Well then,” replied the teacher, “we must first teach you the Blues.” This is when I learned of pentatonic scales.

Scales are one of those things we can’t run away from when learning to play an instrument. They are the basis for the flavour of a song. They tell you what notes are allowed and what notes are not. Remarkably no one ever mentioned to me where they come from, how they are formed, and are there alternatives? We have thousands of years of musical experimentation and growth that has been documented. In learning to play I was deposited on a single outer branch of a complex tree and have been crawling my way back to the trunk ever since in order to explore and understand other types of musical traditions.

Much of the popular music that one hears today is known as “tonal music”. Tonality is built upon the major and minor diatonic scales, and includes triadic harmony. The songs that currently dominate the aural landscape are written from this one system of musical production. If you want to play an instrument to reproduce what songs you hear on the radio, then tonal music is the place to start. This makes it the natural thing to teach little green musicians who are eager to hear a recognisable song emanate from their chosen instrument. Consequently when budding songwriters take up the craft, they tend to go on writing music in this vein. Only those who are pedantic, experimental, or untrained in musical theory may go on to discover the many other branches of musical systems.

Although so much music is written using these scales the major and minor scales are just one facet of the diatonic scale, which itself is a subset of the chromatic scale, which itself is only one of many other scales developed in the world. If you really want to play something immediately upon picking up and instrument then 12-tone music is the way to go, you will be guaranteed not to play a wrong note. To bad it’s not radio-friendly.

In trying to expand the variety of musical experience I wonder what the next big thing could be. Would the discovery of Church Modes by a talented and saleable new artist give rise to a new style of music that uses these un-tempered ratios? Gregorian chanting had a brief heyday some years back and has now incorporated itself into several genres, the folk music resurgence of the mid-twentieth century brought modal music back into the popular arena, progressive-rock borrowed structure from the common practice period to shake up the repetitive verse-chorus layout which so dominates song structure today, all of which shows that there is a place in modern music for older ideas and systems. In addition it shows that new forms can emerge through blending of musical systems. What would happen if we matched the Prometheus scale with the guidelines of counterpoint and the tempos of Speedcore? It boggles the mind.

Furthermore, with computers augmenting, and in some cases replacing, physical instruments the restraint of playing the prescribed frequencies of the system which that instrument is geared towards vanishes. The piano is unfettered from its tuning, allowing us to easily experiment with alternatives to what we are accustomed. Scales with completely hitherto unused interval patterns can emerge because the cost of experimentation (building and tuning an instrument) is eliminated.

I’d like to see the question of what music is, what constitutes a song, taught alongside the mechanics of whichever current musical system happens to be dominate. I don’t think that run-of-the-mill music teachers ever really tackle that question with their students, but rather teach them to play in the constraints of a system which defines the style of music favoured by the student, or the teacher, or the parent that pays for the lessons as the case may be. While one may teach within a framework, it is important to teach how that framework was derived and that there are alternatives that one might like to explore.

When I teach my children music, in addition to tonality, I want to give them a solid grounding in the foundations of music. If we strip a song of all the techniques and flourishes that add complexity, layers, and beauty to the craft of song-writing, we get music in its simplest form. We all start out that way; a child hammering out ‘Twinkle,Twinkle Little Star’ one laborious note at a time on the piano, the screech of ‘Polly-Wolly Doodle’ on the recorder, the hesitant plunk-plunk of ‘Red River Valley’ on the guitar. At the heart of it all is one frequency held for a time, followed by another one held for a time, followed by another and so on until the song is finished. Sometimes there’s a pause between the frequencies, sometimes there is not. I realise this all sounds very reductionist; I fail to mention that what frequencies are allowable is a very important component that separates a song from noise. Of the infinite set of frequencies that you could choose from, only a tiny fraction are heard by humans. A smaller fraction still may be produced by your instrument. Of the range that is producible only a fraction of these frequencies will be distinguishable from each other. Further still only certain ratios of one frequency to another will sound pleasant to us.

This amazing amount of unusable frequencies for a piece of music is what all musical systems intend to proscribe. Not only do these systems lay out rules of permissible notes but they include guidelines as to their use. For instance: Schoenberg’s 12-tone method suggests that each note in the chromatic scale is represented an equal amount of times in a piece. In math terms the distribution curve of notes in the piece is flat.

A scale is just an arbitrary way to divide the continuous gradient of frequencies between the tonic and the octave. The ratios that are chosen for the notes of a scale lend that scale a certain flavour. This flavour can be further restricted or modified by choosing arbitrary starting points in the scale for a tonic centre (modes) or introducing accidentals or augments, or altering the pattern of intervals that make up a scale.

Beyond restricting our choice of notes we may devise many other sorts of rules and guidelines regarding harmony, meter, rhythm, movement, etc. These rules are a way of directing how the selected frequencies are to be combined to make music. For example triadic harmony is the norm in the tonal system, but another system may favour quartal harmony while keeping the same scales. The possibilities quickly become endless considering the combinatorial nature of elements that make up a system.

This post is not meant to bemoan the primacy of teaching or producing tonal music. It is important that a musician learn it, for it is the system of music production that currently rules the roost, but will this always be so? Public tastes change, fashions change, tonal music may be something old fuddy-duddies listen to while the youth favour something we older folk would find quite bewildering. Considering the amount of people taking up an instrument today is by sheer numbers much greater than those in the past who had the ability to play, and given that we have the means to inexpensively record the music produced and broadcast it to nearly anyone, nearly anywhere, why should we not cover the gamut of musical experience? As listeners, we have a greater choice in musical styles to consume than ever before, and as musicians we have greater ability to produce novel forms than ever before. Teachers owe it to their students to at least mention from the onset of instruction that what the student is learning is just one of many ways to produce music and encourage them to explore others.