Same with music, though, right? I used to love music, back when it had melody and chords and lyrics. But now it has no melody and no chords, just thwack-thwacking, and they even seem to be cutting back on the thwack-thwacking, so now it’s sometimes just thwa, and, as far as lyrics, do you consider these lyrics?
Hump my hump,
My stumpy lumpy hump!
Hump my dump, you lumpy slumpy dump!
I’ll dump your hump, and then just hump your dump,
You lumpy frumply clump.
I’m sorry. To me? Those are not lyrics. In my day, lyrics were used to express real emotion, like the emotion of being totally stoned and trying to talk this totally stoned chick into sleeping with you in the name of love, which lasted forever, if only you held on to your dreams.
It’s nice to hear some real guitar playing in pop music. I always knew that Gavin was a true guitarist, even back in the angry 90s when he was the singer for Bush. Sure, his singing and songwriting are pretty much awful, but I could certainly use some more really good guitar playing instead of that awful chump-chump-chumping I hear every time I turn on the radio.
On a side note lala is pretty neat, but 30 second clips are stupid. (There’s some better guitar playing at the end, so click through if you are interested.) I hope Apple can shine them up and make them a totally new way to experience music on the web.
I discovered that if you play the same pitch as the wave and get it perfectly in tune, the waves cancel each other out and all you hear is yourself, not the recording, no matter how loud it is.
I also realized that A#5 is not the right pitch. Check back soon for Version 2.0!
Feel free to let me know how you are finding the Sine Waves, good or bad.
Also, provocative titles make for interested readers, even if said title is ancillary to the crux of the post. (Pro tip.)
As some of you may know, I played the second of my DMA recitals last Friday. For all intents and purposes, the performance went well. It was effective and I believed I conveyed my ideas convincingly and artistically. There are many moments I would like a do-over, but that is not an uncommon feeling to have.
After listening to it, I was struck in both a good way and a bad way, by my intonation. Oftentimes it was very good, but that made the times that it was bad, REALLY bad. I know that I can be a bit of a tuning freak when I am being critical of other people’s performances. I am here to let those people, and everyone else, know that I hold myself to the same standard:
Everything must be in tune. Everything that is not already in tune, must be tuned as quickly as possible. No exceptions.
For the past week I have been thinking about how I can become better at tuning. Obviously tuning is a listening exercise as well as a memorization and adaptation exercise; all three of which require a fair amount of practice.
I do not own a Dr. Beat. I have a metronome that I like. The only other function that a Dr. Beat has is its droning ability. For those who are unfamiliar, the Dr. Beat can play any pitch indefinitely, which is very useful for tuning exercises. Unfortunately, and this is the reason I don’t own one, those tones have an annoying timbre that distracts from the exercise at hand. It is buzzing, nasal, and exhaustive on the ears. Not to mention, at $160, the Dr. Beat is rather expensive for a metronome.
With the Dr. Beat out of the question, I set about finding a better drone. I knew I could always generate tones on the mixing console at Recording Services and record that into Pro Tools, but I wanted a faster and better way. I found an app for Mac OS X called Tone Generator that fills the need. It is not an elegant program, but what it does is play sine waves at any frequency with up to two decimal places of accuracy for any duration of time. It also allows you to export those sine waves as .wav files. It’s perfect for benchmarking your audiophile gear and it’s also perfect for what I did next.
A little Google-Fu awarded me with the formula for determining a Frequency (Hertz) to Pitch conversion:
FREQUENCY = 2^(n/12)*440
n = the number of semitones away from A4. Pitches below A4 are represented by negative numbers.
I put the formula into a spreadsheet and got going with representing all of the pitches on the grand piano. Then I used the Tone Generator to generate a 4 minute .wav file of every pitch between A2 and A6. Finally, I took all 49 of those files and popped them into iTunes to tag and compress them.
The application is obvious. Simply download the zipped file, uncompress it, import the tracks into your music player of choice and get droning. Personally, I rounded all of the little guys up into a playlist for easy access and loaded them onto my iPod for tuning practice on-the-go.
Fine. Good, in fact. The difference is the sine waves are free, accurate, long, and properly tagged in MP3 format. The Tuning CD is $20, each track is only a minute or two long, and they have more than one pitch sounding at a time! It’s amazing to me that people really like using that CD, but it’s their money. If you enjoy the sine waves and would like to donate to the Timothy Rosenberg Academic Enhancement and Debt Reduction Program you can donate via paypal here:
Your kindness and generosity is graciously accepted. There are special places in paradise for all of you.
I think you will find that practicing tuning using pure sine waves will be rewarding and not as exhaustive on your ears as other methods. I know that I am looking forward to working more with them.
Oh, the title? It’s true. Carrier Pigeons can hear sounds down to 0.1 hertz. That’s one cycle every ten seconds! They use that ability in their migratory exercise by guiding their flight based on the sounds of the ocean. It is also widely known that birds are creepy, pigeons especially. With aural abilities like that I am pretty confident they can hear the future and that is just another reason to worry about them.
It says a lot about a young artist when he blatantly chooses to eschew the profusion of gimmicky pieces designed to stimulate the cognoscenti in favor of assembling a program with an aesthetic that would be decidedly unpopular among the majority of up-and-coming saxophonists in degree programs throughout the country.
But did you hear the other thing? They’re SO EXCITED to play this song, and to KICK IT OUT, that they just skip a fucking beat. The last measure before the key change only has three beats. And in doing that, they’re shouting LET’S GO, PEOPLE, GET ON WITH IT, LET’S LIVE HARD. (via Song Parts Dot Biz.)
How did I never notice this before? I knew there was something different and exciting about that moment, but I couldn’t put my finder on it. Rock bands change meter so infrequently, I never considered it.
The piece was written by John Cage and is the longest piece of music ever. Cage initially intended the work to last about one hour, however he later revised the score to remove the durations and indicated that the piece be played as slow as possible. Given the pipe organ’s ability to play until the bellows stop pumping, the piece lends itself to an enormously long performance.
Right now the organ is playing a tri-tone (D4 and A-flat4) and will continue to do so until July 5, 2010. On that day, the A-flat will end and a single D will sound for seven months. Then a G5 will be added. The piece will end on September 5, 2640. To put that date into perspective, The United States of America will have tripled in age. 2009 will be a small blip in the play of time and an organ in Germany will still be playing the same piece.
The beauty of the internet has made it possible to hear the organ from your living room. You can rest assured I will be tuning in to hear the sonority change on July 5th.
The organ itself is something of a marvel too. It resides in a church that was once used as a pig sty during the communist years in East Germany. Right now it has only six pipes, which is plenty for the foreseeable future. The committee that is overseeing the performance accepts donations and will expand the organ as needed.
I am not entirely sure why I am blogging this, but I thought it was illuminating into the life of the great Harvey Lavan “Van” Cliburn Jr.
Many people have heard of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition however, many people have never heard a recording of what is probably the greatest American musician ever. Today that changes, comrades. Here’s Harvey Van absolutely killing it on Franz Liszt’s Etude No. 39 “Un Sospiro”. All those notes that Van Cliburn makes sound really easy? Yeah, that’s not easy.
Charles Ives, age 69, suffering from diabetes, impaired by multiple heart attacks and probable strokes, singing his ass off. This is a recording every American musician should know. This is what makes us American. Ives’s enthusiasm and perseverance through the nasty modulations he wrote are to be admired through the lens of the American spirit. Is it a great performance to listen to? No. Is it a great performance? To me, yes it is.
Not only was Ives writing the most heady stuff when Milton Babbit wasn’t even a twinkle in someone’s eye, but the dude basically invented estate-planning. How those things fit together, I’ll never be certain. Ives is a true American hero that is (and was) too often ignored. He was born 135 years ago today.
For good measure, go ahead and listen to The Unanswered Question. It won’t hurt ya.
The Unanswered Question (1906) – The New York Philharmonic
That’s not E. It’s close, but everything is relative.
All will be revealed.
I was doing some research today for one of my students who is working on intonation and I collected this information on Just Intonation. I have compiled it into a table for easy reading.
Chromatic Scale Degree
Equal Temperament
Just Intonation
Deviation from Equal Temperament
1
0 cents
0 cents
0 cents
2
100 cents
88 cents
-12 cents
3
200 cents
204 cents
4 cents
4
300 cents
316 cents
16 cents
5
400 cents
386 cents
-14 cents
6
500 cents
498 cents
-2 cents
7
600 cents
600 cents
0 cents
8
700 cents
702 cents
2 cents
9
800 cents
814 cents
14 cents
10
900 cents
884 cents
-16 cents
11
1000 cents
971 cents
-29 cents
12
1100 cents
1088 cents
-12 cents
OK. So what?
This information, more than any other, is crucial for playing in tune. For years I have been taught about my instrument’s tendencies (A is sharp, B is flat, etc.) and even taught how to adjust. It wasn’t until I started playing with a quartet and really working on intonation that I began to understand how intonation actually works.
From the chart we can see that scale degree 5 (the tonic major third) is WAY too sharp in the Equal Temperament system. Don’t even get me started about the dominant 7th of the tonic major triad. (Seems like the Equal Tempered guys never thought of modulating to the sub-dominant, but I digress). Somewhere along the way we tricked ourselves into being cool with out of tune-ness. It’s way easier to just accept being out of tune that to actually tune things. (If you agree with the last statement, stop right there cowboy. Your work is done.)
I can site probably 20 recordings of saxophonists who were taught the same way I was, and it shows. Every pitch that I was told was heinously sharp is heinously flattened without a thought regarding where the pitch was supposed to be. I even came across a discussion forum where some one was advocating that flat notes = dark sounds and sharp notes = bright sounds. It astounds me that this still goes on. Our country has enough problems already so let’s just end that debate right here. Flat = flat ; sharp = sharp. Full stop. If you want a dark sound you need to find a different way than playing out of tune. Sorry, Charley.
So there’s the chart. Learn it. Want one to print out? Take mine. Want just a few bullet points to remember? OK, fine:
Major thirds and minor sixths are 14 cents sharp on your tuner. To play them in tune you must lower the third 14 cents. 14 cents is a lot, so it’s time to limber up the golden pipes and get flexible.
Perfect fifths and fourths are only 2 cents out of tune on your tuner. That is undetectable to most people, so don’t sweat it. You’re cool.
The major sixth/minor third is super flat. If you are a reed player and you have the third in a minor chord you will probably need to resort to an uncomfortable amount of biting. Violins have it so easy.
The octave and the tritone are the only perfect intervals in both equal temperament and just intonation. Only one of these will be really useful though. I’ll let you guess which one.
The leading tone of a dominant chord is a lot sharper than your tuner says. Half steps are only 88 cents apart. If you try to tune the minor third between the seventh and the fifth of the chord you might just get there. The tritone between the seventh and the third is a lie.
Final point: knowing your instrument’s pitch tendencies is very important, don’t get me wrong. But the guessing game we call tuning gets a whole lot easier when you understand your tuner’s pitch tendencies first.
. I have a metronome that I like. The only other function that a 