The Vertical Color of Sound

Art, conversation, and geekery.

2 September 2009 Comments

My first experience with the guitar was at about ten years old. I was pretty much obsessed with the opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night, and believed that with enough effort I’d figure out how to play that chord.

I never did figure it out.

There were two things in that situation I didn’t really understand at the time. The first was that no one else knew how to reproduce that chord either. Fast forward to 1998, when math professor Jason Brown finally unlocked the secret using Fourier transform analysis on the recording. What he found is that in addition to two guitars and bass, Beatles producer George Martin had also overdubbed piano on the track. I guess the band knew how to keep a secret, or did they even know what Martin had done?

The other thing I didn’t realize is how compelling sound itself can be, completely apart from what we think of as music. That chord was a great example. There is no melody, no rhythm. There is just the sound, by itself, apart from any real composition. It stands on its own.

The whole thing reminds me of Eric Tamm’s book on Brian Eno, The Vertical Color of Sound. He quotes Eno naming the grand piano as his favorite instrument:

“I like it because of the complexity of its sound. If you hold the sustain pedal down, strike a note and just listen… That’s one of my favorite musical experiences. I often sit at the piano for an hour or two, and just go “bung!” and listen to the note dying. Each piano does it in a different way. You find all these exotic harmonies drifting in and drifting out again, and one that will appear and disappear many times. There’ll be fast-moving ones and slow-moving ones. That’s spellbinding, for me.”

It was through Eno’s words that I fully appreciated that enjoying sound for its own sake can be just as much a first class experience as enjoying music. Sound, on its own merits, is just as interesting and beautiful as melody, harmony, or rhythm. And it justified what I had always felt in those moments when the “music” parts of music momentarily disappear. What is left in that unstructured space? Just sound.

Thanks to Eric Tamm and his publisher for making his books available online.

Also thanks to Steve Turnidge for turning me on to Eric Tamm’s work.

mccJustin

In digital audio production, I use some pretty basic tools like Sony ACID and Adobe Audition. I'm no pro by any means. In fact, I might not even qualify as an amateur, but I enjoy the structure and the technology available to create electronic music.

I have a serious lack of ability to 'hear' tone and pitch when it comes to music creation. So, when I create (electronic) songs, I will often have arrangements that our out of key, but to me, they sound brilliant, and for those that don't bother with the "rules", they can see the art in what I'm doing.

The effort of making digital music has been a real education, one that I would have never been able to understand through guitar or piano lessons. For me, listening to a sound and analysing it in wave and spectral form opens a whole new perspective on what you are hearing and how simple yet complex a sound or single note real is. I think all this leads to why our current era of music is so vast, because artists and technologists are combining to really push what can be done with sound.

Imagine what George Martin would have done if he had Protools!

Walt Gordon Jones

I agree. And along that thread of sound, technology, and things you can do with pianos, here's an amazing vocoder demo where the sound is produced entirely by controlling the keys of a piano.

http://createdigitalmusic.com/...