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Emergency Broadcast System

5 April 2024, 2:20 pm

Today my whole dwelling shook like a bowl full of Mexican jumping beans, which I assumed was a hallucination until I heard the belated tones of the the Emergency Alert System.

Did we just get HAARP’d? Have the Nephilim returned? No, it was just a rare and mild New York earthquake that got us Yankees shook.

The Attention Signal used to be played on late-night television. A mysterious man with a transatlantic accent would explain, “This is a test…this is only a test.” There was even a jingle. The Cold War was raging and we expected the Russkies to invade us at any moment, parachuting down like Tetris pieces as seen in the movie Red Dawn.

The EBS is now called the Emergency Alert System because no one watches TV anymore. That name doesn’t sound quite as good, but nothing does. Thanks, Biden. At least they kept the same tones.

Two sine waves sounding together make up the Attention Signal—853 hz and 960 hz. The interval was chosen for how annoying it is, so Americans would take heed. Click on the score and despair!

Just look at that mess of accidentals, markings, and noteheads. I tried to make it as annoying to look at as it sounds. The Attention Signal is two tones, roughly a half-flat A and a half-flat B, creating a dissonant whole tone interval.

Forgoing the alarm bells and war horns of the previous ages, the Attention Signal heralded the electronic age with its pure sinusoidal waveforms. Now that Cold War 2.0 is back in full swing, I expect we’ll be hearing more of these dreadful tones. Time to break out my schoolboy desk, so I can scurry underneath and hide from the Soviet tetrominos.

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Vanilla Video

24 October 2023, 10:17 am

We’ve finally caught up with the times and turned overwrought bloggies into easily digestible videos. Here’s the latest on the age-old Vanilla Ice vs. Queen controversy. We, of course, side with the former.

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Tyson Video

13 October 2023, 9:20 pm
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Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo

11 October 2023, 10:53 pm

Yodeling was inspired by donkeys. Bored shepherds in the alps needed a way to pass the time and found inspiration in their asses. They sang to the mountains with donkey voices and the mountains sang back, or another yodeler, or a donkey.

Yodeling is one of the manliest forms of singing. You start with your chest voice and then move up to your head voice and back down to your chest voice. It is very sexy.

The classic yodel starts on the 5th, goes up to the major 3rd, and then down to the 1, like a doorbell. The vowel sounds ah, oh, and oo are usually sung with the chest voice, while ay and ee are in falsetto.

The classic donkey bray also involves a jump from chest to head voice. Beginning high on the “hee,” down to the “haw” and back up again. This donkey brays in a perfect octave of Cs as if bred for pedagogy.

Yodeling is well-suited to every kind of music, especially progressive rock. My favorite band Focus features yodeling in their 1971 hit “Hocus Pocus.” Focus is the greatest band ever and “Hocus Pocus” is the national anthem of the Netherlands. Donkeys should be proud of the music they’ve inspired. Horses can’t compete.

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Dun Dun Duuun

10 October 2023, 6:58 pm

There are three notes for when shit gets real. The popular “Dun Dun Duuun” has been around for centuries and pops up in every piece of media. You know what notes I’m talking about when I say “Dun Dun Duuun.” There’s even a Wikipedia entry for “Dun Dun Duuun!”

A dun on the Eb, another dun on the C, and a final duuun on the F#. This music interval is the infamous “diabolus in musica,“ a tritone between the C and F#. This interval is so evil that medieval churches banned it. The final duuun is a type of diminished chord. At least that’s how it sounds to my tinnitus-y ears. I’m not a blind autistic guy, so I can’t perfectly break down a 10-note chord.

Technically, the chord is a F#6(#11) or a Gb6(#11). I know some music nerd is going to get mad at me for being so enharmonically disgusting. But if you think of the above example in G minor with a latent IV V cadence, it makes sense to mix and match sharps and flats.

These notes have been widely used as a shorthand for suspense—in Victorian melodramas, radio, and cartoons—so you know they’re the right notes.

“Dun Dun Duuun” might have inspired (or been inspired) by the dino-brawl from Fantasia with The Rite of Spring providing the score. Three similar notes play over the death of the stegosaurus (not my favorite dinosaur).

Dick Walter recorded the popular sting known as Shock Horror (A), but he says he probably got it from his mom’s old melodramas. It must be nice to have composed a piece of music that people know phonetically. The sting is timeless owing to its orchestral sound, but it’s a little long for today’s audiences.

There is a new suspense sting in town that is gaining popularity—the alert sound from the game Metal Gear Solid. In keeping with refinement culture, the alert sound is even more economical than dun dun duuun. This is a single dun, or rather a ree! with strong feline energy.

This is the suspense sting that zoomers are familiar with because they play videogames rather than listen to Victorian melodramas on a restored 19th-century Victrola gramophone. Or wait maybe they do do that.

The alert sound is a diminished seventh chord, a very goofy chord indeed. It’s a close relative of the major sixth sharp eleventh (dun dun duuun chord) with a one note difference. Instead of a major third, this chord has a minor third. In fact, it’s all minor thirds, which is why it’s so clownish.

When I was a young’un, I used the diminished seventh chord exclusively with no regard for my audience or my own ears. I was trying to be Stravinsky Jr. Now that I’m older I’m more into the maturity of the major sixth sharp eleventh chord, even if I can’t get my enharmonic spellings correct.

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FEMA Emergency Alert Tones

7 October 2023, 10:47 pm

FEMA attacked everyone’s phones this week with a couple dissonant tones. No one in America could escape them. It’s nice to know we’re all connected by something so horrible. Sometimes I forget there’s a society out there, stuck as I am in my solipsistic bubble-boy existence.

I actually turned my phone off on Wednesday afternoon, because I’m a schizo conspiracist. Most people don’t know how to turn their phones off, or they choose not to know, so they were forced to hear the FEMA music, a 5G MK-Ultra torture session to excite their spiked blood.

Since nothing ever happens on time anymore, this was an exciting event, like live television. One by one, the phones of the masses sounded off with the dreadful tones.

The emergency alert is a high-pitched whole-tone interval of half-flat A’s and B’s blaring in 11/8 time. The government uses odd-time signatures to scare you, man.

The same tones are used for Amber Alerts and the Emergency Broadcast System, so they must be some official tones that the government likes to torture people with. Most likely the CIA developed these tones by experimenting on prisoners and orphans.

This comfy message used to come on late-night TV in the old days:

I guess if the government is giving you and your unvaxxed friends a heads up that they’re about to throw you into the FEMA camps, you want it to sound as annoying as possible.

The mild hysteria surrounding this event harkens back to the halcyon days of the cozy Cold War that warms the cockles of my boomer heart. It makes me nostalgic for my childhood spent ducking and covering under my school desk, playing with my nuclear shadow, and watching 80s action movies that I substituted for having a real personality.

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Nice Chords

1 August 2023, 10:01 am

I’ve been obsessed with these two chords lately. The first is a Bb major with a C root, and the second is a C major with a Bb root. C/Bb and Bb/C. The bass moves up from Bb to C, while the top moves down from C to Bb. It has an up yet down feeling.

Halfway between the Lydian and Mixolydian modes, the two chords seem to be of two minds. Lydian in the bass. Mixolydian up top.

Here’s how to play it on guitar.

I would like to see hundreds of songs written with these chords because they’re so damn nice. If you were thinking of write a Mixolydian song with a simple I to VII chord progression, or if you were writing a Lydian song with a I to II, consider combining them both at once to create a mix of Mixolydian and Lydian. Maybe call it: Mix-Of-Lydian.

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