Skip to content

Amazon Backup Noise

12 December 2024, 3:39 pm

There’s a new sound in town, the sound of murdered crows. You may have heard this sound in your kitchenette and come running outside, expecting to find a dead animal or broken-down automaton in your driveway, but it was just your friendly neighborhood Amazon delivery truck, trying not to run over any children below six feet.

Amazon has replaced all their backup beeps with this noise. It’s still in 4/4 like the old backup beeps, but now it’s a sound of indistinct pitch. Supposedly it’s safer to use a broadband noise as a warning signal because people are habituated to tonal beeps in simple waveforms, probably because of all the electronic music we listen to.

Would it also be safer to use an odd time signature as well? Since we are habituated to 4/4, something in 5/4 or 7/8 could save lives. The popular SOS melody played in Morse Code is in 7/8 time, and look at how well that works.

Maybe you heard this sound and thought it peculiar but not enough to summon you from the depths of your mancave with your craft beer and Disney+. Or if you’re an old Gen X boomer like me, you may have noticed it while keeping a side-eyed glance out the window all day.

So now you’ve heard it; there’s no reason to pay attention to it anymore. A crow is not being murdered. A sheep has not eaten a rose. It is the sound of Santa’s sleigh returning to megacorp HQ, like an Iranian drone decked out in FAA-compliant Christmas lights returning to its mothership.

Tagged , ,
1 Comment

Yankees Melodies

4 June 2024, 11:01 pm

I recently attended a sportsball game for the first time in years and it was quite the hypersensory experience. Yankee Stadium hit different. The musical score of the game wasn’t limited to a Hammond organ played live from the organist’s nest (right beside the sniper’s nest). Now the Yankees music director has a whole soundboard full of samples at his disposal.

There were the old standbys like “Charge!” and “De-fense!”, the familiar “S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y” claps and “We Will Rock You” stomps, but most of the soundtrack was filled out with 15-second clips of modern pop music, as if controlled by an iPad kid on shuffle mode. The stadium volume, like modern movie theaters, was tinnitus-inducing.

One particular melody stuck out, an ancient earworm from Long Island.

The P.C. Richards “Whistle” is played for every away team strike-out. It brings a smile to us Gen X boomers in the stands. We can’t help but think of the jingle, subvocalizing the lyrics, “At P.C. Richards.” I’m not sure if this store chain even exists, but the posthumous jingle plays on, a bluesy mix of thirds that resolves on a G.

When the Yankees strike out however, there is only silence and despair. Fathers cry into helmets filled with melted cheese. Mothers clutch their jersey-swaddled infants. Zoomers hold their broccoli heads and ask God, “Why, dawg?”

The “Whistle” was written by VO artist Leer Leary. How nice it must be to have written an immortal melody! The Mets started copying the Yankees and using the whistle for their strike-outs. On a long enough timeline, nobody will remember the lyrics to P.C. Richards, and the whistle will be associated with scalawags whiffing.

So here’s to you, Leer Leary, my king. As jingles go, the whistle is nonpareil. It’s right up there with “Take Me Out to The Ballgame” and Mattingly’s moustache.

Leer Leary
Tagged 
Comments Off on Yankees Melodies

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.

Comments Off on Emergency Broadcast System

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.

Comments Off on Vanilla Video

Tyson Video

13 October 2023, 9:20 pm
Comments Off on Tyson Video

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.

Tagged ,
Comments Off on Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo

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.

Tagged ,
Comments Off on Dun Dun Duuun
« Older Entries