One of Los’s ongoing projects is translating Finnegans Wake by James Joyce into rock music. The Wake naturally lends itself to a musical translation with its jabberwocky prose of multilingual puns and portmanteau words. It’s a twilight book, so it’s gonna need a twilight soundtrack. Here is the ‘thunderword’ from page 1. “Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarr-hounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!” Thunderword. Pg.1 [...]
Archive of entries posted on November 2009
The Loudest Note in the World
With the ears of an angel, the loudest sounds you’d hear from outerspace coming from Earth would be noise. Ocean noise is the loudest, followed by lightning, volcanoes, and industrial noise. These pitchless rhyhms rule the soundtrack of our planet. The loudest musical tones you’d hear would also come from machines, that of the electric [...]
Musical Dimorphism
Men and women are an octave apart. So too are boys and men. Using the falsetto, or head voice, any man can sing like a woman, or more accurately, sing like a little boy. Try out your falsetto at home now. Sing like the boy who dreamed he was a man. Use your mind to [...]
Toney Toney Tone
Every single musical tone is a chord that contains a scale. The secret scale inside every tone is called the Harmonic Series. The Harmonic Series begins with the Fundamental, in this case the C. This is the tone that you hear as pitch. If you strike this tone on a piano, the rest of the [...]
Wooh Hooh H’oh Oh Oh
“Wooh Hooh” is a non-lexical vocable, or an “utterance without meaning”, though the meaning is quite clear in the example below. Non-lexical vocables express the pure joy of playing and singing music. Fa la la la la. Ob-la-di Ob-la-da. Backwards, these notes form a D Major Pentatonic Scale. The vocable from Weezer’s Dreamin’ is [...]
Crying Codas
The coda is the very last hoorah of a song. For example, the classic Beatles Coda from Sgt. Pepper. Click on the sinusoid to play/stop. The coda lets you know the end of the song is nigh. Let’s take a look at a couple of Crying Codas. The first one is from MJ’s debut album [...]
Dreamjam
I dreamed that Ludwig and I are playing a grand piano at the shoreline of a turbulent ocean. He is dressed in a tuxedo and is whaling 3 chords over and over on the bass keys, except it doesn’t sound like a piano. It sounds like a chorus of Sirens and Merwomen singing into conch [...]
♪ Little Notes ♪
The ictus is the Moment of Music, the vertical dimension, the instant of the beat, the flick of a conductor’s hand. The flam is an ictus split into two. Drag over the noteheads to hear a flam of snare drum rimshots. In Percussionese, the flam is pronounced “Plah!”. Now try it at home: Exectue a [...]
Percussionese
Little Richard speaks percussionese – the proto-language of drums. Check out his impression of a drum fill in Tutti Frutti for your MP3 player. Drag over the black stemmed noteheads… Drag over that final “boom” a few more times. Listen to how Little releases that note. He is very great. The people of Percussionesia speak [...]
