The Clock Song plays everywhere all the time. It is the most popular rhythm in the world. Each tick and tock is a quarter beat, or crochet, worth a second.
The human heart also beats at around 60 beats/per/minute, just like clockwork. Moderate Rock Tempo of 120 bpm (the oft-used tempo in Pop Music) is the cut-time of clocks and hearts. None of these things are coincidences. Reality is a setup. Don’t believe it!
We live in a Civilized Song of clock beats and electric drones, on top of which, human and non-human animals breathe out melodies in and out of time.
People actually get married to this chord. At least in the Anglosphere they do. It’s from Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March”. After a monotonal ceremony of gifts, vows, and proclamation, this dissonant chord kicks in on pipe organ. It’s an A minor 6th, which has the satanic interval between the F# and C known as a tritone. Let’s give this matrimonial tritone a nice portmanteau name. Something like…Matritoney (mā’trə-tō’nē)?
How do corporations rule the world when corporations rule the world? Why, with simple melodies played on idiophones like the hand chimes pictured left.
Germans call them “ohrwurm”, meaning earworm. A catchy song crawls inside our ever-open ears like a musical parasite and lays egg-songs in our brains.
There is no more insidious melody on Earth than the dreaded NBC chimes.
The NBC chimes are derived from the popular bell-song Westminster Quarters. It consists of three notes – the Fifth (G), the Third (E), and the One or Root (C). The door bell has these last two notes, which form the interval of a Major Third.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the ABC melody has 4 notes. Whereas the NBC chimes have a distinctly Major flavor, the ABC melody is Minor all the way.
This modern take sounds like sonar pings. Disney is apparently broadcasting from a submarine.
I don’t know which melody is more nefarious – the child-like chimes of the Major NBC motif, or the slick Minor turnaround of the ABC pings? I’m not even going to get into the FOX fanfare, because let’s face it, TV sucks, and their cute major-minor melodies can go to hell.
HEY, aren’t there any birds to transcribe? Or any other new animals to make Yankovician parodies of?
Friends, these corporate melodies are but a passing footnote in the Los Doggies’s Electric Encyclopedia.
The most famous chord in all of rock ‘n’ roll is the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” by The Beatles.
If the Galaxy runs anything like in Close Encounters, then the above chord will function diplomatically. I’m sure it already has, here on Earth.
If Lewis Carrol were to develop a portmanteau word for this chord, it would be a superduperimposition of “brr’ling”, “brr’lang”, and “cha-aa-a-aa-a-nng”.
This type of chord is known as a Thunderchord for obvious reasons: it splits the heavens in halves.
It takes all of the Beatles and their producer to play this one chord. Paul is hitting a high D on his Hofner bass, George is playing an F9 chord on his 12-string Rickenbacker, as is John on his acoustic Gibson. Meanwhile, George Martin is striking a G power-chord thang on his Grand Piano, and Ringo taps a single snare. There is much dispute over the true nature of this chord, and there seem to be at least 20 different possibilities. For more interpretations, read this article.
However, George stated in an online chat, that he definitely played an F9 (the top of the chord). He also picks this chord during the outro.
This is one of them 60′s style lickety-split fade-outs. You can hear this on a lot of Beatles’ tunes (See “Good Day Sunshine”).
You can clearly hear the D bass note dominating the “A Hard Day’s Chord”, making the most sensible interpretation some form of the D Dominant chord. I prefer to call it a “D Minor 7th Suspended 4th”, though really it just sounds like the entire G Mixolydian scale (GABCDEF) played at once, excluding the B. “A Hard Day’s Night” is in the key of G Mixolydian.
The 7 frequencies of the G Mixolydian scale when converted into light, correspond to the 7 colors. A good mnemonic to remember this photosonic relationship is “GAB C. DEF, meet ROY G. BIV”.
Unfortunately, the Goldie Hawn version misses a golden opportunity to jazz the shit out of this thunderchord. Instead, it begins with a crummy ol’ bass triplet.
The Great Horned Owl has a semitonal hoot. The male and female display musical dimorphism in their hooty duets. Male hooters usually end up somewhere around the human note E, and female hooters sing something like an A. Though there is much tonal variation in owl pairs, female owls are about a fourth above males. Imagine sitting around a campfire in an owl-laden wood with nothing but an acoustic guitar. One could play an E Major chord with the male owl’s melody, and play an A Major Chord with the female’s.
Like so:
Actually, it’s almost as though the owls are playing a bass line underneath the guitar chords. The rhythm of their song is similar to “SOS” in Morse Code which goes “dit-dit-dit, dah, dit-dit-dit”.
Great Horned Owls make a host of other sounds besides hoots. They say “Wah! Wah! Ah! Ahh! Ark!” and the owlets whistle. Here is a page of their repertoire.
The Barred Owl’s song has 8 hoots and ends in a descending oo-aw. Ornithologists like to sing the mnemonic: “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all?” The song is swung and in the key of B Minor Lydian. Drag over the note heads below.
Owls are like upright basses. They hoot in jazzy walking bass lines just like monkeys do. Below is a rock cover of the “Barred Owl Song” by Boird Band, all played on a bass guitar
Today let’s look at a couple of crazy guitar licks from the song “Green-Eyed Lady” by Sugarloaf. Now, this song ain’t great. The melody and lyrics are throwaways. The bass line is copied right from a book of Guitar Exercises. Still, there are some valid reasons for liking this song – guitar reasons.
The two crazy licks in question appear at about two and a half minutes into the song, right before the organ solo. Example 1 (below) is a harmonized ascent of two voices, jumping up and double-backing in semitone intervals. The scale they reference is B Harmonic Minor and cycles through 3 sets of semitones (A# and B, C# and D, F# and G).
The second crazy guitar lick (below) is a descent that defies reason. It runs through a series of tritones, that get lazy in triplets, and fall chromatically towards the end.
If that ain’t Suck-Rock enough for you, check out the guitar solo from this song. This guy rips the shit out of these 16 bars. At around the 7th or 8th bar (15 seconds in), it sounds like he’s about to lose it. This is called Rocking at the Edge of Suck.
Green-Eyed Lady Guitar Solo
All of this guitar work was played by Bob Webber, co-founder of Sugarloaf. On the strength of this track alone, I can safely say he is my second favorite guitarist.
Who’s my favorite guitarist you ask?
Why, that would have to be Waddy Wachtel for his one-note playing on “Edge of Seventeen”.
The Human Heart is our natural metronome. It kicks like a bass drum anywhere from 60-80 beats per minute. In Italian, this tempo is called larghetto. It is no coincidence that the moderate rock tempo (120 bpm) – the cut-time of our heartbeat – is the standard tempo for Pop Music. The pitch of our hearts is quite low, and occupies the lower registers on a 4-string bass guitar. Thus, the ‘feel’ of a piece of music, is strongly dictated by the bass and drums – the riddim, as the rastas call it. The riddim is the heart of music.
Drag over the noteheads or push play to loop.
The heartbeat is a kind of shuffle beat composed of the two basic heart sounds – S1 and S2, or “lub” and “dubb” – separated by cardiac rests. In poetry, this beat is called an “iamb” as in the Shakespeare line:
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!
Trying tapping the above line out with your hands while saying it in time with your heartbeat. Iambs were used in ancient Greece for a satirical form of verse. The mocking quality of the heartbeat is seen today in kid songs parodying Ring Around the Rosie.
In locomotion, the heartbeat expresses itself as skipping. Children love to skip, and like myself, often can’t help tapping beats out on their environment.
Our love of 60 b/p/m iambic shuffle music and poetry is shaped during our time in the womb, while listening to the constant pulse of our mothers’ biomusic. The loudest sounds a fetus hears are her heartbeat – the four sounds of the heart (in waltzes and gallops) – the bruits of the blood, nerve noise, and all the sounds of the social environment filtered in through the subwoofer of her womb. This intrauterine soundtrack is like listening to riddim underwater – big bassy waves and strong pulsing rhythms.
So what to play for your newborn’s First Sound? We know babies like Major, bass and drum music, at Moderate rock tempos. Should the First Sound include the froufrou of a scrub’s shoes? The syncopated applause of family? Or a 4/4 Lamaze beat – a natural extension of mom’s 60 bpm heartbeat – jammed out upon delivery by the Hospital House Band? Or should, as William Burroughs suggests, the newborn be treated to silence as her First Sound?
Of course, it you want to sever the child’s sonic umbilicus right away, have the doctors play your newborn some Mahavishnu Orchestra.
Comments are always welcome. It’s easy and anonymous.
Love, Homey
As the Winter white noise fades, the peepers emerge from their silent hibernation to once again sing the sexy song of Spring. Choruses of these pinkletinks take the stage of wetland venues all along the Eastern seaboard to jam on a single note; a slightly rising G tone. This is the highest G found on a piano. If you ever find yourself singing songs around the campfire without a tuning fork, use the peepers’ G to tune your singalongs. The peepers’ song was probably the inspiration for Morse Code, also a high G. (Watch yo volumes! Frogs are forte!)
That’s their monotonal and staccato song. Drag rapidly over the score above to rev up an entire chorus of peepers.
The sine-like timbre and hi-pitch of their choruses make them sound a lot like an insect jam. The males are the only ones who peep, making them yet another species that display musical dimorphism.
Peepers also sing a trill like song when another male gets too close. It lands on the same G note as above. This is their aggressive territorial song. The subtleties of batrachian genre might fall on deaf human ears, but the trill song below is clearly more rocking than the mellow mating ballad above.
Here’s a China-style jam using a chinese keyboard. The scale is C Major Pentatonic, the most popular key in China.
Below you can hear both the 7-note and the 5-note major scales. The major scale is known as the happy scale, because it has less natural dissonances than the sad minor scale. The Major Pentatonic scale sounds even more like a happy dream for it lacks any semitones. A semitone is the smallest interval, that produces the sharpest dissonances. In a C Major scale, the F and B provide semitone intervals with the E and the C respectively.
Chinese harmony favors the fourth. Chords built on 4ths are a chinese trademark. Call them sinosonics if you will. They play sinosoids.
You can hear the Major Pentatonic scale in action in the intro lick to My Girl by the Temptations. Can anyone think of a Beatles song that uses this Major Pentatonic a lot? George liked Mixolydian. Lennon loved his Minor. Paul was Major boy all the way. If there was one, it’d be a Paul song.
So tootle your horn melodiously at first!
This China post is dedicated to all my dear dear homeys at Snake B-tt. :-}
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