Everywhere are musical bugs, alighting on your ears like black unstemmed noteheads. They buzz like B-sharp bees, or dangle from ledger lines like silent spiders. They fly like flatted F# flies, and hiss like beetles. They crawl into your openings, like earwigs and brainworms, to sink their hooks into you.
They call to you in 1-note songs like crickets, then disappear every time you are near. It’s almost a 4/4 beat―keeping time like a heartbeat and other natural metronomes, sometimes approaching clockbeat click-track perfection if only for a measure, but usually tempoless and free like laundromat rhythms.
In a field of crickets, their staccato chirps smear together into one thick wavering drone. Imagine the male citizens of your country all singing together like this, in a field.
This is a field cricket who chirps in D, the kind I usually hear out my window. They play with their wings and hear with their legs. They dig amps into the Earth, all to impress the ladies.
Trill, rest, trill, rest, like Verse-Chorus-Verse. Each trill is perceived as a single tone, sometimes a D, sometimes flat or sharp. Sometime D natural straight-up. Concert D.
If we slow down their song 2 octaves, we can see each trill hovers around D and C#. Crickets fire off a quick burst of staccato wingtones and then rest for about the same amount of time, creating a pulsing beat.
If we slow it down yet another 2 octaves, we can see each single tone in the trill actually bends down from D to C#, and sometimes back up again. Plus, there are even smaller rests between these individual tones of the trill.
So not only is he hitting D’s and C#’s in lickety-quick trills, but he also bends each single tone between these two tones. There is a kind of holophonic [sic] principle at play here, whereby each tone contains the whole. While we hear a collection of single tones jumping up and down a half step, each perceived tone is made of many shorter tones that also jump up and down a half step, and finally, each of these shorter tones also bends up and down a half-step―a triple-tiered semitonal holophonic bug song of love.
Like any chirp tune enthusiast, I keep a cricket in a cage…
Can I play.
