When you hear a high G, does it Stress Out your Shit?
The international distress signal melody is a monotonal song in 7/8 time, written in the key of Morse Code, consisting of three quavers, followed by three crotchets, and another three quavers. Normally, the telegrapher is supposed to rest the equivalent note duration in between dits and dahs, but in an especially distressful signal, the beat is kept pulsing at the odd time of seven.
At a radio frequency of 500 kHz, the equivalent tone would be an high G7 (50175.4 Hz), an annoyingly high-pitched tone, and so is transposed down two octaves to a G5 in the widget above.
Here is a 45-second rock cover of “The SOS Song”. It is partly in free time to mimic the distress of a tattooing telegrapher, and features a 7/8 section as rescue efforts get mobilized. The choruses are rendered sailor-style, if not piratically derivative.
Morse code, like written music, is for the most part a dead language. While the commercial use of Morse code is just about obsolete, it is still a very powerful musical language that encodes simple rhythmic patterns into letters (and vice versa), and can be refashioned for much more esoteric forms of communication than relaying the massive bustling missives of business.
Tabla players, African Dummers, and other drumming cultures, speak in Percussionese dialects. However, rock drummers haven’t really much of a rhythmic vocabulary for their beats. We can refer to the style of the beats themselves―up-beat, down-beat, and possibly the African beat that they are based upon―the time signatures and tempos, and that vague quantifier of “feel”. We can speak in specifics―Dave Grohl flams and John Bonham triplets. But what if you were to describe a certain drum fill to someone? You’d be forced to dispense with all symbols, and just sing what it was you meant to say.
No longer friends. Now you can just say “Gimmie the D” in drumorse code.
Epilogue:
The Spring Peepers sing the same tone as the distress signal melody. Could they have provided the inspiration for SOS, in the way that the rhythms of the railways have been said to inspire Jazz beats?
The formula:
Frogs (G) + Railroads (Jazz) = Morse Code
Dah, Dah, Dah, Dit. Here’s some old timey porn.
