The television test screen, known as “bars and tones”, is used to calibrate color and sound on a TV screen or computer monitor. The accompanying tone—the soundtrack to this minimalist music video—is a high sharp B that stations use to tune TV’s. But at 1000 Hz, the bars-and-tones tone is a quarter-tone sharper than the […]
Archive of posts tagged B Tone
The Schumann Scale
It’s an arpeggio. No, It’s an octochord. No, It’s the lick of Thunder and Lightning. Black unstemmed noteheads played on HAARP THE SCHUMANN SCALE is based on extremely low frequencies (ELF) in the Earth’s electromagnetic field. Lightning strikes create electromagnetic waves in our atmosphere, which excites the Schumnan Resonances. The global averages are listed above, […]
Beep, Beep
Traffic is the biggest brass band on the streets. In between swelling swooshes of many mediums, vehicles of every key sing onomatopoeic songs―car horn honks, backup truck beeps, klaxon awoogas, train choos, and bicycle bell brrngs―all day and all night and all afternoon, fading in and fading out, with timbres thrown back to the Jazz […]
Music of the Spheres
At the atmosphere’s edge, where spiders, moments, gods, and all the other silent things live, the black noise―black as space, but golden as ever―travels on nothing to nowhere for light-years, like measures of rest that seem to last an entire score, it strips the babble off a baby, flattens wineglass song, and rips the screams […]
Mystic’s Chord
Jim Henson’s 1982 puppet epic The Dark Crystal features a race of gentle beings known as Mystics. Central to the lives of the Mystics are a series of musical rituals, the dissonance of which, seriously belies the gentle nature of these fraggle-faced hunchbacks. Behold the Mystic’s Chord! What a chord! It’s like three chords in […]
iFart computer sounds :) (o)- – –
What are the most popular sounds around us? Are they musical or noisy? Artful or aleatoric? Do you hear more birdsong than pop song? Is the human speech around you monotonal, monotonous, or musical? Do you wear headphones all day, or does your own cortex hallucinate music for you? Friends, there are no more insidious […]
The Loudest Note in the World
With the ears of an angel, the loudest sounds you’d hear in outerspace coming from Earth would be noise. Ocean noise is the loudest, followed by lightning, volcanoes, and industrial noise. These pitchless rhythms rule the soundtrack of our planet. The loudest musical tones you’d hear would also come from machines, that of the electric […]
