Pong wasn’t the first video game, but it was one of the first with sound effects. In the movie biz, they say the final product is 51% music, 49% picture. The sound informs the visual, as the soul possess a body. If you take the music away from E.T., it’s as awkward as family dinner. […]
Archive of posts tagged Industrial Music
iPhone Alarm
Modern life is full of obnoxious sounds—ambient noise, schizophonia, and industrial music—but there is one sound so nasty that it cuts through all of them, which is kind of the point. Of course, we’re talking about the iPhone’s default alarm sound, known as “Radar.” Did somebody drop a penny down the drain? Did the world’s […]
Bike Bell
There is no more insufferable group of people than cyclists, even more despised than the vegans. Music theorists are a close third in the insufferability Olympics, which is held in Portland each day. My small town wishes they could compete. One man can only be so insufferable, so I don’t consider myself a cyclist per […]
Black Out!
Side-B of e’rebody starts with the punk-wop industrial song “Black Out!”—a song constructed from American choruses and the rhythms of the railroad, describing a post-collapse world where “rolling blackouts” are “rolling home” and the reactionary power-down militia has no recourse but to “get an acoustic.” A rolling blackout is an intentional blackout, a partial shutdown […]
Microwaveforms
The home microwave oven is yet another dubious musical instrument—like the television and the car horn—that is tuned completely wrong. Dead flat wrong. It drones the same flat tone below, as it beeps octaves above—the “flattened B” of the groaning grid tone, the same tone most machines moan. These ‘psych-out sounds’, or ‘made-ya-listens’, sure make […]
Baby’s Got Bars and Tones
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 […]
Car Arm Alarm Bug Nuts
The popular Car Arm Alarm is a duplet of flat B’s that bend upwards. Within this short mechanical musical phrase, one can hear the ten thousand voices of nature crying out for an audience. Like the quick stridulation of an insect or the glissando of a bird, the Car Arm Alarm is followed by long […]
