New York New Yorkers have been singing lots of fresh new songs over the past couple of months. They sing on the street, and in the park, and on the bridge. They even engage in what George Orwell once called “group-sing”. They sing syncopated 4/4 call-and-answer crowd-pleasers, sung with the People’s Microphone, at plus 120 […]
Archive of posts tagged Insects
Holophonic Bug Love Songs
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 […]
Latest Picardies and Bug Songs
The new Weezer album “Hurley” has a picardy on it – the band’s first and only picardy. If you recall from our last post, a picardy is when music changes key from Minor to Major on the very same root note. A reverse picardy occurs when a song turns from Major to Minor. In a […]
Musicquito
This mosquito’s got the high E. She plays it on her wings like all the other insects. Roll over the notehead below. Should you hear this Blood Tone, you’d do well to make haste. Mosquitoes kill more people than any other animal. Or, if you practice ahimsa, maybe you can vamp on the mosquito’s drone. […]
Fly Sharp
The house fly drones in F Sharp (F#). She’s a little sharper than that, but with the doppler shift constantly bending her drone as she flies away, the F# is probably around where she lands. Roll over the notehead below. F Sharp is an obscure tone. In Meantone Tuning, the common European tuning from 1500 […]
Mellifluous Melodies
The honey bee drones in C (C♮). Roll over the notehead below. Sometimes, in honor of his namesake, he’ll drone down to a B (B♮). Ya know, like “B/Bee/Be natural”? Does anyone take reality seriously when this kind of thing exists? Mnemonic Device: Sharp Bees Buzz a B Sharp! The tone C might just be […]
Stridulations
If the woods were a jam, the crickets would provide a high-pitched pedal point with their incessant chirping for the birds to solo over. Crickets chrip all around a D tone. If you drag the mouse back and forth over the score above, you can get a sense of what a field of crickets sound […]
