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iFart computer sounds :) (o)- – –

5 November 2010, 1:04 pm

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 sounds out there than the perpetual music of our machines. Along with the Grid Hum and corporate earworms, the synthetic sounds of personal computers earn their place in the Industrial-Musical complex. These are the most popular sounds around us – neither words nor lyrics, nor melodies, nor even our own effluvia surround us so much as these perverse atonalities. The computer literacy involved in turning these presets off, combined with the hopeless habituation of users to their presence, makes the following samples some of the most played sounds on Earth ever. Unlike the B-flat hum, which will drone on into the twilight of humanity, we have the choice right now to silence this digital flatulence.

Behold the Mac fart!

This farting sound is actually attached to the volume controls on an Apple computer, so that every time you turn it up or down, it fires off a fizzle of these pathetic robotic imitations of our beautiful body score – that big ass brass, like a Spike Jones concert, perfectly blending comedy and music.

There is an analogous sound on a Window’s machine, the so-called “System Notification” that resembles a lip-pop—another offensive natural sound that emerges from our bodies. Now why would a Gates, or a Jobs, want to make machines that reproduce our flatus for us? The answer lies in the Doomsday Seed Vault.

For all their irksome qualities, these body-based synths are nothing compared to the truly tonal variety, such as the Window’s “Asterisk”. This is another of a million alarms that come ready to rock each PC. Like the Hum of American machines, it is a B tone.

What kind of instrument is that? Does it sound like any instrument you can even name? It’s pure computer tone.

Please, people: Get in your control panels and turn this shit off. I can shut my eyes from the horrors of this world, but I ain’t got no earlids!

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Marching Jam

22 October 2010, 4:04 pm

Hello. We will be having a Marching Band Jam in New Paltz for the Halloween Parade on Sunday October 31. It starts at 6pm on North Manheim Blvd. and marches down Main Street into town. Please join us for this intense musical experience, where we try to play a single song for an hour long. Bring your own instrument, use one of our percussive toys, or play the membranophone of your own body. We also need lots of singers!

We will be performing a classic ’80s hip hop dance groove. It’s got 4 notes and is super easy to play. The scale is know as A Minor Pentatonic.

If you can’t play the low E in the 1st and 3rd measures, just sub in another G to play a 3-note version. The 4th measure has plenty of rest to either drop out or pick up the melody once again. We will also have plenty of drum-based vocal sections where lyrics to various 80’s and 90’s hip hop hits will be sung out and shouted.

Some songs we will sing are:

“Everybody Dance Now” – C+C Music Factory
“Pump Up the Jam” – Technotronic
“Wiggle It” – by 2 in a Room
“Push It” – Salt ‘n’ Pepa
“Can’t Touch This” – MC Hammer
“This Beat is Tecnhotronic” – Technotronic
“It Takes Two” – Rob Base
“Who Let the Dogs Out?” – Baha Men

If you can think of more songs, please write them down in the comments section of this post. Here’s the facebook event page that we had David Fincher make for us.

Hope to see you there!

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Cock-a-doodle Doo

12 October 2010, 6:42 pm

Since chickens find the same faces attractive as we do, it’s possible we share other aesthetic tastes as well. Take the rooster’s crow for instance:

Such pacing and portamento! Drag over the noteheads below to hear the rooster played on a rhodes.

I hear it in 3/4 time, like the heartbeat. Afterall, cocks are known to waltz. The notes of the rooster’s crow fit neatly into one obscure scale – F Half Whole, also know as F Octatonic for its 8 notes, 1 more degree than the usual Diatonic 7-note Major/Minor scales.




The rooster hits the first four notes. The F is his tonic root which he begins and ends on. The A and Ab flirt with Major to Minor modulation – the picardy. Though the Octatonic scale is almost absent from Pop Music (with a couple of Los exceptions), the Half Whole interval movement is found in the Radiohead song “Just”. Just listen for the ascending lead guitar line in the intro. It actually follows the reverse of the above, rising a Whole Tone and then a Half-tone.

Why do roosters crow? Why do wine glasses sing? Where do Rock ‘n’ Roll babies come from? All of these questions and more will find their answers here at the Los Doggies Musical Literacy Foundation.

And please do be kind to your chicken friends!

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Neotropic Wren

27 September 2010, 2:27 pm

Most birds are solo artists, but plain-tailed wrens form bands. Male and female wrens sing choruses together, duetting in call and answer form. Songs are 2 minutes long, as compared to the standard human pop song of 3 minutes, and will last for as long as 40 verses. Take that Leonard Cohen with your measly 14 Hallelujah’s! Same-sex wrens sing melodies in near perfect synchronicity, similar to the “double-tracked vocals” in a recorded pop song. The males will sing together, followed by a female melody.

Listen to the Neotropic Wren Song


A 2005 article describing the wren’s duets goes by the ridiculous title Antiphonal four-part synchronized chorusing in a Neotropical wren. It sounds like something a robot might dream up, but that’s what they actually called it. You’d think with such a crazy musical title, there’d be some noteheads somewhere in their research, but alas, scientists would rather look at sonograms. All of this pain-staking obsession over an animal’s song, and they didn’t even bother to learn how to play it on guitar. No worries professors, Los Doggies transcribed it below.



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The wren’s song is a lot like other birdsong, with its choppy frantic pacing, modulating phrases, and rhythmic surprises. The first two notes form a Major 6 interval, and sound very similar in pitch and feel to the cardinal’s “purdy”. Below, you can hear how the wren sounds with a musical instrument playing along — a veritable “cover.”


Listen to Wren Song with Keyboard Doubling



On the right, is a sonogram of the song. This is how scientists visualize it. The blue lines denote the males, and red lines denote the females. A double-line is the double-tracked vocals of two wrens in synchronicity. In typical scientific fashion, the authors attempt to reduce these beautifully complex duets to sex and violence.



This must be one of the most complex singing performances yet described in a non-human animal…Why then do the members of a group join to produce a complex chorus? The two hypotheses most commonly put forward for duetting are mate guarding and mutual territorial defence (Hall 2004)…The latter is more plausible, particularly as playback leads chorusing birds to gather round the speaker. The close presence of several birds singing in a coordinated fashion is then very obvious to a human observer and could be especially intimidating to intruding wrens.

I wonder how we would fare under such scientific inquiry, were the motives of human artists reduced to “fucking” and “fighting” or any of the other Biological F’s? A famous pop singer who only plays sold-out stadium gigs, could said to be “only in it for the money”, but this says nothing of the enjoyment of performing music. If these birds suffered alone with their songs, starving and friendless, Vincent van Gogh-like, would their musical motives be more admirable?

Wrens aren’t mere Darwinian machines. They sing for the fuck of it. Just like us. At least I think we do. To be sure we might just have to kidnap little Justin Bieber, puncture his brachial vein for blood samples, color-ring his neck for easy gender recognition, and then show up at his house with boom-box held overhead, blaring out his enemy’s music.

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Latest Picardies and Bug Songs

26 September 2010, 11:52 am

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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 rocking twenty year history of power chords, love-lorn lyrics, and Sensitive Female Chord Progressions, it’s nice to see songsmith Rivers Cuomo finally employ this obscure musical device.

“All My Friends are Insects” by Weezer is in the key of E. It starts off with E Major for the “earthworm” and “butterfly” verses, but then promptly switches to E Minor for the “dragonfly” verse. The subsequent guitar solo keeps rocking the E Minor key in Munsters style, until the song modulates once more back to E Major for the remaining bridge and verse. Thus, it uses a reverse picardy in switching from E Major to E Minor, and then picardies again back to E Major. The structure is: Major-Minor-Major.

Thanks to Weezer for their picardy contribution, and also for correctly using gender-specific pronouns in reference to non-human animals. “It” is sung for the gender-bending earthworm, “She” for the pretty butterfly, and “He” for the colorful powerful dragonfly.

Why are insects friends? For their vital work in service of the ecosystem? Nah, because they fly around, being beautiful, doing what they do.

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Picardy Party

24 September 2010, 1:15 pm

A picardy is a minor-major switcheroo. When music is sad, and suddenly turns triumphant, this is the picardy at work. And it is all thanks to one little note – the Third or Mediant.

In the example above, the Mediant is the note in the middle – the Third. In C Minor the mediant E Flat, gets sharpened up to an E for a C Major. C Minor picardies to a C Major and it feels goods. To discover why, we turn to the dreaded Harmonic Series!


Consonances are found in the lower harmonics, while dissonances are found in the higher harmonics. You can see a C Major chord forming early on in the first five harmonics (C G C E G). Thus, every pitched note you hear has an implicit Majorness to it, as per the harmonic series.

A picardy used as a musical device not only makes us happy by switching to Major, but because it changes key on the same degree, has an extra triumphant boost. The tonic C overcomes his sad minor self, sharpening his third to an E, and becomes consonant, major, and awesome.

Aye picardies! Radiohead do it, The Beatles did it, J.S.Bach did it so cheesey, but no one do it like Lionel:

“Hello” Picardy by Lionel Richie
It begins on A Minor with a “Hello”, down to G, then F, then picardies up to an A Major for the “looking for!”





Picardy also has plenty of cheeky potential. Take the example from “Roundabout” by Yes, a Minor classic that resolves in a picardied E Major chord.

Very cheeky. Or is it pretentious?




Here’s a cheeky picardy of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” written on the Casiotone mt-46.


This is a highly cheeky picardy because of all the blue notes – those devilish D sharps. It’s downright bebop now. The phrase is the same as the original until the end where it picardies at the C#, which is usually a C natural, and in the key of A Minor, now picardied to A major. Cheer up there Beethoven!

Less common is the “Reverse Picardy” where a Major song turns Minor. It seems that the Harmonic series pushes human music ever and ever Major.

Here’s a version of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Minor – a reversed picardy of its former self. The usual “I V vi iii IV I IV V” is now minored where major and majored where minor, making it “i v VI III vi i iv v”.

Surely this is both sad and pretentious!

The Pink Floyd song A Pillow of Winds is structured “Major-Minor-Major”. It’s a Picardy Trip!

It’s your turn now at home. Can you help think of notable picardies, Major Minor switcheroo’s, and the like? Just write ’em down in the comments section.

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While My Guitar Gently Weeps

19 September 2010, 11:59 am



There’s a kind of swelling of guitars, like violins joyously weeping. Some of them, are possibly reversed. Who can tell? They cyclone around the protagonist’s sorrow, wrapping up the episode’s final moment, when the TV composer twists it all around and drops a heavy Twin Peaks chord on the Stringboard, if only to launch the last of a few too many tasty bends into the fading credited night.

Gone are the days when TV scores were fashioned by a couple dudes sitting at their computers with distorted guitars (Or is that still going on?). Now it’s all ready-made indy pop rock buzz-clips in every commercial.

If only the reptillian broadcasters would bait a Los earworm!

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