The Earth vibrates at a discrete set of frequencies, as discovered by Nawa et al in 1998. These frequencies are much lower than we can hear, between .002 Hz and .007 Hz (we can hear in the range of 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz). There are also microseisms, much higher frequencies (a whole .2 Hz, still 100 times lower than we can hear). Seismologists have known that the higher frequencies are caused by ocean waves interacting with each other, trasmitting pressure fields through the depths of the oceans to the floors below. But now they think they know why the Earth hums at the lower frequencies as well. Winter storms in the oceans (north in boreal winter and south in the austral winter) provide the continuous energy oscillations that make the Earth ring like a bell. Still no word on when the Earth will be coming out with its first CD.
Barbara Goss Levi, "What's Making Earth Hum?" Physics Today (March 2005), 22-23.
K. Nawa et al, "Incessant excitation of the Earth's free oscillations," Earth Planet Space 50 (1998), 3-8.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Tangled Bank
I've begun to submit posts to Tangled Bank, a biweekly aggregator of blog posts on scientific subjects. The latest issue is now up, including a link to my post on synaesthesia. There is also a great post about music, spiders, and the great nation of Australia, among many other brilliant explications of matters scientific. And welcome to any visitors from Tangled Bank. You may also enjoy my post on Animal Music.
Monday, March 07, 2005
Thoughts about Music of the 21st Century
Augusta Read Thomas was the guest composer for DePauw University's Music of the 21st Century festival. On Thursday, I conducted a question-and-answer session with Augusta. She revealed that despite her vividly descriptive titles, she regards her music as absolute. She has withdrawn over fifty of her works from the beginning of her career, as she regards them to be too immature. Augusta doesn't own the copyright on any of her recent works, so she cannot withdraw any more.
Friday night Augusta was very nurturing with the five students in the composition masterclass. She is distinctly Modernist in her perspective, discouraging unvaried repetitions in the students' compositions. However, she did not try to limit the students voices, even the student who wrote a distinctly Beethovenesque piano piece.
Saturday afternoon was the student symposium. Three of my students presented analyses of Chopin mazurkas and the Brahms Romance in F, op. 118 no. 5. Then three students from the 20th Century Music Literature class presented analyses of Augusta's Magneticfireflies and Fruit of My Spirit. Professor Thomas was present as the respondent. As a composer, Augusta is concerned about the placement of each work within the composer's oeuvre. When and why the mazurkas and the Romance were written, that her pieces were written specifically for high school band and amateur church choir respectively, and what other experience she had in composing vocal music were all things she wanted included in the presentations.
The closing concert was held Sunday afternoon. After another performance of her fanfare (Ring Flourish Blaze) three of the main ensembles performed works by Augusta and others. The orchestra was quite challenged by Galaxy Dances, A Ballet for Orchestra, composed for the National Symphony Orchestra, but they acquited themselves nicely. The work depicts timeless space (low strings and contrabassoon) bookending five different galaxies dancing through the cosmos. The chamber choir sang Fruit of My Spirit, a fairly short setting of John 15:5 and Galatians 5:22-23. It had some very evocative yet subtle text painting, including some clever passing of syllables from one voice to another. The band performed Magneticfireflies, which it also recorded last spring. Both Galaxy Dances and Magneticfireflies end with loud crashing chords that give way to decaying percussion, though in the first case both pitched percussion and piano is included, whereas Magneticfireflies was only cymbals. It was fascinating to listen to the changes in timbre as the pitched and unpitched sounds decayed. The combination of piano and non-pitched percussion provides a whole slew of inharmonic partials to clash and shift around in, even when using a consonant fundamental chord as Augusta did. Not only did some partials die away, but other partials became louder when their "big bully" masking partials lost energy. It was almost a melody rather than a timbre change, perhaps the closest thing to a true Klangfarbenmelodie that I've ever heard.
Friday night Augusta was very nurturing with the five students in the composition masterclass. She is distinctly Modernist in her perspective, discouraging unvaried repetitions in the students' compositions. However, she did not try to limit the students voices, even the student who wrote a distinctly Beethovenesque piano piece.
Saturday afternoon was the student symposium. Three of my students presented analyses of Chopin mazurkas and the Brahms Romance in F, op. 118 no. 5. Then three students from the 20th Century Music Literature class presented analyses of Augusta's Magneticfireflies and Fruit of My Spirit. Professor Thomas was present as the respondent. As a composer, Augusta is concerned about the placement of each work within the composer's oeuvre. When and why the mazurkas and the Romance were written, that her pieces were written specifically for high school band and amateur church choir respectively, and what other experience she had in composing vocal music were all things she wanted included in the presentations.
The closing concert was held Sunday afternoon. After another performance of her fanfare (Ring Flourish Blaze) three of the main ensembles performed works by Augusta and others. The orchestra was quite challenged by Galaxy Dances, A Ballet for Orchestra, composed for the National Symphony Orchestra, but they acquited themselves nicely. The work depicts timeless space (low strings and contrabassoon) bookending five different galaxies dancing through the cosmos. The chamber choir sang Fruit of My Spirit, a fairly short setting of John 15:5 and Galatians 5:22-23. It had some very evocative yet subtle text painting, including some clever passing of syllables from one voice to another. The band performed Magneticfireflies, which it also recorded last spring. Both Galaxy Dances and Magneticfireflies end with loud crashing chords that give way to decaying percussion, though in the first case both pitched percussion and piano is included, whereas Magneticfireflies was only cymbals. It was fascinating to listen to the changes in timbre as the pitched and unpitched sounds decayed. The combination of piano and non-pitched percussion provides a whole slew of inharmonic partials to clash and shift around in, even when using a consonant fundamental chord as Augusta did. Not only did some partials die away, but other partials became louder when their "big bully" masking partials lost energy. It was almost a melody rather than a timbre change, perhaps the closest thing to a true Klangfarbenmelodie that I've ever heard.
Man vs. Machine
Scott Strader has a very interesting post about composing for MIDI, key associations, and the effect of technical shortcuts on the direction of pop music. That is all for now. I will write up some thoughts about Augusta Read Thomas' visit tonight or tomorrow.
Friday, March 04, 2005
The Lamest Journal Club post ever
The latest issue of Music Theory Online is now available. It is a special issue devoted to the topic of Performance and Analysis. The three articles are a reprise of a special session from the 2004 conference of the Society for Music Theory. Nicholas Cook writes about the interaction of performer and score, using Bryn Harrison's être-temps to make his point that the distinction between jazz improvisation and performance from notated scores is a false one. William Rothstein explores the use of rubato in Chopin's Prelude in Ab major, Op. 28, no. 17. He mixes his previous theories of phrasing and form with the thoughts of David Epstein to defend rubato choices he made as a seventeen year-old. And Daphne Leong, with the help of flutist Elizabeth McNutt, argues that Milton Babbitt's "music finds an astonishing richness of expression within and because of its constraints, and that performers can similarly find interpretive freedom within the confines of the notated score."
Musical Taste
The Swiss police had better keep an eye out for Fred Himebaugh. Nature has an article about a Swiss synaesthete. (I found it via a CNN article a student sent to me.) What's unusual about this Alpine musician is that she 1) associates intervals as well as individual pitches with other senses, and 2) one of the other senses involved is taste. 
When E.S. hears tone intervals, the difference in pitch between two tones, she not only can see the musical notes as different colors but can taste the sounds.
"This is a special case of a musician who, when she hears tone intervals, she has a perception of a taste of a tone," said psychologist Michaela Esslen, of the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
"She doesn't imagine the taste, she really tastes it."
The case of E.S. reported in Nature is exceptional because seeing letters or digits in a certain color is more common in synaesthesia. It may also involve seeing a musical tone as a color.
But E.S. sees the colors and depending on the tone intervals a symphony could be bittersweet, salty, sour or creamy.
Psychologists Gian Beeli, Michaela Esslen and Lutz Jäncke tested "E.S.'s" synesthetic abilities by asking her to identify intervals while they stimulated her taste buds with four solutions (sweet, sour, salty, bitter). E.S. identified all the intervals correctly, but was faster in identification when the taste/interval configuration corresponded to her synaesthetic associations.
Figure 1 Mean reaction times in a gustatory Stroop task linking perception of tone intervals with different tastes for congruent-taste (grey), incongruent-taste (red) and no-taste (blue) conditions for synaesthete E.S. and for five non-synaesthetic musicians (controls). In the 'Taste' condition, musical intervals were presented while solutions of different taste (citric acid, 20 g litre-1; quinine, 60 mg litre-1; salt, 10 g litre-1; sucrose, 120 g litre-1) were delivered to the subject's tongue. The 'Conceptual' condition followed the same procedure, except that words describing the tastes, instead of the tastes themselves, were visually presented 2 s before the tone interval. Non-parametric randomization tests were used for statistical comparison. For E.S., all statistical comparisons in the taste condition were associated with P values of less than 0.01 (*P<0.05,>**P<0.01,>***P<0.001).>
What I would find interesting is what E.S.'s instrument is. Does she have reeds in her mouth, or a metal mouthpiece pressed to her lips, or is her instrument oral-free?
G. Beeli, M. Esslen & L. Jäncke. "Synaesthesia: When coloured sounds taste sweet." Nature 434, 38 (March 2005); doi:10.1038/434038a
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Animal Music
On the Auditory e-list, a discussion on whether music abilities are among the last abilities to be lost due to brain damage (I'll post more about this later) has evolved into a discussion on the cognition of music by non-humans. Through that, I found this interesting article by Philip Dorrell. He posits that musicality is an attribute of normal speech, and music is a means of super-stimulating the perception of musicality. His conclusions are:
* The sounds that animals make are in almost all cases sounds that serve a communicative function.
* Human music is a super-stimulus for the perception of musicality in speech, and speech is a system of human-generated sounds with a communicative function.
* If some species of animal had an ability to perceive "musicality" similar to how humans perceive it, then there could exist some form of music for that animal such that the relationship between the animal's music and the animal's normal communication sounds was analogous to the relationship between human music and human speech.
* Since no animal has a language that sounds like human language, any form of animal music would not be expected to sound like human music.
* Given that human music is difficult to compose, quite likely animal music would also be difficult to compose, and, in particular, the animals themselves would not be clever enough to know how to compose their own music.
* Some day, when we understand enough about music, we may be able to apply rational rules of musical composition to compose music for other animals. But for now, the ability of composers to compose music depends on their intuition derived from their own subjective experience of appreciating music, and, since there is no easy way to subjectively experience what non-human animals experience, there is no way to develop an intuition about how to compose music for those animals.
* Therefore, animal music exists as a possibility, but not as something that animals themselves can currently create and appreciate in the way that humans do.
It's an interesting idea, though I think he is quite incorrect that "human music is difficult to compose." It is very easy to improvise or compose music. It is difficult to compose really good music. Also, if music is an outgrowth of the language of a particular species, shouldn't the creation of said music be within the cognitive abilities of that species? (Damn, there's my tendency toward Socratic dialogue again. Sorry, Chad.)
* The sounds that animals make are in almost all cases sounds that serve a communicative function.
* Human music is a super-stimulus for the perception of musicality in speech, and speech is a system of human-generated sounds with a communicative function.
* If some species of animal had an ability to perceive "musicality" similar to how humans perceive it, then there could exist some form of music for that animal such that the relationship between the animal's music and the animal's normal communication sounds was analogous to the relationship between human music and human speech.
* Since no animal has a language that sounds like human language, any form of animal music would not be expected to sound like human music.
* Given that human music is difficult to compose, quite likely animal music would also be difficult to compose, and, in particular, the animals themselves would not be clever enough to know how to compose their own music.
* Some day, when we understand enough about music, we may be able to apply rational rules of musical composition to compose music for other animals. But for now, the ability of composers to compose music depends on their intuition derived from their own subjective experience of appreciating music, and, since there is no easy way to subjectively experience what non-human animals experience, there is no way to develop an intuition about how to compose music for those animals.
* Therefore, animal music exists as a possibility, but not as something that animals themselves can currently create and appreciate in the way that humans do.
It's an interesting idea, though I think he is quite incorrect that "human music is difficult to compose." It is very easy to improvise or compose music. It is difficult to compose really good music. Also, if music is an outgrowth of the language of a particular species, shouldn't the creation of said music be within the cognitive abilities of that species? (Damn, there's my tendency toward Socratic dialogue again. Sorry, Chad.)
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