10 The Sound
The sound I’ve been looking for,
my whole life.
There is a sound I have been looking for my whole life, and finally, I think Ive found it. It’s part of the reason why I love science fiction so much. It is in it constantly. But I have been unable to make that sound myself until this year when I was finally able to clear my mind.
A long time ago when I was a boy, I learned to play the piano and as always they teach you to play a tune. And I learned that tune but I didn’t know the next one. Something was missing.
Recently a girl was on my keyboard and she tried to mark all the sounds that go together, which of course, wasn’t working. She managed to get herself quite upset, especially because she wasn’t supposed to use those pens. I was upset when I saw the pens on that keyboard, but it wasn’t because of what she thought. It was because it was happening again, but this time to someone else.
She inspired me to do better, because what I wasn’t taught, and I think should be the main thing that’s taught with the piano, is not how to play a tune, but how to play a chord. To make that sound. I got some very strong cleaner and the keys have not looked so clean in years. Then immediately afterwards I went out and bought some coloured dots and covered the keyboard with, for all the biggest chords. C, F, G B flat. And now every time that girl plays the keyboard, as long as she follows the rule of sticking to one colour, she cannot play a bad tune. This is why the guitar always sounds better than a keyboard when you first hear it. It’s because a guitar is all chords.
Someone once said, humans really love the sudden up and down movement of sound. We like repetition and now you know to listen to it in all the big hits. Sometimes hidden with different instruments or different things completely. But you hear the low and the high then the low again. When you cross that with a chord you get an amazing sound. A sound so amazing, so ubiquitous it has it owns button on the synthesiser. If you play music this way, its arpeggio, you can use your fingers to do it, because that is how it was always done. And so I found the beginning of the sound, but the problem is you can’t talk over it. There is something else, some other key. Then eventually, I stumbled across something that helped me unlock the final stages. A true masterwork. Then I could start applying what I learned.
Animation vs. Physics
It’s the noise that makes it interesting, its the reverb, the grungy sound, the distortion, but that also drowns the sound, drowns the voice, which is why it’s also done with a crisp sound. It works and people use it, but how?
Listening to this masterpiece. This amazing video about maths and physics, I realised that this arpeggio mainline, is actually the base! And then we can balance the eq to make it little more muffled and suddenly we have a base line. Then we can have what I call the lower voice. Its’s the bit that can vary to denote a change of feeling. It provides the background.
The sauce can allow you to be ANGRY WITH HORNS! IT ALLOWS YOU TO TAKE THE ANGER OUT WITH ALL THAT TIME WASTED, WITH HORNS!
The realisation is just so profound! So free! And then I can leave it just euphoric! And that is the sound… I’ve been looking for… my whole life!
Why does this matter for us? Well, we could make sound and feel sound long before we had language. We emote through sound. Music links to our emotions and it’s why you can not even know the words you your favourite pop song. It’s secondary to how it feels. It ties in to what is going on in our brains and somehow music is synesthetic.
Thank you.