The Alien “Symphony”
Aug. 14th, 2023 08:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eerietomNote
This blog entry is one of two parts about my August 3, 2023 experience. This page deals with my perception of sounds after an experience at the OHSU Wellness Center lobby; the other entry deals with various media I watched that day.
As I said in another blog entry about how THC affects me, I feel like I hear everything more deeply when I’m stoned. And while I can point to this article about why music sounds better while stoned, it doesn’t explain why even just ordinary noise sounds like music to me. The following are some thoughts that occurred to me while I was sitting in the lobby. I dictated them into my phone as quickly and as coherently as I could, but even so I could not always keep up with the flow of ideas. Some of what I came up with is just flights of fancy, although there is perhaps value in that as well!
The ambient noises in the lobby—of people talking, of echoing footsteps, of elevator bells ding-ing when the doors opened, of phones ringing, of outside noises when someone entered or exited the building—all sounded like the best soundtrack ever to the “live theater” I was watching. But it wasn’t just about enjoying sounds, like one might enjoy the sound of waves breaking on the beach or the sound of the wind. I didn’t perceive these sounds as sounds but as music. Everyone speaking was a singer, and every noise was made by an instrument, all being played and mixed with each other in real time into an incredibly complex composition.
The trippiest thought of all was the idea I was able to perceive aspects of music like time signatures, tempos, and pitch far beyond what most people, even professional musicians, can perceive. We easily tap our feet to the beat of music if it’s most pop music (a time signature of 4/4) or a waltz (3/4). But listen to the opening of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913): the bassoon seems to meander rhythmically, and even with the score in front of me, I have difficulty following the melody, much less tapping my foot to the quarter note counts.
There are probably very few signatures where the note value is higher than a 16th. And while I’ve never seen any score where a note of a shorter duration than a 64th is used, theoretically one could have notes with durations of a 128th, a 256th, a 512th.
Popular song tempos are usually measured in beats per minute (BPM). A lot of upbeat popular music, for example, falls in the 110-130 range. I remember being surprised as a teen that Racey’s “Lay Your Love on Me” (1978) was listed at about 170BPM. Moby released a song called “Thousand” that boasted a BPM of 1015. Again theoretically, it’s possible to have a BPM in the millions, though it would demand a lot of music software to be able to play it.
Finally, music is often expressed in terms of pitch. Middle C on a piano vibrates at approximately 261.63Hz; the note above it, C-sharp (or D-flat) vibrates at approximately 277.18Hz. There is no piano key to play a pitch between those two, but that doesn’t mean such pitches don’t exist. If you subdivide the range between those two notes by 1Hz, you could have about 15 more “notes”. Microtonal musicians love to play with these “extra” notes. And instruments from Asia and the Middle East often have tuning different from Western tuning, creating microtones, which is what gives them that “exotic” sound.
So imagine a song, with a time signature of 263/512, played at 5000BPM, with microtones. It wouldn’t sound like music as we know it. It would be an incomprehensible din of blurred pitches and rhythms.
Or, perhaps ... what real-life ambient noise sounds like.
Perhaps it’s not unlike listening to a foreign language; to most of us, it would sound like gibberish, impossible sometimes just to try to imitate the syllables, but to someone, it’s language, with meaning and context. So why couldn’t what seems like random, arrhythmic noises be music to someone? Maybe this is why I like The Shaggs! I would like to point out, however, I was a fan of The Shaggs looooong before I got into THC.
So ... I was sitting there listening to all these ambient voices and organic noises, imagining them as instruments making very complex sounds, and enjoying this “symphony”. I fantasized I was on an alien planet and this was the aliens’ idea of music, or language, or both. Then, somewhere in the lobby, an electronic alarm sounded, a brief, shrill note. Compared to the symphony, it was jarring, inorganic. I had a thought: what if these aliens thought we humans weren’t sophisticated enough to understand or decode their “language” ... what would they have to do if they wanted to communicate with us? Dumb it down for us by creating the simplest sound possible, like a sine wave. Baby talk!
In any case, these were just the musings of an amateur musician, happily stoned, enjoying the sounds around him, and trying his best to understand the thoughts that came to him. Not the worst way to spend an afternoon ...
This blog entry is one of two parts about my August 3, 2023 experience. This page deals with my perception of sounds after an experience at the OHSU Wellness Center lobby; the other entry deals with various media I watched that day.
As I said in another blog entry about how THC affects me, I feel like I hear everything more deeply when I’m stoned. And while I can point to this article about why music sounds better while stoned, it doesn’t explain why even just ordinary noise sounds like music to me. The following are some thoughts that occurred to me while I was sitting in the lobby. I dictated them into my phone as quickly and as coherently as I could, but even so I could not always keep up with the flow of ideas. Some of what I came up with is just flights of fancy, although there is perhaps value in that as well!
The ambient noises in the lobby—of people talking, of echoing footsteps, of elevator bells ding-ing when the doors opened, of phones ringing, of outside noises when someone entered or exited the building—all sounded like the best soundtrack ever to the “live theater” I was watching. But it wasn’t just about enjoying sounds, like one might enjoy the sound of waves breaking on the beach or the sound of the wind. I didn’t perceive these sounds as sounds but as music. Everyone speaking was a singer, and every noise was made by an instrument, all being played and mixed with each other in real time into an incredibly complex composition.
The trippiest thought of all was the idea I was able to perceive aspects of music like time signatures, tempos, and pitch far beyond what most people, even professional musicians, can perceive. We easily tap our feet to the beat of music if it’s most pop music (a time signature of 4/4) or a waltz (3/4). But listen to the opening of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913): the bassoon seems to meander rhythmically, and even with the score in front of me, I have difficulty following the melody, much less tapping my foot to the quarter note counts.
There are probably very few signatures where the note value is higher than a 16th. And while I’ve never seen any score where a note of a shorter duration than a 64th is used, theoretically one could have notes with durations of a 128th, a 256th, a 512th.
Popular song tempos are usually measured in beats per minute (BPM). A lot of upbeat popular music, for example, falls in the 110-130 range. I remember being surprised as a teen that Racey’s “Lay Your Love on Me” (1978) was listed at about 170BPM. Moby released a song called “Thousand” that boasted a BPM of 1015. Again theoretically, it’s possible to have a BPM in the millions, though it would demand a lot of music software to be able to play it.
Finally, music is often expressed in terms of pitch. Middle C on a piano vibrates at approximately 261.63Hz; the note above it, C-sharp (or D-flat) vibrates at approximately 277.18Hz. There is no piano key to play a pitch between those two, but that doesn’t mean such pitches don’t exist. If you subdivide the range between those two notes by 1Hz, you could have about 15 more “notes”. Microtonal musicians love to play with these “extra” notes. And instruments from Asia and the Middle East often have tuning different from Western tuning, creating microtones, which is what gives them that “exotic” sound.
So imagine a song, with a time signature of 263/512, played at 5000BPM, with microtones. It wouldn’t sound like music as we know it. It would be an incomprehensible din of blurred pitches and rhythms.
Or, perhaps ... what real-life ambient noise sounds like.
Perhaps it’s not unlike listening to a foreign language; to most of us, it would sound like gibberish, impossible sometimes just to try to imitate the syllables, but to someone, it’s language, with meaning and context. So why couldn’t what seems like random, arrhythmic noises be music to someone? Maybe this is why I like The Shaggs! I would like to point out, however, I was a fan of The Shaggs looooong before I got into THC.
So ... I was sitting there listening to all these ambient voices and organic noises, imagining them as instruments making very complex sounds, and enjoying this “symphony”. I fantasized I was on an alien planet and this was the aliens’ idea of music, or language, or both. Then, somewhere in the lobby, an electronic alarm sounded, a brief, shrill note. Compared to the symphony, it was jarring, inorganic. I had a thought: what if these aliens thought we humans weren’t sophisticated enough to understand or decode their “language” ... what would they have to do if they wanted to communicate with us? Dumb it down for us by creating the simplest sound possible, like a sine wave. Baby talk!
In any case, these were just the musings of an amateur musician, happily stoned, enjoying the sounds around him, and trying his best to understand the thoughts that came to him. Not the worst way to spend an afternoon ...
