Geoforms

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An impulse to create outlined the space in which a universe was to be built and so it was. Defined and solidified. This was followed by an intent to form things and implant in them a persistence, an enduring state of existence. This universe was then filled with clouds of radioactive dust, a malleable form of energy with which to bring to shape the hallucination of a creative impulse from an image formed in the mind of an intelligent being. A dream was then projected from the mind of a Maker and many other cooperating minds so that by it began the process of creation. For by this dream alone, a desire for images to become mobile, the universe began to take shape.

Geoforms, begins with a syncopated overlaid set of drum tracks that form a brief intro. They will be the backbone for the entire duration of the song. It sets the stage for a sparse melodic drone of mid-range notes that playfully counterpoint with another short line of bass notes, in call and response format. The rhythm guitar holds a splashy chord with shimmering effect that sustains itself throughout the intro until it releases the tension by flowing into the next section of music that rises and pulls you up with it.

The compression of the gravitic pull of this piece represents the built up pressure with which planets started to form. Within one critical moment, an ignition takes place, and thus the core of a planet was lit. Geoforms too ignites with an explosion of energy into the second section of the song and shows how a process slowly forms by building up energy and unleashing it in a magnified release.

The great ball of energy upon which the Earth grew and its enormous pull gave it its eventual size. The pull of other large masses and their interaction with the laws of the forces which govern their motions placed them all, each in their own orbits and positions. The extensive magnetic field of the Sun and the numerous magnetic fields of what would become the other planets all interacting put everything in its place and thus the universe was set.

In Geoforms, this idea comes to life when just a few musical elements center around a simple idea and rhythmic structure that eventually expand and release the energy that was being concentrated in the intro. But like all forms of energy, whether creative or astrophysical, when it reaches a critical mass of compression, the energy must be released and dispersed into the environment, particles blown out of an explosion.

Over millions of years, all of the planets cooled and became rocky or gaseous balls circling the Sun at differing rates of orbit. A day on Earth was defined as a rotation of the Earth on its axis, with a year referring to a completion of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The illusion for us is of the Sun rising and falling, when in actuality all that occurs is that the Earth turns, while the Sun remains motionless.

Originally, as one mass of radioactive energy, the Earth formed a crust over a ball of molten rock, mostly composed of iron. Gigantic plates of rock, the continents, move about the surface of the planet and perform minute movements by grinding against each other to form mountains, shores, and rifts causing an endless arrangement in landscapes I call Geoforms. The movement of these tectonic plates are what make and re-make the look of our world over time. The slow and persistent motion of these plates build oceans, generate earthquakes, erode coasts, and sink entire continents.

Geoforms captures this element of slow and persistent tectonic motion with a smooth melody in the second section as it contrasts against the jaggedness of rock from the guitar strumming, which gives the illusion of a staggered mountainous region rising out of a plain. The low notes in the main theme speak as if they were a great command proclaiming the eternity of life and existence, back of everything we see, feel, and hear. Moreover, the tones of the melody have a courageous, almost triumphant quality that illustrate a motive power underlying the process of forming and remaking the Earth for eons.

On Earth, evolution would follow its own unique planetary blueprint in geology and biology, environment and life forms. Not only would the environment cool and harden, but it would also become the landscape we now know, inhabited by plants, animals, and more importantly, water. But whether here on Earth, or on other planets, Geoforms really tells the story of all planets and the way they develop according to the blueprint by which they were designed - in chance formations governed by universal laws coded into the fabric of the cosmos.

The third section of Geoforms reveals this fact about Earth and in sound shows us several scenes of oasis. One is a refreshing area of land irrigated by water diverted from a nearby river to help fertilize fields and their crops, another is a gorgeous waterfall filling a large pool at its base where the myriad life forms can gather to drink, frolic, or bathe, and lastly, a vast ocean spreading out into a seeming infinity where there is no end to the horizon. Fish, plant, and man all benefit from the bounty that is provided by the Earth as it evolved from a creative impulse to build a dream and to give it form.

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Related Music:

Geoforms

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Marc

https://stereothesis.bandcamp.com/

Live Music Recordings and the Element of Surprise

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“Subtle material like those which exist in recordings of jazz and other improvisational music becomes more interesting and meaningful upon relistening.”

– Brian Eno, The Studio as a Compositional Tool

"Live music recordings" are simply a music recording approach that harnesses the ease and immensity of digital recording equipment with the freedom of improvisational music. The basic idea is that you'd improvise a new composition from the beginning of the recording process, track by track, until you achieve completion. 

The purposes of recording live music or of recording improvised music are to improve the sensitivity of the musicians or composer and to exploit the element of surprise. Recordings of live concerts and classical music clearly illustrate this principle in action.
 
What's wonderful about digital recording equipment is that it allows the solo musician, composer, or unstable band to  transcend time by freezing music in a digital universe. This is extremely useful because any new musician can come in at a later time and fill in the missing parts in a piece of music. The solo artist can also perform this function by creating the illusion of multiple players by multi-tracking.
 
The way in which he would achieve this is whenever a new track is going to be added to the piece he, in effect, acts in the capacity of a new player coming into the recorded ensemble with his own perception of what the piece should sound like or with what he would like to add to it. This psychological approach will increase the chances for another layer of the element of surprise. 
 
The new player infuses an existing piece of music with his unique signature of creative energy, technical skill, and emotional expression (style). All of these factors are injected into the music he adds to and the surprises manifest as he reacts to the twists and turns of rhythm and melody. In my music, I don't worry as much about getting each part just right, rather I'm concerned with capturing an energy or solidifying an idea. That's the only thing worth recording.

Recording live music includes the idea that chance events and musical accidents might stay in the recording as a way of authenticating the actual "live-ness" of the music recording. The advent of affordable digital music recording equipment leveled the playing field in terms of sound quality. That means for good or bad all music can be recorded at more or less the same quality. On some systems and software the mixing and mastering process can be completed with the touch of a button. So what's going to determine what's good or bad about a song will only be the strength of the composition and the level of musicianship.

Another way to think of the studio is as an environment where music recording is done as opposed to a place that determines what music will be made. The difference between these two viewpoints is one of quality - freedom vs. restriction. The element of surprise must be preserved at all costs. So when producing live music recordings you have to balance spontaneous performance and rehearsals. Rehearsing should only be used as a way of determining the possibilities within a song, while the recording process should unleash the live energy of the musician that allows him to spontaneously arrange the material he discovered during the rehearsals.

The field for digital distribution and marketing of music has also leveled a barrier that stood between the composer / musician and the consumer. Now the lines of communication are direct and open to all. With this barrier gone too, the quality of the composition and musicianship must be stressed on any recording that gets made. Average songs and mediocre musicianship can become popular, but they don't last and are easily replaced by other average songs and mediocre musicians.  A vicious artistic cycle.

Live music recordings can bring the living energy of an artist through the music to the consumer. The little imperfections, outtakes, and minor variances all give a digital recording a "live" feel. And when they are permitted to remain in a studio recording, all those little things a composer didn’t intend to be in a recording take on an added significance when listened to over and over again. No consumer listens to music they like only once. Instead, they listen to it many times over a period of years, so the music grows more meaningful as they change from their experience of living. As they grow, the music they listen to also changes and takes on deeper significances.

Now if you do decide to edit or erase little imperfections or musical accidents be very selective and only remove those that interfere with sound quality and not those that reduce technical skill or emotional expression. Sometimes it’s the chance events and musical accidents that become the reason why an audience falls in love with a recording. Good music is always used as an essential part of life to highlight meaningful events and important moments in a person's life.

  

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Related Music:

Creative Flows

Rear View Mirror
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Related Articles:

The Computer Music Man: Top 10 Arrangement Tips for Home Recording Artists

Art and The Emotional Rollercoaster
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Marc
http://stereothesis.com/

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Subliminal Messages and the Potency of Communication

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Richard: Everything is hypnosis.

John: There’s a profound disagreement between us. There is no such thing as hypnosis. I would really prefer that you didn’t use such terms, since they don’t refer to anything. We believe that all communication is hypnosis. That’s the function of every conversation. Let’s say I sit down for dinner with you and begin to communicate about some experience. If I tell you about some time when I took a vacation, my intent is to induce in you the state of having some experience about that vacation. Whenever anyone communicates, they’re trying to induce states in one another by using sound sequences called “words.”

…you will discover that somnambulistic trance is the rule rather than the exception in people’s everyday “waking activity.”

-          Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Frogs Into Princes

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Subliminal Messages: Audio and Visual

Smart companies frequently hire marketing and advertising agencies to design television, radio, and printed messages in an attempt to invoke the past. What they want is to get you to associate pleasant or strong memories with their client’s products and services. In other forms of media, you get similar and sometimes even more powerful results. For instance, players of video games often become susceptible to hypnotic suggestions when those games contain subliminal messages.

Trance researchers have studied this and understand that “the players who may be unhappy or angry or frustrated [with his or her own life] could become psychologically dependent on the positive strokes of some subliminal messages” (Wier).  They believe that this could lead to the development of addictions to such media. Also, today’s on-line marketers use emotional triggers very successfully to make sales and build contact lists.

Above you’ll notice an example of a subliminal message designed to appeal to men and women where sex appeal, hygiene, health, desirability, beauty, respectability, sophistication, and status become part of the message for the brand of razors and shaving cream, but also for the act of shaving. Below is an example of a subliminal message designed – undoubtedly – to appeal to men and two of his physiological needs: food and sex.

Aligning physiological, psychic, or spiritual needs with a given product or service is a very effective technique to use in audio and visual advertising. Sex, health, status, desirability, beauty, intelligence, hunger, sleep, wealth, hygiene are just a few examples of these needs. The range of techniques varies greatly and many clever minds have found numerous ways to combine and recombine effective assortments of essential needs. They then turn around and use these combinations of needs in association with all kinds of products and services. These products and services then become indispensable to our lives and forever own a piece of our minds. 

The Potency of the Medium of Communication

After many years of study and gathering lots of information on the subject of the power of words, trances, and communication, I’ve develop an idea that I call “the potency of a medium of communication.” This idea is based on a number of known facts about what elements contribute to the effectiveness or poor quality of a message from one person to another. In “Words in Songwriting and their Power as Emotional Triggers (Part 3),” I   wrote, “Strong evidence supports the conclusion that when it comes to person-to-person contact, facial expressions convey 55% of the message, the tone of voice 38% and the words just 7%. So while it may be useful to have an extensive vocabulary to use in our conversations with others, it turns out that it’s not as important as our facial expressions and tonality (body language).”

So how does this help us build more impact in our art and writing? Well, for example, it gives us an order of priority (facial expressions – tone – words or see – hear – symbols) when it comes to which senses we should address primarily or in sequence to provoke an emotional response. A primary attack would dictate that we focus our artistic energies to the sense or senses most receptive to messages such as sight or hearing. In contrast, a sequential attack would mean that we target a series of sensual attacks in combinations of 2 or more senses, linearly (a, b, c, d) or in cycles (repeated attacks – a, b, a, c, b, a).

For example, music recordings are a less powerful means of communication than music videos because the recordings don’t provide the visual elements we need to analyze the artist’s facial expressions and body language. The reason is because we retain less information from the things we hear in contrast to the things we see. But because the power that recordings of music possess is in their capacity to convey tonality and the artist’s use of words (prose, rhymes, and poetry), they are infinitely more likely to communicate than a photograph, which possesses less power because it contains even fewer elements of communication. A static visual moment – photograph – lacks movement, sound, and a stated message. [To learn more about this subject read "The Power of Frames in Communication."]

Now that we've covered these basics I can tell you what I mean by “the potency of the medium of communication.” The potency of the medium of communication is a cognitive diagnostic tool used to evaluate the number and strength of communicative elements present in any given message. Basically, it determines a messages potential for achieving understanding as well as the potency of the message delivered.

[Optional Exercises: This exercise is designed to help you see for yourself how important various communicative elements such as motion, body language, facial expressions, words, and tone are in relation to a message. With this exercise and variations on it, you can determine on your own the relative value of any given communicative element and the emotional or psychological impact it creates upon you.

Version 1: Watch a commercial or some part in a movie with the sound off (mute). Notice how the communicative elements besides sound and words push or do not push the message out from one person to the other. Can you pick up on the emotion, the message, the impact, and the understanding?

Version 2: Get a song from your music library and find the music video for the same song on YouTube. Go back and forth between them comparing each one’s power or impact upon you. Obviously, the visual component is the primary element that will be missing in this comparison, so test out the difference and evaluate the impact.

Version 3: Compare a photograph with a video. Find a celebrity’s photograph and footage of them on YouTube. In the photograph, notice the fixed facial expression, pose, make-up, attitude, and emotional impact. Now watch whatever video footage you’ve found and take note of the celebrity’s personality traits, tone of voice, use or command of language, their use and choice of words, facial expressions, sense of humor, and emotional impact. Which medium – the photograph or video – makes you feel more bonded or dismissive of the celebrity in question?

To take Version 3 a step further, you can compare the photograph with the video again, but this time mute the sound on the video to compare a still image with a moving image to see what discoveries you make.

There are many more ways to explore the comparisons between various communicative elements in regard to the power and influence they possess over human emotion. You should take some time every now and then to study each one I mentioned in this article and also try to discover more on your own. Other communicative elements that exist, but I didn’t find useful to mention here include touch, smell, confidence, and authenticity. Using these exercises, developing more on your own, and experimenting with them will have a dual benefit for you. On the one hand, you will become more aware of the effective communication patterns of others and, on the other hand, you can with discipline and practice develop more effective communication patterns within yourself.]

Afterword: On Understanding

In "The Power of Frames in Communication," I also wrote, “while words are important in many ways, they’re not as important as what a message or communication is intended to create, which is an understanding. Understanding is largely affected by whether or not one sees (or imagines) what the other person is communicating.” Understanding can be either positive or negative. One communication can lead to a state of understanding like love, whereas another communication will be understood as hate.

The only qualification for what an understanding is or is not, is whether or not what one party is communicating to another party is actually what the original party intended to get across. In other words, if what person ‘A’ sends as a message to person ‘B’ is not what person ‘A’ means, then there is no understanding. But if what person ‘A’ sends as a message to person ‘B’ is what person ‘A’ means to arrive at person ‘B’, then understanding has been achieved. This is all there is to effective communication in person, in print, audio, or visual.

When communication is clear and direct it is easy to tell who are one’s friends and who are one’s enemies because our body language, tonality, words, facial expressions, and eye contact (or lack thereof) project our love and hate. But when communication is unclear, socially acceptable, or politically correct it is not so easy to determine one’s friends and enemies. This can be problematic because we can inadvertently create what some people call “frienemies (friend-enemy),” which is the designation given to someone who is not always friend and not always enemy. Moreover, besides the type of associations that can develop out of unclear and indirect messages, misunderstandings are common and devolve into something much worse – manipulation.

“Frienemies” cannot develop a healthy or thriving relationship because they serve as tools for one another in the games that occur within most social circles. For as long as they allow such a “relationship” to continue, they permit tacit consent to guide their overall interaction meanwhile they remain silent on the manipulations they use on one another to get what they want or need out of the other party. This sort of relationship is also based on understanding, but it is a negative understanding involving psychological risks, physical abuse, and emotional dangers whose outcomes are difficult to predict and assess until the damage is done.

So in your communications via your art, music, songs, and writing, are you a friend, enemy, or “frienemy” to your audience, fans, and supporters?

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The Power of Frames in Communication

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P.S. To support Stereo Thesis with a financial donation, click here.

Marc

http://stereothesis.com/ 

The Pythagorean Theory of Color and Music

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The Pythagorean Theory of Color

"There are numerous arbitrary arrangements setting forth the mutual relationships of the planets, the colors, and the musical notes. The most satisfactory system is that based upon the law of the octave. The sense of hearing has a much wider scope than that of sight, for whereas the ear can register from nine to eleven octaves of sound the eye is restricted to the cognition of but seven fundamental color tones, or one tone short of the octave."

The Pythagorean Theory of Music  

"To Pythagoras music was one of the dependencies of the divine science of mathematics, and its harmonies were inflexibly controlled by mathematical proportions."

"The lyre was regarded as the secret symbol of the human constitution, the body of the instrument representing the physical form, the strings the nerves, and the musician the spirit."

"Every element in Nature has its individual keynote. If these elements are combined in a composite structure the result is a chord that, if sounded, will disintegrate the compound into its integral parts. Likewise each individual has a keynote that, if sounded, will destroy him."


This essay is from Manly P. Hall’s book "The Secret Teaching of All Ages,” which can be read for FREE or purchased here through Amazon. 

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The Essence of Music: The Pulse of Sound

The Ethos of Rhythm and Scales

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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

 

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Steve Vai’s 10 Hour Guitar Workout: A Summary

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In 2007, Guitar World Magazine reprinted an interview with Steve Vai, in which he describes the details of his practice approach. Because of the huge impact this article had on my practice discipline, I am presenting it to you. Even if you do not play the guitar, you may still find it interesting just how one would go about becoming a great guitar player. While you may be very familiar with the idea that becoming great in anything will require a huge amount of practice and discipline, you are probably unaware of the types of practices and the kind of discipline a guitarist would have to perform in order to increase their skill and achieve results. To provide you with a bit of data about that here’s a brief summary of Steve Vai’s 10-Hour Guitar Workout. Basically, what he describes is the disciplined way he approaches his practice time.

If you don’t know who Steve Vai is and would like to acquaint yourself about him before continuing, click here. And to see him perform one of his most loved pieces called “For the Love of God” watch the video below.

 

Ever since I’ve used the information in this article my skill set has improved dramatically. It helped me to become more results-oriented, it encouraged me to challenge myself to reach for the attainment of ever higher levels of difficult skills, so now I practice for a purpose, and I’m always trying to develop my skill set to match my understanding that the guitar is a secondary “voice box” for creative expression. 

Here is the summary of the 10-Hour Workout:

The first hour focuses on technical exercises, the second on scales, the third to some “chord thing”. Repeating them three times, he’d devote the remaining hour to “sensitivity” training, where he would reproduce spoken phrases like words or a sentence as passages on the guitar.

 The technical exercises are categorized into three groups: linear picking, stretching, and angular exercises. The linear picking exercises are used “To develop a strong, fluent alternate (down-up) picking technique,” and Vai recommends practicing “things that are technically awkward.” The stretching exercises “…are played…to gradually increase the span of your fretting hand…[so] try spanning four or five frets with the first and fourth fingers…[but] STOP if you feel ANY DISCOMFORT.” Lastly, “angular exercises improve your string-crossing chops…the more adept you are at crossing strings with the pick, the better your picking technique.”

The scale/mode studies involve “…playing the major scale in all 12 keys at 10 different tempos, and practicing scales in interval patterns.” The first goal here is to “make sure they’re perfect—clean, even, and right in sync with the metronome…making sure your pick isn’t moving that much.” Next, taking any scale shape, learn to play through it in thirds, fourths, and fifths.

Now with chord studies Vai’s approach was to devote the first hour to studying chord charts. On the second hour, he’d spend time “experimenting with unusual chords and voicings”, and in the third hour just jam on a rhythm. Using whatever chords he found and liked, he would then incorporate their inversions and arpeggios. Once he had a groove going, he’d record it, and solo over it. 

In the “Sensitivity Hour”, he would think of phrase like a word or sentence and try to play it on the guitar. “Each note corresponds to a syllable, and the rhythms follow the natural speech pattern.” 

To hear a sample of how he does this and what it sounds like, here’s a video to watch. The part I want you to hear begins at 1:08 min.

 

The purpose of all this is “to try and balance the technical with the emotional...and [discover] that, once I got my motor skills sharpened, it’s a lot easier for me to express myself, as long as I didn’t get carried away with my chops…It’s very expressive and a lot better than thinking, Okay, I’m in the key of E minor and…,” so I can play these chords with these notes. So by practicing these exercises and mastering them, when one plays the instrument he starts to say things that are “extremely personal [where] the personality behind each phrase will reach the audience. It’ll make your solo mean something very special and it’ll add a certain feel to the way you play it.”

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Related Music:

 

Auto-Hypnosis

 

Witch Hunt

 

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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

Remember to join our mailing list.

To support Stereo Thesis with a financial donation securely through PayPal, click here.

The Human Voice: The World's First Musical Instrument

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Introduction

The human voice is a dynamic instrument. It’s also the very first musical instrument that ever existed on Earth. Its ability to articulate, communicate ideas, create beautiful melodies, and translate human emotion into sounds is unmatched in the animal kingdom. In this article we are going to go into some of the interesting ways the human voice is used and can be manipulated by its user to bring about a desired artistic outcome. I will also relate some of the information we’ll discuss here to other ideas I’ve talked about in previous articles about tuning musical instruments to frequencies outside of the Equal-Temperament system. Because the human voice is a self-tuning instrument, in that it doesn’t require knobs or other tools to change its tone or timbre, it’s one of the easiest of all instruments to relate to the subject of microtonal music. 

It’s also very important to relate it to microtonal music because, like the fretless bass or a violin, it’s one of the few instruments which can access microtones by sliding across and between the notes of the Equal-Temperament system of tones. In a previous article I wrote, “so since any frequency can be considered a note so long as it’s assigned a letter name or some other designation, and a scale is any set of allowable notes used in a composition, then any instrument, including the human voice, can be tuned or modulated to access the sonic material found only in microtonal music.”

Physiology: What Makes a Voice Unique?

The sound of each individual's voice is entirely unique. Its uniqueness is due to the actual shape and size of an individual's vocal cords as well as the size and shape of the rest of that person's body, especially the chest and vocal tract. The manner in which the speech sounds are habitually formed and articulated adds another set of factors that determines vocal character. (It is this latter aspect of the sound of the voice that can be mimicked by skilled imitators.) Human spoken language makes use of the ability of the vocal cords to dynamically modulate themselves within certain parameters in a socially consistent manner. The most important communicative, or phonetic, parameters are the voice pitch (determined by the vibratory frequency of the vocal folds) and the degree of separation of the vocal folds. 

Children learn to use all of these actions consistently during speech development. They learn to speak the difference between utterances by listening to and imitating the voices of the adults around them. They mimic these voices playfully because they are so much different from their own. Humans have vocal folds that can loosen, tighten, or change their thickness, and over which breath can be transferred at varying pressures. The shape of the chest and neck, the position of the tongue, and the tightness of otherwise unrelated muscles can be altered to give the voice a certain quality. Any one of these actions results in a change in pitch, volume, timbre, or tone of the sound produced. Sound also resonates within different parts of the body, and an individual's size and bone structure can affect to a certain degree the sound produced by an individual.

 

Adult men and women have different sizes of vocal fold which reflects the male-female differences in larynx size. Adult male voices are usually lower-pitched and have larger folds and the female vocal folds are smaller – between 12.5 mm and 17.5 mm in length. The folds in both sexes are within the larynx. As seen in the illustration above, the folds are located just above the vertebrate trachea (the windpipe, which travels from the lungs). The difference in vocal folds size between men and women vary as well because of genetics causing men and women's singing voices to being categorized into types. For example, among men, there are bass, baritone, tenor and countertenor (ranging from E2 to even F6), and among women, contralto, mezzo-soprano and soprano (ranging from F3 to C6). There are additional categories for operatic voices. 

Basic Mechanics: The World’s First Human Instrument

Singers use the human voice as an instrument for creating music. The vocal folds, in combination with the articulators, are capable of producing a highly intricate array of sound. The tone of voice may be modulated to suggest emotions such as anger, surprise, or happiness. Singers can also learn to project sound in certain ways so that it resonates better within their vocal tract. This is known as vocal resonation. 

Vocal resonation is the process by which the basic product of phonation is enhanced in timbre, amplification, enrichment, enlargement, improvement, intensification, and prolongation. The end result of resonation is, or should be, to make a better sound. Or from my point of view to control sound better. There are seven areas along the path of air which leaves the body to produce a musical sound that are vocal resonators. In sequence from the lowest within the body to the highest, these areas are the chest, the tracheal tree, the larynx itself, the pharynx, the oral cavity, the nasal cavity, and the sinuses. 

Another major influence on vocal sound and production is the function of the larynx, which people can manipulate in different ways to produce different sounds (think ventriloquists and imitators). The primary method for singers to accomplish this is through the use of the Singer's Formant, which is a resonance added to the normal resonances of the vocal tract enabling the singer's voice to carry better over musical accompaniment. These different kinds of laryngeal function are described as different kinds of vocal registers. 

Vocal registration refers to the system of vocal registers within the human voice. A register in the human voice is a particular series of tones, produced in the same vibratory pattern of the vocal folds, and possessing the same quality. Registers originate in laryngeal functioning. They occur because the vocal folds are capable of producing several different vibratory patterns. Each of these vibratory patterns appears within a particular vocal range – consisting of a range of pitches – and produces certain characteristic sounds. The term register can also be used to refer to any of the following: 

A part of the vocal range such as the upper, middle, or lower registers.

A resonance area such as chest voice or head voice.

A vocal timbre.

A region of the voice defined by vocal breaks.

A subset of language used for a specific purpose or in a particular social setting.

The Human Voice is a Microtonal Instrument: Counter-argument

According to a study published by the New Scientist, the twelve-tone musical scale, upon which some of the music in the world is based, may have its roots in the sound of the human voice during the course of evolution. Analysis of recorded speech samples found peaks in acoustic energy that mirrored the distances between notes in the twelve-tone scale.

In alignment with the previous statement, the only rational argument opposed to the idea that the human voice is a microtonal instrument comes from the thinkers at the Schiller Institute. The first point they make is that middle C must be set at the frequency 256 Hz. Why? Because the human voice shifts registers at key points of the musical scale when C=256. Currently, middle C is set to the frequency 261.63 Hz. This small alteration in the placement of middle C forces the human voice to strain at shifting registers at awkward places in the musical scale. For example, notice how the human voice lines up perfectly with the musical scale in significant locations – specifically at the tri-tone and the half-steps in the musical scale. Instead what the Schiller Institute argues is that the voice should be mirroring in vocal registration the musical scale itself. 

 

(The chart above illustrates where the 6 vocal types shift registers when middle C is 256 Hz.)

Although their thinking is well grounded in facts about the human voice, the one aspect of their position that irks me is how they are essentially arguing for a new tuning system to replace Equal-Temperament and where C=256. That they actually want another fixed standard where another set of 12 frequencies is all that comprise music and song is certainly bothersome.

Conclusion: The Human Voice is a Microtonal Instrument

The physiology and the basic mechanics of the human voice essentially determine that it is a microtonal instrument. Its ability to produce frequencies ranges from about 60 to 7000 Hz with the ability to produce every single frequency and tone within that range. 

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Related Music:

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Related Article:

 

Breaking Glass with the Human Voice

 

Words in Songwriting and their Power as Emotional Triggers

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Marc

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