Greg: I’ve been listening to 808s and Heartbreak and Twisted Fantasy. I’m really enjoying them. Far more than I thought I would. I think Auto-tune here is somehow protective for Kanye when he is expressing emotion in a genre where that is not really smiled on. I haven’t quite put my finger on it, but I think the dehumanizing of the human voice is somehow a foil for the expression of inner turmoil. It’s haunting.

Ethan: Yes! Absolutely. The Auto-tune gives Ye a way to be the sensitive, vulnerable singer, as opposed to the swaggering rapper. And I like the similar sonic palettes between 808s and Fantasy, except 808s is sparse and Fantasy is full. And the thing of using tuned 808 kick drums to play the basslines is so hip.

Greg: The hard part for me to wrap my head around is the fact that Auto-tune is a filter, a dehumanizer, and it manages to make Kanye both closer and more human.

Ethan: I have a broader philosophical idea brewing about the concepts of “dehumanizing” and “posthuman” and how they’re really kind of meaningless, at least as applied to music. How can things that humans create be dehumanizing? Everyone involved in the production of Kanye’s albums is human. Auto-tune is a novel way of sounding human, but it’s still human, just like the sound of reverb or EQ or compression.

Greg: Yes — I have similar issues with natural vs. unnatural in general. Humans are natural, therefore everything we do is also natural.

Ethan: I’ve been listening a lot to “No Church In The Wild,” the opening track from Watch The Throne.

Kanye doesn’t use any Auto-tune, he just raps. The interesting thing is that the chorus is sung by Frank Ocean, who’s a perfectly capable legit R&B singer, and they put him through the full Cher effect. At the end of each verse, Kanye and Jay-Z tell Frank to “preach” through the Auto-tune. Curious as to your reaction.

Greg: This track is really something. The animal noises fusing with human with street noise. The bizarre outro — WTF is that? The Auto-tune section kind of hides structurally, in some ways. If the liner notes are to be believed, then the Auto-tune section is actually The-Dream on vocals. [Ethan note: it is Frank Ocean singing; The-Dream co-wrote the song.] The extreme EQ of that section is key, though. The dropping to low frequency moves the preceding music into the far distance and down into the horizon. In some ways it heightens the internal effect in an almost cinematic way. It’s a radical emotional zoom and pan. The fact that it is also Auto-tuned may relate to what we were talking about on Kanye’s earlier albums. The sense that Auto-tune allows for and maybe heightens emotional expression. One would think that it is despite the dehumanization, but maybe the dehumanization allows for the words themselves to become more present? I’m not sure. I’ll keep listening.

Ethan: There’s a tradition in hip-hop that if you have an instrumental that isn’t going to get turned into a full song, you append it to the beginning or end of another track. But usually it’s a funk sample or something, not a weird classical piece.

Greg: It reminds me of the Fiona Apple cover of “Extraordinary Machine” for some reason. It’s flat weird.

Ethan: I don’t know that Fiona Apple song, will have to check it out.

Greg: it’s a Marilyn Monroe cover, of all things.

Greg: Funny that delay is not corny, but reverb is? What’s that about?

Ethan: I think the thing with delay is that it’s technologically newer — tape delay goes back a ways, but tempo-synced digital delay is still pretty fresh and of the present. Also, reverb diffuses the sound, and delay keeps everything nice and crisp. Good point about how the EQ spatializes the track — reverb is considered corny by current pop and hip-hop producers, so either you leave everything bone dry or use delay and EQ for spatial effects.

Maybe the Auto-tune heightens emotion by making the melody totally unambiguous. It gives the sung notes an organ-like clarity and distinctness, and slight pitch nuances get exaggerated into stairsteps and warbles. Also, the filter changes the voice’s upper partials in odd ways that adds to the pathos. The-Dream has done some nice Auto-tune singing on other Kanye material — there’s a song called “Flight School” that I have on a mixtape or something. But it’s nowhere near as hip as “No Church.”

Greg: I’m digging “Made in America” as well. The tone is so unapologetic. How often does “banana pudding” show up in rap? It’s unsettlingly positive in some ways. Nostalgic and wistful. Where’s the Auto-tune?

I was teaching John Adams‘ “On the Transmigration of Souls” today and I noticed some distortion on some of the sampled voices. It’s utterly unnecessary but clearly present. I realized that this is related to our discussion of Auto-tune and filters on the voice. My thought in class was: “Do we live so scared that a naked voice is a thing that can’t speak truth?” I’m not sure I still stand by this sentiment, but there it is.

Ethan: I’ll catch myself putting delay on everything as a matter of course. It takes a lot of discipline to leave things dry. I saw this movie called Jiro Dreams Of Sushi about Japan’s best (and most expensive) sushi chef. All he does is cut fish, put it on rice, add some soy sauce and serve. But he uses the best fish, the best rice, the best soy sauce, the best sequencing of dishes, etc. I like that philosophy of getting good ingredients and not processing them at all.

The authors present CMERS, “a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the real-time control of musical emotion that modifies features at both the score level and the performance level.” The paper compares CMERS to other computer-based musical expressiveness algorithms, as part of a larger effort to find a complete systematic categorization of all of the emotions that can be expressed and evoked through music.

The authors first conducted a survey of past efforts to categorize emotions, and after meta-analysis of the results, devised a two-dimensional graph. The vertical axis runs from Active to Passive. The horizontal axis runs from Negative to Positive. The Negative/Active quadrant includes such emotions as anger and agitation. The Passive/Positive quadrant includes serenity and tenderness. The authors then paired particular musical devices with each emotion, both compositional and performative. For example, sadness is correlated with slow tempo, minor mode, low pitch height, complex harmony, legato articulation, soft dynamics, slow note onset, and so on.

Having established a rule set linking musical devices to emotions, the authors encoded the rules into a set of MIDI filters. These filters were used to generate computer performances with the desired emotional quality. The authors used computer rather than human performers because they wanted a ground base of perfectly flat affect, and very fine control over performative nuance. (A human performer in a good mood will find it difficult to convincingly convey despair, and vice versa.) Finally, the authors played the performances to students and asked them to locate their emotional response on the two-dimensional graph. They found very strong agreement between the intended emotion of a given piece and the students’ ability to identify that emotion.

I approach the authors’ entire effort with considerable skepticism. They have shown that within a given culture and narrowly-defined style, it is possible to identify broad-stroke relationships between particular musical devices and particular emotions. Within the goals they have set for themselves, they have succeeded quite admirably. But no unambiguous categorical system can possibly capture the bottomless complexity and nuance of emotion. A listener’s reaction to a piece of music will depend heavily on social context, personal history and education, and countless other intangibles. The state of the listener’s digestive tract is at least as important in determining their emotional responses as anything happening between their ears.

The authors focus their research on common-practice era Western classical music. This makes their task easier, since Western classical is centered around scores that easily translate into MIDI, and that follow a comparatively narrow rule set. The authors are conscious of this limitation and discuss applying their system to music of other cultures, with rule sets altered accordingly. But it is not necessary to look outside of America to find music whose features would defy ready emotional categorization. As I type this, I have James Brown in my headphones. He’s screaming in what at first blush sounds like rage and pain. Yet the overall result of hearing him is powerful emotional uplift. His music expresses conflicting emotions simultaneously: joy and anger, tenderness and aggression. That tension and complexity is the main appeal of James Brown’s music for me.

While I support efforts to find a deeper understanding of how music conveys and evokes emotion, I am not convinced that a reductionist approach ultimately contributes much of value. It would be better to embrace the full complexity, attempt to trace as many causal threads as possible, and be humble in the face of the ultimate impossibility of the task. For musicians, meanwhile, the best method for understanding how they can convey emotion to listeners is simply to practice and perform, to be attentive to the mood in the room, and to learn by experience.

The fundamental unit of electronic popular music is the loop. This puts it at odds with the Western art music tradition, which typically favors linear structures with a narrative arc. Repetition has mostly appeared in classical music at the macro level of phrases and sections. While shorter repetitive cells do appear in classical music, they are not always welcome. The term ostinato, from the Italian “obstinate,” does not connote approval. Popular music (and some minimalist classical) of the twentieth century has been significantly more repetitive, deriving its harmony from western Europe but its rhythms and circular loop-based structures from Africa and the Caribbean. The advent of synthesizers, drum machines and computers has strongly encouraged the trend toward cyclic repetition, since the default output of such devices is the endless loop.

Björk produced relatively conventional dance music early in her solo career, but her use of loops has become more sophisticated and complex over the course of her career. Her 2004 album Medúlla is comprised entirely from vocals, aside from the occasional synthesizer. Some of the songs are traditional songs and choral works, but most are built from vocals that have been heavily edited, sampled and looped in Pro Tools.

Malawey’s article analyzes three songs from Medúlla in depth: “Öll Birtan,” “Who Is It” and “Triumph of a Heart.” Malawey is primarily interested in the circularity of these songs’ chord progressions. She explains their two-chord or one-chord structures as creating a sense of oscillation or stasis, rather than the source-path-destination schema of western classical tradition. While Björk’s harmonies are colorful, they are hardly groundbreaking. What makes Malawey’s analysis valuable for my purposes is that her vocabulary for harmonic analysis is also applicable to the sonic and emotional quality of looped samples.

“Öll Birtan” is built from layers of Björk’s voice singing highly repetitive figures on a single mixolydian scale. There is no beat per se, but there is an implicit pulse. The piece is less a pop song, and more an art piece reminiscent of Steve Reich. “Who Is It” and “Triumph of a Heart” are closer to dance music convention in form, but they use sampled beatboxing and mouth sounds in place of drum machines and breakbeats. Similarly, sampled vocal tones fill the role of basslines and keyboards. These videos use different mixes than the ones on the album, but they’re so delightful you should watch them anyway.

Malaway’s central thesis is that harmonic stasis creates a feeling of timelessness. She quotes Kofi Agawu:

Repetition enables and stabilizes; it facilitates adventure while guaranteeing, not the outcomes as such, but the meaningfulness of adventure. If repetition of a harmonic progression seventy-five times can keep listeners and dancers interested, then there is a power to repetition that suggests not mindlessness or a false sense of security (as some critics have proposed) but a fascination with grounded musical adventures. Repetition, in short, is the lifeblood of music.

Despite the fact that Agawu is dealing primarily with repetition in African music, much of what he says in this passage applies directly to all kinds of music that are based in repetitive processes. Furthermore, his quote explains the appeal of the more literal sonic repetition of looped samples.

When you listen to repetitive music, time is progressing in its usual linear way, but the cyclic sounds evoke timelessness and eternity. Malawey describes harmonic ostinatos as having a feeling of alternating repose and tension. I’ve found this to be true of looped samples as well; the first and third repetitions will have a “call” feeling that is “answered” by repetitions two and four. The continuing reversal of call and response, of front and back halves of a phrase, can evoke other image schemas as well. Malawey lists swinging, fluttering, quivering, jiggling, hovering and flickering as appropriate image schemas for repetitive music.

In other songs not discussed by Malawey, the feeling of stasis brought on by sampled vocals is even more prominent. The atmospheric haze that dominates “Desired Constellation” was created from a sample of Björk singing the phrase “I’m not sure what to do with it” from “Hidden Place” on her previous album, Vespertine. The vocal loop that opens “Mouth’s Cradle” is so severely processed as to be unrecognizable as a voice; it sounds more like a synthesizer sequenced using MIDI, and the bass notes are pitch-shifted to an unearthly depth. Together with the animalistic backing vocals forming the “percussion,” the collective effect is otherworldly.

Malawey does point out the connection between Björk’s radically simple chord progressions and her unearthly timbres. “[N]on-teleological harmonic processes make room for the vocal textures to carry the music forward.” By building a predictable musical foundation under her sonic experiments, Björk leaves the listener with enough attentional bandwidth to absorb the complexities of her vocal manipulation and looping. The familiarity of the voice combined with the “future shock” of radical digital editing challenges the listener, but the repetition makes the challenge a surmountable one, eventually leading to deep musical gratification.

Update: this post is featured on Synthtopia’s Facebook wall, and there’s a lively discussion happening over there. Check it out!

From a science perspective, octaves are pitch intervals related by factors of two. When a tuning fork plays standard concert A, it vibrates at 440 Hz. The A an octave higher is 880 Hz, and the A an octave lower is 220 Hz. Any note with the frequency 2^n * 440 will be an A. It’s a central mystery of human cognition why we hear pitches related by powers of two as being “the same” note. The ability to detect octave equivalency is probably built in to our brains, and it isn’t limited to humans. Rhesus monkeys have been shown to be able to detect octaves too, as have some other mammals.

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The top row shows the fundamental frequency, the one you hear as the pitch — say it’s a violin string playing A 440. The second row shows the first harmonic, the string vibrating in halves, producing A 880. The harmonic is quieter than the fundamental, so you aren’t necessarily conscious of it, but you can isolate it by lightly touching the string at its halfway point while playing. The other rows show other harmonics, vibrations of the string in integer ratios, each producing a pitch that’s an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency. The second harmonic is E 1320; the third is A 1760; the fourth is C# 2200.

In an ideal string, the harmonics would continue to get infinitely higher, beyond the range of your hearing. As the harmonics get higher, they also get quieter and subtler. Still, they all have an impact on the overall sound of the instrument. All musical instruments have overtones: winds, the human throat, speaker cones, even well-tuned drumheads.

Read more about how harmonics form the basis of western music theory.

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All of our behavior results from a bunch of molecules bouncing around according to the laws of quantum mechanics. Seen that way, we don’t have any more free will than pebbles being tumbled down a river. We think we have free will because we can’t predict the future, and because our immediate experience is full of so much ambiguity.

Free will is an illusion, but it’s a powerful, persistent and useful illusion. The inherently complex and chaotic nature of our brains prevents us from being able to predict our own actions. We’re even worse at predicting events caused by the emergent complexities of the interactions between large groups of people other people.

Way down at the quantum level, we may well be living in a deterministic universe. But because we have no way of perceiving all the intricate quantum interactions doing the determining, for all practical purposes, we might as well pretend to have free will.

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I’ve always wondered where the Egyptian melody came from. It turns out to be hundreds of years of old, and goes by many different names. You can find an excellent capsule history of it in William Benzon’s book Beethoven’s Anvil. The context is a discussion of a Louis Armstrong recording from 1928 called “Tight Like This.” Listen at 2:04 as Louis quotes the “Egyptian” melody and varies it a few times.

Benzon knows the Egyptian melody from childhood. He quotes different sets of lyrics, such as:

All the girls in France do the hokey pokey dance,
and the way they shake is enough to kill a snake

Another variation:

On the planet Mars all the women smoke cigars.
Every puff they take is enough to kill a snake.
When the snake is dead they put flowers on its head.
When the flowers die they say 1969!

The tune has been known in America as the “hookie-kookie dance” or the “hoochie-coochie dance.” It came to fame when it accompanied a belly dancer at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, and afterwards it became something of a hit. The melody was copyrighted under various names early in the 20th century, including “Dance Of The Midway,” “Coochi-Coochi Polka” and “The Streets Of Cairo.” (Thank you, Eunji Choi, for pointing me to this last tune’s Wikipedia page.)

The Egyptian melody appears in the widely-studied Arban’s Complete Conservatory Method For Trumpet from 1864, under the title “Arabian Song.” Arban almost certainly didn’t write it; it’s one of many “representative ethnic songs” in the book learned from the folk tradition. The tune is related to an Arabic or Algerian melody called “Kradoutja” that had been circulating around France since the 1600s. Who knows if the tune in Arban’s book is an actual middle eastern folk song, or a European mutation of “Kradoutja,” or what.

The Egyptian melody also gets quoted a lot in performances of “Sheik of Araby,” for example as performed here by the Beatles for their unsuccessful Decca audition in 1962.

Steve Martin uses the melody at the beginning of “King Tut.” (no embedding.)

They Might Be Giants use the tune in “Istanbul” for the line “Even old New York was once New Amsterdam.”

A more recent quotation — “Who’s That? Brooown!” by Das Racist:

This story is a perfect illustration of how musical memes evolve the way organisms do. It has a similar evolutionary history to the “Asian riff,” another stereotypically ethnic musical meme.

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Why has music been historically the most abstract art form?

I had an art professor in college who argued that all “representational” art is abstract, and all “abstract” art is representational. Any art has to refer back to sensory impressions of the world, internal or external, because that’s the only raw material we have to work with. Meanwhile, you’re unlikely to ever mistake a work of representational art for the object it represents. You don’t mistake photographs (or photorealistic paintings) for their subjects, and even the most “realistic” special effects in movies require willing suspension of disbelief.

Music seems more abstract than other art forms because it represents emotional states, symmetry and repetition, and other intangibles. But just because you can’t see or touch these things, doesn’t make them any less real. In preliterate societies, music was probably one of the best methods for storing and conveying complex stories and information.

Also, I dispute the idea that visual art started representational and then “progressed” toward greater abstraction. Architecture, textiles, tile work, face and body decorations and jewelry all use pattern, color and texture for their own sake, without any representational content.

Any one of the above images could pass as a music visualization or notation. I see a strong parallel between this kind of decorative art and the mathematical patterns in music — there’s the interest in interlocking patterns and symmetry for their own sake. Symmetry is a fact of the world, and both abstract art and music represent that fact clearly.

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Recursion is crucial to writing computer programs in a compact, elegant way, but it also opens the door to infinite loops and irreconcilable logical contradictions.

Self-reference makes loops possible, which is great for programming. But sometimes the computer gets stuck in those loops. XKCD gives a playful illustration of how this can happen, using ducks.

We experience these infinite loops as computer crashes. The computer isn’t “stuck” when it crashes; it’s just running the same few instructions over and over.

The computer can’t break its own loops by “stepping outside of itself;” it needs an external agent to intervene, like you hitting the reset button.

The operations of our minds are also heavily recursive and self-referential. But unlike computers, we aren’t prone to getting stuck in loops, and we seem to be unfazed by logical paradoxes. Some of us even find them beautiful. Nature is full of self-similar, “paradoxical” structures like fractals.

Biological systems are especially self-similar and fractal-like.
Our brains are full of recursive loops. The brain’s representation of itself to itself is probably the basis of our consciousness.

The profoundest truths take on the quality of strange loops, GEB’s useful shorthand for recursive paradoxes. Here’s a diagram I made of the “heterarchy” of human knowledge.

Bach isn’t the only musician to use recursion and self-reference. Hip-hop and other sample-based music use it too, in the form of artists sampling their own songs within their own songs. Here are some blog posts digging into this idea.

• Biggie Biggie Smalls Is The Illest
• Eric B and Rakim
• Nas Is Like
• In A Silent Way is a remix of itself
• Self-reference in computer programming and hip-hop
• Take it to the bridge

Hofstadter also tackles the concept of emergence, the way that an intelligent mind can arise from the interaction of unintelligent component. He compares the mind to an anthill — the collective ant colony has intelligence, even though the individual ants are dumb.

Finally, the book is the best introduction to Zen Buddhist thinking that I’ve come across. Hofstadter observes that westerners are used to thinking in terms of neat Manichean categories — profound truths are unambiguously true or false. Zen prepares the mind to deal with Gödelian paradoxes, strange loops, fractals and the like.

I don’t think I’ve ever succeeded in reading GEB from cover to cover. It’s not really that kind of book. I prefer to just open to a random page and struggle with whatever concept I find there. I recommend a similar approach.

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My musician friends use the term “jazz face” to describe the sometimes ridiculous expressions they have when they’re most deeply immersed in the music. Think also of Michael Jordan sticking his tongue out in the heat of play. And consider the fact that some people need to pace in order to think, or gesticulate, or perform repetitive manual tasks like knitting or splitting wood.

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