There are a lot of different musical instruments out there. Just about all of them share four basic components: a harmonic oscillator, a source of noise, a control surface for modulation, and a resonator.
Tag Archives: resonance
Jimi Hendrix, electronic musician
People had been playing electric guitar for decades before Jimi Hendrix. Mostly they used it as a louder, less effortful version of the acoustic guitar. Jimi was one of the first musicians to think of the guitar amp as a musical instrument unto itself, an early analog synth, with the guitar as a very sophisticated control surface.
Wow chicka wah-wah
Say “oooh” as in “noodle.” Then say “aaah” as in “park.” When you say “oooh” your mouth is more closed, with less resonating space and a smaller opening. This configuration blocks the higher overtones of your voice. When you say “aaah” your jaw and lips open, creating more resonating space and letting more high overtones through. Now glide from one to the other. The resulting “ooohaaaah” is the sound the wah-wah pedal is named for. By selectively filtering an electronic instrument’s overtones, the pedal can make it sound more vocal. It’s only two vowel sounds out of the dozens your mouth is capable of producing, but it’s a start toward making a more human tone.
Here’s a documentary about the wah:
Cry Baby: The Pedal That Rocks The World from Joey Tosi on Vimeo.
Tuning the quantum guitar
Music is really just orderly vibrations: in the air, in instrument bodies, in speaker cones, in tiny hairs in your inner ear, in electromagnetic fields in wires, in patterns of neurons firing in your brain. If you understand the math behind these vibrations, it can help you understand how music works. Surprisingly, it can also help you understand quantum mechanics and the fundamental structure of the universe. No joke! Albert Einstein himself used music theory to guide his investigation into the vibrations of the subatomic world. Einstein’s preferred tool for musical investigation was the violin, but any instrument will do.