[LAU] re Subconscious Affecting Music

[Arvind Venkatasubramanian]

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Brent Busby <brent at keycorner.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 3 Sep 2010, Arvind Venkatasubramanian wrote:
>
>  I discovered this while I was walking besides the school of philosophy
>> after completing my class in in engineering. As I was hearing to the sounds
>> of leaves and birds, I was approaching my music lab at the Frost school of
>> music. As I was about to get into my department, I heard a beautiful melody
>> from a saxophone. I kept chanting the melody for sometime as I started to
>> work on my computer. With time, I started to feel the image of the melody
>> subjectively. But I felt that to be too faint to hear. I wanted it to be a
>> bit louder and tried to turn up the volume button in me. I noticed that I
>> could not do that. Any attempt that I made to turning up the level of the
>> music only helped me transposing the melody up my one or two keys
>> (semitones). Similarly, any attempt to lower the tone helped only in
>> transposing the melody down by few keys.
>>
>
> Drummers regularly exploit this tendency we have, to think of higher volume
> level as being subjectively perceivable as higher pitch.  A drummer who is
> working with a small number of percussion instruments (perhaps just one
> snare drum and nothing else) may use accented notes that are played louder
> than the others to create the impression that those notes are the "snare
> notes", and other fainter notes are the "bass drum notes".  You can take it
> even further to make notes of intermediate volume seem to be the "tom
> notes".  If played with appropriate feel and intonation, you can create
> something of the illusion of a whole drumset pattern on one drum using only
> volume changes.  The listener's mind will interpret the volume changes as
> pitch changes that don't really exist. This is even useful when a full
> drumset is available, because it means there can be implied pitch changes
> available alongside real ones, which can be interesting.
>
> Your mind was probably just doing the same thing with the memory of the
> saxophone.  When you imagined it louder, you also imagined the pitch going
> higher.
>
> --
> + Brent A. Busby         + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
> + UNIX Systems Admin     +  banging on a million typewriters will
> + University of Chicago  +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
> + Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
> + James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky
>


Brent: Very Interesting.  But that's the skill of trained drummers to
control the bandwidth of the spectrum by their playing skills.  In the
subjective memory music, if I listen to a note in a melody or percussion
just 5 seconds back, I can have control over sound level, if I want to
change sound level and pitch control, if I want pitch control.

But after 10 minutes, I cannot do that.  But from what you say, a drummer
can do it anytime he wants because he is actually tweaking the matter
(waveFORM) and not accessing (his?) mind.

Regards,
Arvind V
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