3 Sep
2010
3 Sep
'10
4:25 p.m.
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