3 Sep
2010
3 Sep
'10
4:43 p.m.
On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Brent Busby <brent(a)keycorner.org> wrote:
On Fri, 3 Sep 2010, Arvind Venkatasubramanian wrote:
I discovered this while I was walking besides the school of philosophy
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
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