Here's a fun fact:
You can Kill Musical Instruments
How?? I ask you desperately demand of me.
Well, I'm starting a mini-series addressing the top 5, or maybe 10, incredible facts about sound & music, and today is your lucky day as part 1 will show you exactly how to ensure your instrument dies.
Each fact is going to go deep into the rabbit hole, into the very fundamental features of our universe, demonstrating how music is an indelible part of our physical existence. Seriously, looking back at this stuff in more detail just drops my jaw. Fascinating stuff, trust me.
But before we get to the instructional part of the post, we need to address the very nature of sound itself: Timbre.
Timbre
Timbre refers to the quality of sound that comes from a given instrument. For example, You could play the exact same note on a guitar string and a piano string, and they will sound completely different. They have a different timbre. Indeed, you can have two guitars play the same note and have distinctly different sounds from each too. Even more, you can play the same note on the same guitar, but using different strings and easily tell the difference. This is because every note played is vibrating through strings of different quality, which reverberates around different bodies of wood and other materials.
This process creates unique waves of sound with many complex frequencies hidden within. I've talked about the harmonic series before, and I'm sure to do in this string of posts in the future in more detail. But in short for now, take a look at these:
Both of these images represent my own voice singing the exact same pitch. So, same instrument. The only difference is the top one I am singing 'Ooo' and the bottom I'm singing 'Ahh'.
From the left, this shows the lowest, rumbling low frequencies, and the right is the highest, dog-whistle levels of frequencies. As you can see, my voice isn't actually just one frequency, or note. It's built from a whole cacophony of notes, with one or two typically taking dominance.
In my 'Ahh' sound, there, there seems to be more dominant frequencies in the lower end compared to the 'Ooo' sound, making it unique.
Well, what if we wanted to destroy my voice?
What happens if we remove all of those secondary peaks, and just use the one dominant peak for each one? A quick EQ should do it:
Now, there are no other peaks. The other peaks are what we call overtones. The dominant one is the main harmonic. By eradicating all overtones, we end up with a pure sound which tends to lose all kinds of information.
We end up with a sine wave
A sine wave is simply a wave with equal peaks and troughs across equal time. Boring, plain, simple.
You can see my representation isn't perfect, merely a rough estimation. But if you take a listen, you can already tell that with one simple step, I've transformed my own unique, human voice into little more than a mechanical tone. My voice is officially dead. There is no more musical character to speak of. All evidence of a crime vanished without a trace. All sense of vowel sounds has totally disappeared!
Here they are side by side untouched. After removing the overtones, can you guess which one is which?
You can do this with practically any sounds, no matter how different they are to begin with..
Look at these instruments: a Clarinet, a Horn and a Violin all playing the exact same note:
Clarinet
Horn
Violin
(Disclosure: These are MIDI versions of each instrument, so manufactured replications of each instrument. This might actually make it easier to see how the sounds are designed)
The first thing I noticed was that the clarinet has a large primary harmonic followed by a chasm of nothing before the higher frequencies to the left start to come in. This is quite distinct from my experience.
The Horn and Violin are fairly similar, but you can see the Violin has much more deeper frequencies to the left as well as higher ones to the right. One could say the violin has a 'richer' timbre.
Clearly, these are different sounds, and we can hear them as such without any problem.
Now, let's do a REAL test.
Below are 6 completely different instruments, live-recorded by me:
- A pure Sine Wave
- A Piano
- A Shakuhachi (Japanese flute)
- A Guitar playing on the A string
- A Guitar playing on the B string
- My own voice saying Eeeeeeeee
I've recorded them here in random order, but I have removed all overtones.
To truly kill off any musical characteristic in every single one of them, and to make it a little harder for you to guess (ok, impossible), I added the following things:
A Gate. This cuts out sound when it falls below a certain volume. So, whereas a guitar string will become quieter slowly (called decay), a shakuhachi will cease as soon as I stop breathing into it. I wanted to remove this variable.
Reverb. For the same reason as above, giving a little bit of room noise hides the pure sine wave, as the others will naturally have the sound reflections of the room I'm in.
Melodyne/Autotune. I used this to remove wobble, or vibrato in certain instruments so each sound is a flat performance. Nothing artsy fartsy allowed here.
Compressor. I used this to make the quiet parts louder and the loud parts quieter, so each instrument has equal representation without any volume discrepancies.
Ultimately, I simply recorded each one at the exact same pitch, then removed the overtones and obvious variables that occur at the start and end of each sound.
Which one's which??
https://soundcloud.com/andrewmobbs/sound-quiz3?si=0a326b7d022c4df79b37ab3316d01f50&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Sorry it's a bit quiet
... Pretty crazy, eh? Answers at the bottom of the post!
I mean, I know you can't possibly figure it out so I wouldn't bother even trying if I were you.
We here have officially destroyed every instrument in this room except the drum kit, which is a story for another day.
Final thought
I was listening to a podcast recently which touched upon something very interesting. As a choir instructor among other things, I notice some students are completely 'tone deaf'. But I've learnt not to actually see it in this way.
What I started to notice is that students don't sing random notes. They follow the melodic direction accurately, and typically stay within a certain interval out of tune, say a 4th (for example 'Do Re Me' is sung as 'So La Ti').
How can this be if they are 'deaf'? Well, it turns out that there's reason to believe these tone deaf kids actually have better ears than the regular-eared person. The problem is, they simply cannot distinguish the dominant harmonic from the rest of the overtones. It's possible that their brains can actually hear the overtones with less discrimination compared to us who can simply sing the correct pitches naturally, only hearing the one dominant pitch!
When a girl with pitch problems tries to sing what I sing, she has great trouble, hitting all kinds of wrong harmonies. However, when I sing at a higher octave to match her own voice, she will get it immediately. One can also sing with a more breathy tone, which purifies some of those overtones, and students tend to get it more clearly then, too.
What tone-deaf people actually need to do is to learn to discriminate the dominant harmonic from the chaos of sound coming into their ears without them even consciously knowing about it. Which takes time and practice of course.
Now, we need to understand these overtones, which I will cover in depth in a follow-up post at some undetermined time in the future.
Answers
1) Guitar on A String
2) Guitar on B String
3) Pure Sine Wave
4) Piano
5) Shakuhachi
6) Me singing Eeeeee
This is a fascinating blog about music, and I learned information. However, as I read your blog some related (unrelated?) thoughts ran through my mind.
First of all, I like the graphics. There surely must be people who have made art from these graphs. I find them very visually interesting.
And then, when you discuss 'tone deaf' singers I was thinking of how impossible it is for us to experience sensations as others experience them. When we see or hear something, we project our experience on others. But that isn't valid.
This will be an interesting series, I think.
Yep! Much like the polar opposite of tone deaf: Perfect pitch, which I'll go into later. Turns out it's not all it's cracked up to be!
Well, music is art, quite literally in this case =) But they are merely representations of cold, cold physics
Glad you enjoyed it! I'll try not to ramble too much as I continue the series. I tend to do that when I get too into something heh
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Nice! Great presentation and examples for people who are new or unaccustomed to this sort of thinking about music and audio!
Yeah it's kind of a fun challenge to make it readable to all. There's endless opportunity to get very very confusing. I imagine it'll get harder as the series goes on...
Quite a fascinating read about music. I once read an article here about a deaf person composing beats for singers. Wish I could recall the user who made the article.
Oh, that's mighty impressive. I guess its made more or less impressive depending if they had hearing in the past, or if they can hear through vibrations a la Beethoven. Either way, great to overcome such things
The image answered it, doesn’t it? More seriously, when I started to read your post I was thinking about the piano I bought 5 months ago. I had to learn how to treat it to make sure it will last for the next 40 years at least (constant temperature in the room, protected from the sun, regular tuning (to get a reasonable tension internally), etc…
But then surprise surprise this had nothing to do with the post (I like to write a comment in parallel to a reading, so that it may happen to be unrelated and I may be too lazy to erase it).
Thank for sharing this post (is it the one you started months ago). It was quite interesting, even for someone who cannot sing... Even after trying to apply what I have read here, I won't be able to sing (and to isolate any harmonic with my voice).
I didn’t try as I assumed this should not even be possible ;)
Haha you dont HAVE to comment if you say unrelated things lol... Though I always appreciate it
One of my huge frustrations where I work. The grand piano is right by the window, and the big boss insists all windows have to have their curtains open at all times, forcing the sun to bake the finish of the piano. Heating goes from 0C - 30C whenever they decide to turn on the A/C which is about 20 times a day. It's a nightmare. I've already had to climb under the thing and make repairs on the pedals, and had to tune it multiple times already. Urgh.
Nah, I got rid of that the other day. After so much time it just started to feel obsolete or irrelevent or uninteresting to me now. It happens. At least I got my writing streak back though!
Actually you can. If you sing, for example, Eeeee(doesnt matter how badly), put your palm over your mouth as you sing it, you'll cut out some of those harmonics and your voice will start sounding as Ooooh regardless. Try it out! (recording it will make it more obvious from outside your own head)
Yeah but this was already written... I had the choice to remove the comment, which I was too lazy to do, or post it anyways. I chose the latter, as this is also much funnier.
I will try the "eeee" "ooo" thing, but not in the middle of the institute... i.e. tonight at home ;)
Guess what? We tried the "oooh" and "eeeeeh" around the table during the week-end... with the full family :D
Hahaha, wow. nice to see my nerdery is infecting other families now =D
That's normal: this one was so funny to do :D