Distorting Sound

Imagine you’re in Jamaica, circa sometime in the ‘60s and ‘70s. You want to make some cash, maybe selling wares and food, get a little bit of a party going. You need to attract customers to your spot, so how are you going to do it? Well, one way you might is by getting a sound system going – some speakers on a flatbed truck, for example. You need to play some music, so you might get yourself a turntable with a DJ, and play the hottest records around. Now that you have all that set up, you go to a nice sunny spot, and you start to play. A crowd starts to show up, and you can sell a bit of merch; things are going well, until just down the way, someone else shows up with the same kind of truck and starts playing – but louder. They’re drowning out the sound of your music, so you up your volume to win the crowd back. More trucks start showing up, and the crowd is moving from place to place, and the music is getting louder and louder. You try to keep up, but your sound starts clipping at the highest volumes, and eventually – BANG! Your speakers blow out. You just got killed by sound in a Jamaican sound clash.

The clipping sound you heard right before you blew your system? That’s distortion, and it’s been around since the first electric guitar amplifiers. When you try to play sounds louder than your system’s power supply can allow for, the tops and bottoms of the sine waves that the vibrations from your music make get cut off, leading to that dirty, crunchy, warm sound. Distortion is one of those beautiful things that sound like a mistake at first, but can actually add a lot of colour to the music you make. Early blues guitarists experienced distortion because their amps didn’t have very large power supplies; amplifying the music would result in distortion even if they didn’t want it. Later on, musicians started experimenting with distortion intentionally, with guitarists like Link Wray intentionally poking holes into their amplifiers in order to mess with their sounds.

Today, distortion and rock music are so intertwined it would be almost impossible to find a band that hasn’t used it in some way or another. We’re no longer so prone to jabbing our amplifiers full of holes or intentionally blowing them out; in fact, there’s a whole industry dedicated to not having to do that. Many effects pedals produce distortion in some manner or another; the techniques that they use to do this can be pretty varied, and the sounds you can create are as disparate as the techniques used. You can have distortion on your low notes, distortion on your high notes, fuzz effects; you name it, there’s probably a pedal that can produce it. All of this from something that was considered dissonant, unwanted and problematic.

There’s an important lesson to be learned from the history of distortion: you need to keep an open mind when making music. When you’re writing or improvising, and you make a note that sounds off, see if you can incorporate that note into the overall structure of the song. Repeat it. Riff off of it. Play with it. When you make a noise that doesn’t sound like music, think about distortion; that didn’t sound musical to many, at first. Producers would shy away from the noise. Link Wray’s “Rumble” got banned from radio play because the distortion was so scary; can you imagine? One of the keys to unlocking new and exciting music is to be willing to use sounds no one has thought of as musical; incorporate the dissonant, the surprising, and the surreal into your compositions.

Music lessons shouldn’t just be about teaching you to play music – they should be about teaching you to appreciate music. Training your brain to hear music everywhere is like training your brain to think in a different language; it allows you to perceive the world in a new way. When everything is music to you, the world takes on a lighter, more playful tone. Every sound you hear becomes more beautiful. The buzzing of the city becomes an orchestra. You can hear the sum of the parts, the greater whole they form, the unity of it all, from distortion to crystal clear sounds.

source https://www.academymusic.ca/distorting-sound/

The Triplet Flow

Those of you who haven’t been living under a metaphorical musical rock recently have probably noticed the substantial uptick in a little genre called “trap”. The genre originated in the 1990s in Atlanta; at its origin, the term “trap rap” referred to the lyrics of trap music. Rappers would tell tales of the hardships of drug dealing and poverty, the word trap a reflection of how difficult it was to leave that lifestyle. The word “trap” also referred to the place where drug deals were made. Today, the word trap refers to the music that derives from those origins, even if the lyrics are much less commonly about drug dealing. As of the writing of this article, in fact, the top song on the Billboard charts is a “country trap” song called “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X, a far cry from the genre’s origins (debate continues as to whether or not it’s country) If the lyrical themes are no longer the hallmark of the genre, how do we know what is and isn’t trap?

The answer lies in the instrumentals and flows, the new signifiers of trap. Instrumentally, trap music focuses on a sound I would describe as pretty dark and a bit jittery; deep 808 kick drums, clattering hi-hats and crisp snares. While the genre has become more experimental in recent years, with psychedelic efforts like Travis Scott’s “Astroworld” playing with a wide array of sounds and instruments, the rhythmic palette remain mostly unchanged. Flow can vary pretty wildly between artist to artist, but almost all of them employ, at one point or another, the flow we’re going to talk about today: the triplet flow.

The triplet flow is pretty intuitive to grasp if you understand a bit of music theory. In essence, a triplet is any series of three notes that is played in the same time that it would normally take to play two of those notes. That means an eighth note triplet is three notes played in the same amount of time it would take to play two eighth notes. A way of grokking this if you’re not so well versed on music theory is to take a two syllable word, then say a three syllable word in the same time it would take you to say the two syllable word. To experiment with this, let’s take an iconic fashion brand like “Dolce and Gabbana”; say Dolce 5 times, then say Gabbana 5 times in the amount of time you said Dolce 5 times. Congratulations; your Gabbanas were in a triplet flow!

I’ll admit that choosing a fashion brand for that demonstration was a bit cheeky on my part; the reason I did so is that the triplet flow was popularized largely by the song “Versace” by Migos, the chorus of which is the word “Versace” repeated several times in a triplet flow. The effect of the flow is pretty exceptional. It’s fast and disorienting to the point of being almost dizzying; it’s often rapped in an extremely staccato style, so every syllable of every word is stressed. While Migos may have popularized the style, it goes back a long way; some of the grandfathers of trap rap, like the group Three 6 Mafia, rapped with triplet flows way back in the 1990s.

The effect of the triplet flow, juxtaposed with the beat, will often create complex rhythms that ramp up the intensity of a song. For this reason, triplet flows don’t only see use in rap; you can sing in triplets, too. Pop singers like Ariana Grande and Charli XCX have both used the triplet flow on their songs. That’s a tricky proposition; a lot of singers find it difficult to sing rapidfire while still retaining the quality and tone of their notes. There’s a reason that the two of them are near the peak of the pop pantheon right now.

Whether you’re trying to learn to rap triplet flows or sing them, there are music lessons that can get you stage ready. You can learn everything from the deeper music theory and history of the flow, to the best vocal warm-ups to get you ready to perform. The lessons take place in your home, so you don’t have to worry if you stutter over your first few attempts; stay at it, and you’ll be able to rap any fashion brand’s name astonishingly fast.

source https://www.academymusic.ca/the-triplet-flow/

Consonance and Dissonance

Humans crave simplicity. We crave complexity too, but under very different circumstances. The beauty of simplicity is that it’s easy to understand, and understanding things easily is important to our survival. Simplicity is especially useful in language, because tight definitions allow us to convey information in fewer words. I once had a friend ask me what the “shape that was like a square but two sides were longer and the other two were shorter” was; he meant, of course, a rectangle. Reducing complex ideas to a single term helps us better understand each other; not all concepts can be so easily reduced, though.

Consonance and dissonance are not things that can be easily described with one definition; their meanings are relative to each other, and relative to culture, upbringing, sense of aesthetics and more. A discussion of consonance and dissonance must also be a discussion of complexity. Instead of offering you an easy answer for what they mean, we’re going to analyze them through a variety of different lenses, to see if we can create a deeper understanding of the terms.

The first lens we’ll employ is purely mathematical. Two notes might be said to be consonant if the ratio between them is simple; our desire for simplicity, back at it again. A perfect fifth is highly consonant; it has a ratio of 3:2, meaning that the upper note makes three vibrations in the same amount of time it takes for the lower note to make two. The major seventh, conversely, has a ratio of 15:8; quite an odd ratio, and quite dissonant to the ears. Without knowing these ratios, you could probably still tell which interval was consonant, and which was dissonant. Things get really strange with the perfect fourth, though. It has a ratio of 4:3, which is quite simple, and to listen to it without context, it sounds quite consonant. In practice, however, the perfect fourth is often considered dissonant. Why?

Put simply, it’s because more often than not, a perfect fourth feels like it needs resolution. It feels inchoate and unstable; we expect it to resolve to a more stable note. You can try this yourself; play an A, then a D, and you’ll almost certainly feel the desire to resolve the two to a third note, something like a C. This shows that simple mathematical ratios aren’t sufficient to explain consonance and dissonance; what else, then, explains it?

The answer to this isn’t simple, though we might very much like for it to be. We can look at cultural understanding to get some idea. When most of the music you’ve listened to for most of your life has treated certain intervals as “tension” and other intervals as “resolution”, you’re likely to interpret perfect fourths or other dissonant intervals as tense, even if you didn’t even understand the concept before reading this. Things that we might find “dissonant” can be seen as desirable in other cultures. For example, if you play two notes whose wavelengths are ever so slightly different, the ear can’t readily distinguish between the notes, but the respective waveforms will construct and destroy each other when overlapped, creating a “beating” or “tremolo” effect. Western musicians strive to eliminate beating, while in Indonesian gamelan music, the beat effect is sought for its added texture.

Here’s where things get really complex: what is music? When we make music, what are we trying to do? There’s no easy answer to this question, but what we are doing, in most cases, is trying to use sounds to invoke an emotional response. We can analyze consonance and dissonance from a variety of different angles, but in the end, it all comes down to how you feel. You can feel dissonance because you want resolution; you can feel consonance because it feels like home, like you’ve arrived. Without dissonance, the music might not be very good, because there’s no real journey to embark on; you never leave home. Without consonance, the music feels listless, unpredictable, not fully formed, because you have no sense of where you’re trying to get to. This means that consonance and dissonance will change constantly over time, as we gain new conceptions of what home is, and what the journey to home feels like. As you learn more about music, through piano lessons, music theory classes, even just listening to new songs, you’ll begin to appreciate how deep the concepts of consonance and dissonance truly are.

source https://www.academymusic.ca/consonance-and-dissonance/