I stopped geeking about microphones and audio interfaces for a second and got dragged into a rabbit hole on harmonics, waves and dissonance. (long story, involving trying to remove room tone/echo so I can record in the bathroom). I dropped in on Adam Neely‘s channel for a video about of all things, Celine Dion (?)
Weird cos I HATE music theory…might sound odd for someone who has created sort-of musical things, but a lot of presentation of music theory is so dry it’s like a dessicated husk tumbleweeding in the desert. It’s like it takes all the fun and emotion out of music – the very lifeblood – and make it chinstrokey and boring. Or maths – and I fucking HATE maths. So I can only take very low doses of music theory before losing the will to live.
Also there can be a rather confrontational edge to music theory, a sort of extreme geekiness that tends to lead to either passion or pedantry. It’s put me off learning more because, to be brutally frank, a lot of it feels like it isn’t welcoming to beginners, that there’s scoring of points rather than collaboration/teaching? Like I’d have to be quiet about any new thing I learned because of those wanting to show their dominance? It feels different to art in that respect, more in your face.
This lead to the probably the best ever explanation on the harmonic series by Andrew Huang. I kind of knew this, sorta. It’s quite hard to grasp and this is amazingly well done how it explains that. It even explains why actually equal temperament is a compromise and we don’t actually use just temperament in the modern music scale, even if the two are related.
And then with harmomics, sine waves were referenced and so I got a lesson in how fourier transformations worked in a way that even I, as a visual only artist could understand (interesting side fact: I learn visually, I struggle with number-based learning and to some extent purely word based as well, So teach me with diagrams and visual means, I get it immediately. Stick to numbers or long paragraphs of text and you have lost me immediately)..
I love the idea that mathematically you can just draw anything with circles and sine waves. I’m sure the maths is actually quite eye-wateringly complex.
Also there is an interesting video on why culturally and musically people hate harmonic dissonance and different tuning, especially in the West, referencing a TikTok video of a woman harmonising in fifths to a very complicated song, The Schoenberg skit really made me LOL…but this definitely relates to mashups and mashup production – like with Adele’s latests, perfect pitch is not always ideal, and how much do we enforce this ancient classical-based cultural homogeny over pitch and harmony?
Another video talks about Melodyne and vocal perfection being ‘uncanny valley’ and affecting how vocalists sing, as nearly everything is auto-tuned or tweaked harmonically now in the computer. This affects mashup producers as well; as that search for perfection can be a fool’s errand and deaden music into a homogenous mulch…I have come across this, sometimes ‘perfect’ sounds wrong.
I think Adele’s latest song is #shotsfired about this, it’s obvious she didn’t tweak the vocal intentionally to get that old-skool flavour, and sang off pitch centre for creative and emotional reasons, not cos she’s ‘OOK’. And it works.
Also I learned about antiphony – the harmonic call and response I heard in Addis Ababa cathedral for instance or was aware as plainsong in Western Isles Protestant churches via Adam as well – talking about the Wellerman trend again on TikTok and how those work songs worked harmonically, and their surprising rhythmical structure.
I really wish I had Adam or Andrew as a teacher when I was young, I might not have been scared off music by a screaming scary teacher who made it so stressful. I loved music and wanted to play an instrument even as a kid but didn’t want to study under her or deal with some of the ideologies of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ which are so culturally loaded.
I feel like art, music teaching in schools can be equally enlightening but also creatively destructive. So nice that there are YouTube educationalists filling that gap, and opening up that world to those of us who didn’t have that chance.
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