Building Blocks of Music Part

Building Blocks of Music
Part One – the sound

I was going to start with the interval, but decided to start with the most basic building block of music: sound itself. Surprisingly, most musicians and music students never tackle the nature of sound itself, which is their loss. I was fortunate enough to have studied this material in depth with Gordon Mumma and Peter Elsea in the UC Santa Cruz electronic music program. Believe it or not, it even has helped me in interpreting work on the harpsichord.

Sound is a wave. It is pure energy. It must move through a material in order to transmit itself. Unlike light, it cannot skip through a vacuum and show up on the other side. The characteristic of the sound is effected by the material it passes through.

We perceive sound through three senses, although we only think of one. When the sound carries enough energy we can SEE the sound (think of watching iron filings on a cymbal). At the right frequency (the number of waves per second) and amplitude (the amount of energy carried in the wave), we can certainly FEEL the sound (if one has the right equipment and the wrong intentions, one may force a person to wet his trousers with sound). If the sound’s frequency is between 20 Hertz (waves or cycles per second) and 20,000 Hertz (or 20 KHz), and we have not damaged our hearing we can HEAR it (have you been to a rock concert? Walked a mile in a city during the day? You cannot really hear 20 kHz, then). Now, there are some composers and musicians (Karlheinz Stockhausen makes this claim), that even though one cannot hear above 20 kHz, we still perceive harmonics to about double that. Apparently they have done tests, etc. I am unconvinced.

When the sound enters our ears, it is converted from mechanical energy to electrical energy. The electrical energy is sent via the nerves to the brain, where the sound is interpreted. For those of us who grew up in Italian families with lots of female relatives, sounds of a certain frequency are not processed as speech, rather as background noise. It takes a special intonation of "are you listening to me?" to force the brain to accept information in these frequencies as speech. Fortunately my mother does not read this blog.

But for most folks sound matching recognizable phonemes is processed by the brain as speech and semantic content is extracted from it. Some sound plays with the boundary between speech and non-speech, and we will discuss that when we analyze Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate and some of the vocal works of Luciano Berio and Arnold Schoenberg.

Sound that does not parse as speech can still carry information. Some sounds are indexicals of physical processes (a Doppler-shifted air horn is an alarming indexical of a rapidly approaching train (Cash, John. "Folsom Prison Blues" from At Folsom Prison. Columbia Records, New York. 1968. Or for a concrete example of this phenomenon, look at Superman animated shorts)). Sounds can convey non-speech information by interacting with other sounds, for instance, a narrative can be established by sounds indicating a door opening, footsteps, a revolver’s safety being turned off, a scream, a gunshot, footsteps, and a siren. Or a mood can be established by sounds indicating a brook, aspen leaves in the wind, birds chirping, cowbells ringing. Or the sounds can convey information by establishing patterns by way of relation and repetition.

When sounds convey information by establishing patterns with relations and repetitions we are in the realm of music (although, the other ways that sounds can convey information can be a part of music, too, as we will see when we look at John Zorn’s Spillane). But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Right now (and for the next two parts) we will just look at single sounds in isolation.

Sound can be divided into two basic forms: the tone and noise, which will be Part Two and Three. Part Four is when we will discuss two sounds interacting in the form of an interval.