808 Sounds You've Heard

     No, the title of this post is not the header for a behemoth list of audible observations. My hands don't have the longevity to write such a list, and I bet not even audiophiles would have the will to read it. But that hypothetical list might be summed up with this short clip:

808 References

     808 this, 808 that...  I've noticed this lyrical pattern for a while but, before I got into electronic music, I had no idea what everyone was talking about with their 808 "Bumps," "Beats," "Bass," and "Booms." And if that bundle of breviloquent B-words didn't tip you off already, what these lyrics are referencing is a drum track. More specifically, they mean one produced by the Roland TR-808 drum synthesizer, endearingly referred to as simply the "808."

     Naming the 808 mid-song (or dedicating your entire song/album title to it) is a testament to how popular this thing is. Though sometimes the sounds are heavily processed, an enormous amount of the hip-hop, R&B, dance, and electronic music you'll hear on the radio uses some incarnation of the TR-808 for its rhythmic backing. This includes most of the clips you just listened to. You're probably familiar with many of those tunes. They're all relatively recent, especially considering that the drum technology they're serenading is from the early 1980s — the veritable stone age of synthesizers! Listen:

Roland TR-808 Samples

     If you strain your ears, you can at least tell which parts of a percussion kit these segments are meant to approximate, but compared to the realistic drum machines you can get today, the TR-808 is ridiculous — the snare drum sounds like gas escaping from a plastic grocery bag. I had to wonder why this obsolete synthesizer is so prevalent in popular music today.

     The simplest answer I could find is that it was cheap in its day, which always helps build a following. With hip-hop being a youthful genre void of any glamour at the time, aspiring emcees who just needed a few beats behind them always preferred a modest price tag, even when better drum machines were available. (Early Beastie Boys stuff, for example, features some pretty hot 808 action.) Over time, the artificial drum sounds became an integral part of that urban hip-hop flavor.

     But there's more to it. The most interesting thing the TR-808 has going for it is its killer kick drum whose emulation errs in an intriguing way. Listen to the first sound in that 808 sample clip again then check out what you find when you do a waveform analysis of it:

Horizontal axis = time (seconds). Vertical axis = loudness (decibels)

     First notice how the 808 kick takes almost zero time to get loud. In both drum and synth lingo, the time it takes a sound to initiate and get loud is called the attack. The faster the attack, the sharper it sounds to us. (recall my post on saw waves.) Also notice that the 808 kick oscillates at a much higher frequency near the beginning. This translates to a very high pitch that lasts about 1/300 of a second before dropping. It happens so fast you don't even know you've heard it until it's gone, but that rapid change in pitch gives the initial attack an extra little "pop" sound for emphasis. The equivalent pitch drop on the real kick drum isn't nearly dynamic enough to accomplish that feat.

     My favorite part of this comparison, though, is the fact that the 808 kick drum sustains a low pitch for way longer than a real kick drum does. And it's louder! A sharp attack plus a loud and long bass tone means the whole sound hits you fast and hard, in that order. A heavier sound makes for a more visceral reaction to it, and that's where we find much of the TR-808's lasting charm. Modulate those sounds in the right way and you get the foundation for pretty much every energetic electronic genre out there. And when things like house, trance, and dubstep converge with the aforementioned "urban hip-hop flavor," you get the 808-saturated pop music we hear today.

     Even if you're not using the 808, referring to it in your lyrics is a quick gimmick to make you sound like a cooler, more mature musician who understands his or her musical roots. Some genres have become practically defined by "that 808 bump." As a rough demonstration, here are two of my own tracks. They have similar rhythmic styles, but one features an 808 drum kit and one doesn't:

"AMP 2.2"	*Yawn...* A standard, vanilla drum synth. I made this as a teenager, well before I knew what the TR-808 was. It's dance-able, but I had to make the other synth instruments work extra hard to compensate for the fact that I just didn't know how to get the percussive power needed to make this track sound the way I thought it should.
"Flaming Squash"	Ah, that's better! The 808 isn't absolutely necessary here, but an 808-style wave profile is. Without that characteristic attack and bass, this wouldn't feel like proper trance music. Far East Movement said it well: "That 808 bump make you put your hands ups."

     Like many synthesizers, the TR-808 was originally meant as a replacement for an acoustic instrument. With respect to serving that purpose, no one will disagree that the TR-808 is obsolete. However, the sounds are now so departed from what we would consider a realistic drum synthesis that the technological limitations of 1980s offer 21st century musicians sounds in a category all their own. And the people who accepted the 808's musical potential for what it was at the time instead of trashing it the minute a slightly better drum approximation became available were the ones who pioneered entirely new genres of music.

     It's almost impossible to escape the influence the TR-808 has had over the past thirty years. The sounds are now staples of dance club music and are about as celebrated as the Friday nights during which they get played. Some group of people even went so far as to honor the renowned drum machine with its own day. "808 Day" is a novel holiday that pays tribute to the device whose penetrating drums beat the path for a good chunk of modern music. Quite predictably, it occurs every year on 8-08. And quite incidentally, that's also my birthday.

     So...I think I know what my birthday is going to sound like next year. Don't worry about showing up to the party — you'll hear it from where you are.

Substitutes

I was doing some research for a future blog entry I want to write and found this:

"Thump the bass and blast that solid Christian rock!"

Sweet, rocking Jesus, this is so terrible I almost don't know where to start! Since when is the on/off switch on a piece of electronic hardware listed among marketable accessory features like a removable strap and whammy bar? That's like if I were trying to sell you a new car by saying, "It also comes with wheels!"

But the reason I shake my head at this ad is not the quote-ably awful script. The game is an overt knock-off of the popular Guitar Hero games and is one of many products made for audiences whose interests or agendas conflict with what is already available. There's nothing wrong with catering to a different subset of people, but it seems almost disrespectful to assume those people will only be satisfied with derivative copies of other things.

To elucidate by analogy, I'm sure you've noticed this same phenomenon in vegan food options. There are vegan substitutes for pretty much everything now thanks to the infamous culinary shapeshifter, soy. I tried some soy-based vegan cheese on a pizza recently. Despite being a little sandy in texture, I was surprised at how creamy and cheese-like it tasted. But the fact that it tried so hard to mimic the real thing is a sign that people are either unable or unwilling to explore the still endless possibilities available to their dinner table even without so much as a reference to meat or dairy. For example, I can think of dozens of amazing and delicious things a person can do with almonds aside from turning them into a substitute for cow milk.

"Teese" was the name of the cheese substitute I ate — a name which, itself, suggests that being vegan is just a constant battle to resist sinful temptations. I've been vegan for several good stretches of time in the past and I can say that if the diet you choose is a diet you genuinely want, you won't crave the things you can't have. It's a slightly different story for people whose food restrictions are in response to allergies or other medical conditions, but substitutes like Teese seem mostly made for unafflicted people who either don't truly want or can't fully appreciate their choice of lifestyle as it is.

Guitar Praise is for people who want Guitar Hero but can't have AC/DC's irreverence or Ozzy Osbourne's demonic overtones. (You wouldn't want your Bible-studying, choir-boy son listening to a band called Black Sabbath, would you?) There are several other things the creators of Guitar Praise might have intended in its inception: To make Christianity fun and accessible to kids; to unobtrusively spread the word of God; or just to provide simple, wholesome entertainment. But their delivery device prevents me from getting any of those messages. It's a clone of Guitar Hero. The only message that sends is that Christianity is incapable of offering anything other than diminutive incarnations of bigger and better things. And that's about as fair a statement as saying that almonds are only good for milk. Substitutes are not limited to Christianity (or religion at all) but religious substitutes are perhaps the saddest considering the number of complex idiosyncrasies any spiritual lifestyle could offer for inspiration.

I've been picking on Guitar Praise, but there's almond milk everywhere! Ever heard Christian hip-hop? Or Christian metal? They exist, unabashedly emulating sounds we've heard before. Here's a listening exercise. Compare:

I hope you noticed the stylistic similarities here, particularly in the vocals. The left track is by a band called Eternal Decision which delivers Christian messages through thrash metal (hidden somewhere in the gruff yelling, I imagine) and the right track is... well... Metallica. While most religions' distinctive sounds come from well outside this century, and while Christian music hasn't had its own sound for about 300 years, it's practically unimaginable that something as big as an entire religion couldn't inspire unique and wonderful gifts for musicians to give the modern world — gifts that are more than just familiar songs with Jesus in the lyrics.

The best vegan dishes bring their own personality to the table without being overshadowed by the beefier dishes among them and without resorting to imitation. They are good not despite a lack of meat and dairy, but because they lack meat and dairy. They own and nurture the creative possibilities still available instead of constantly compensating for the restrictions, which is a big paradigm shift in a world that loves substitutes. It's a shift I hope to see more in diets, video games, songs, and every other place. As a music enthusiast, I have a particular interest in hearing Christian music re-imagined. That's probably too tall an order for me to deliver as a single musician (and perhaps even blasphemous for me to try as an atheist) but maybe others will have these same ideas. If the existence of gourmet vegan food is any indication, then I look forward to Christianity's creative crusade.

Though after seeing stuff that tries as hard as THIS does, Guitar Praise starts to look pretty good...

Reschedule

Nothing grand this week. I'll still probably post something every week, but the things I want to write about most are necessarily big topics. I enjoy writing these entries but I'd rather spread the big ones out over two weeks for a couple reasons:

• Bigger entries take a lot of time. A lot. I know I certainly that won't be able to do this during school. For now, it's totally manageable work for a week's time, but...
• I'm sad. A lot. It's hard to convey how impossible even tiny tasks seem when you're sad. Sometimes it's hard to convince even myself that anything could feel as challenging to me as it did the day before. I just have to take my word for it.

It might actually be beneficial to have a more erratic posting schedule to better take advantage of the times that I'm both available and motivated. Point being, I would like to post as frequently as I can about things that are important to me (and hopefully you), but please don't be disappointed if sometimes I'm unable to produce the time and energy required to do so. I will see again you soon.

Love,
Anthony

The Queen B of Pop

     Several months back, I listened to Britney Spears' "Hold It Against Me" for the first time. If you read my post about sawtooth waves in pop music, you only have to listen to the first eight seconds or so to understand why I was instantly fascinated by it. Britney has a strange amount of longevity on the fickle thrones of music charts and, with this song as my Rosetta Stone, I thought I'd figured out the source of it. But I needed to put some research behind the theory. Based on Billboard chart records, here's a list of Britney's top singles from every album, with links to the songs if you don't already have them memorized. For the sake of space, I wont embed every song I think you should listen to, so just know that every following link in this post is a link to a song.

Year	Album	Top Single	Top Chart Position
1999	...Baby One more Time	"...Baby One More Time"	1
2000	Oops!...I Did It Again	"Oops!...I Did It Again"	9
2001	Britney	"I'm a Slave 4 U"	27
2003	In The Zone	"Toxic"	9
2007	Blackout	"Gimme More"	3
2008	Circus	"Womanizer" / "Circus"	1 / 3
2009	The Singles Collection	"3"	1
2011	Femme Fatale	"Hold It Against Me"/"Till The World Ends"	1 / 3

     "Circus" gets honorable mention since it topped almost everything before it, and the battle between "Hold It Against Me" and "Till The World Ends" is still hot. "3" isn't on Britney's main line of studio albums, but hit #1 on the charts in 2009 so is worth mentioning. Perhaps by looking at this timeline in detail, we can gain some insight on how Britney Spears became such an inexorable part of the pop pantheon.

—————————

"...Baby One More Time" / "Oops!...I Did It Again"

     Ah, the breakout hits. I grouped these two songs because they're very much the same (even the titles are weirdly similar). They both feature a simple head-bobbing beat, staccato piano for emphasis, and a hint of funk — the exact sound that made the Spice Girls popular in the States immediately prior (admittedly, with the sass toned down a couple notches). The writers/producers for these two Britney tracks were also responsible for early Backstreet Boys and N'Sync hits which sound markedly different. Instead of keeping with their style of songwriting, the dominating pop sound was likely put aside for the sake of mimicking what had recently worked for female pop vocalists of the time.

"I'm A Slave 4 U"

     There's that touch of funk again. The overall style is a little different though. The accented beat (normally represented by a snare drum) now sounds more like a hand clap/rim shot, which are staples of hip-hop and R&B music. Incidentally, this is the point where hip-hop and R&B began to usurp the reign of boy bands. Following suit, the strength of this song is in the rhythm. Britney sings a melody, but one that is not harmonically well-supported with the percussive instruments. In fact, one of the only recurring extended tones in the song is detuned, which makes it actively resist being harmonized with. If you can't figure out which sound I'm talking about, it's the one that happens every few beats and sounds like a cartoon flower wilting — an appropriate symbol for the teenage innocence Britney had totally abandoned by this point in her career.

"Toxic"

     This video is a monument to Britney's power as an sexual symbol so I can't help but mention the visual sexplosion. And the scenes are so badly hyperbolic they become good again. She freaking dances through a laser grid! How stupidly awesome is that?!...But anyway...


     The guitar is an obvious reference to the James Bond soundtrack. There have been Bond films pretty regularly since the 60s, so I doubt there was a strong enough trend to make that more than an arbitrary stylistic choice. But the other sounds have a more interesting origin. They are actually taken directly from a Hindi film called Ek Duuje Ke Liye (don't ask me to pronounce that). More specifically, the song, "Tere Mere Beech Mein." The film and song are from 1981 and probably foreign to Britney fans, both literally and figuratively. The popular trend followed here was not the source of the sounds used, but the fact that they were used at all. This is called "sampling" and is common in electronic music, which (alongside R&B/hip hop) was gaining a substantial footing in popular culture by the time "Toxic" was written. Additionally, the beginning of the song and the point starting at about 2:21 are lo-fi versions of the sound that drop back into a heavy beat after a few measures — a musical technique I hear most commonly in electro-pop, used for a dance-able and energizing emphasis to otherwise repetitive songs.

"Gimme More" / "Womanizer" / "Circus"

     The hand clap/rim shot return with bass lines that are easy to follow — another tip-of-the-hat to hip-hop. Unlike previous songs, the instruments in these are unabashedly digital. There are also several more post-production edits than we've heard before (digital filters, vocal effects and such). The forte of a song with a hip-hop feel but electronic sound will necessarily be where those styles overlap: the strong beat and rhythm. This super dance-able lovechild of the two hottest trending genres creates what we now think of as the last decade's typical pop song. With Britney Spears at the forefront of their convergence, she became the reigning queen of the dance floor.

"3"

     "3" is musically simple (even for a pop song) and therefore particularly easy to get stuck in your head. I suspect that's the only reason it climbed the charts like it did because it's also boring, goes nowhere, uses stock synth sounds, and really doesn't say anything significant about Britney's musical progress. "3" deserves a spot on the charts like I deserve a spot on the senate. If nothing else, the simple nature of this outlier makes it good remix fodder.

"Hold It Against Me" / "Till The World Ends"

     If you've heard "Hold It Against Me" before, you already know what happens at 2:17. It's a drop! Like from dubstep, the not-so-underground DJ movement favoring the dirty, filthy sound that's currently trending in pop music as a result. In textbook dubstep style, it drops to a throbbing 66.5 BPM, a cutting saw wave, and a heavy, low-frequency oscillator. Both of these songs are a (dub)step in the right direction for the current trends. The influence is more subtle in "Till The World Ends," but you can still hear comparable elements. Not surprisingly, "Till The World Ends" was co-written by Ke$ha, perhaps explaining the vocal wailing in the chorus and the excessive use of a saw synth.

—————————

     I wasn't so in touch with popular music trends until the last year, so the secret to Britney's longevity eluded me until hearing "Hold It Against Me." Dubstep hadn't been on the mainstream scene very long before that song was made. After looking (and listening) to all this, hopefully you noticed what I noticed. She and her producers are consistently among the first to adopt the trends of whatever musical season they're writing for. Pop music is frequently not about innovating anything, but rather giving as many people as possible the sound they want at any particular time. And it's a gold rush: The first people to the mines are the ones who get rich, leaving only flinders of wealth for the late-comers to glean while everyone searches for another deposit.

"Why, yes indeed!"

     When talking about Britney Spears, it's often unclear whether you're talking about the actual person or the pop sensation created by musical minds working silently behind the glamorous curtain. Britney is definitely not the same type of musician as the other contenders for the title "Queen of Pop" (which include Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Lady Gaga) but she's still a juggernaut. Every single one of her albums over the past twelve years has been a chart-topper. And just because her existence is mostly a symbolic one doesn't mean she's undeserving of the crown. Right, Elizabeth?

     Madonna is old news (53-year-old news, to be exact), Janet Jackson is inconsistent (is she even on the radio anymore?), and Lady Gaga is only a toddler on the scene (plus her aesthetic parlor tricks are growing stale). These lovely ladies all have their place in the ranks of pop royalty. But with the veritable key to pop music stashed in her back pocket, who truly deserves the throne? It's Britney, bitch.

Delay

A new post is in the queue! It will be up tomorrow after I put it through the necessary revision process.

In the mean time, I should put some thought into scaling scale back my blog endeavors a bit. It seems like every post I make takes twice as much effort as the one before it. At this rate, I'll die from exhaustion.

...though on the other hand, "death by exponential growth" sounds like a pretty badass way to go.

-anthony-

Friend Project (update)

I've been getting carried away with the verbiage lately. Short post this week, I promise. (But don't expect such mercy next week.)

The Craigslist Friend Project has had a tiring consequence. Each meeting seems to require that I spend more time on administrative tasks like responding to emails, coordinating schedules, making plans, and commuting than actually being around anyone. The process is not allowing me the volume of exposure I need to feel like I'm honing any social skills. Constant reflection and analysis have made me significantly more aware of what's happening when I do get to meet with someone, but this is like trying to become a better guitarist by rationalizing and researching guitar music while rarely ever touching the instrument (also something I do, incidentally).

I have my seventh meeting on Monday, then I have to decide if I want to keep this project going or not. The zugzwang is between meeting new people in an exhausting and inefficient way and not meeting people at all. Though honestly, I'll happily give up social improvement if it means I get to focus on more fruitful activities like writing music and posting blog entries. Next month I'll be moving into a house with a handful of well-tuned social beings and this imminent immersion therapy is probably a better means to the same end anyway. (Does that sound too defeatist?)

Harry Potter and the Magical Divergence.

The Deathly Hallows pair was sorely disappointing. I'm no expert on cinema, but I can say pretty confidently that one of the big problems was the music. I found it weird that the music took a downward turn in Deathly Hallows when I actually liked the music from The Half-Blood Prince. Turns out the production switched composers for the 7th and 8th movies from Nicholas Hooper to some guy named Alexadre Desplat who, in my opinion, should be composing music for daytime soap operas, not epic finales. Nicholas Hooper also did the music in Order of the Phoenix. As I recall, the scores for both movies were okay, but the main reason I liked the music in The Half-Blood Prince was because it was pretty stylistically diverse for a Hollywood movie. I caught emotional tones well outside what I expected to hear and yet, somehow, it worked. During several places, Hooper even seemed to be channeling Aaron Copland. You're probably familiar with Aaron Copland, even if you don't recognize the name.

This is a clip from Copland's "Hoe-Down." His music is used in everything from commercials to firework shows and represents Americana at its purest: The wild west; purple mountains majesty; cowboys; and humble country living. So what is his spirit doing in a movie that couldn't be less about America? And more importantly, why does it work so well?

When we think about a kind of romanticized historical America, we generally think of the point in history starting right around the California gold rush of 1849. People were packing their belongings and following the Oregon Trail to cheap land and a new life. The Civil War ended in 1865, connecting the north and the south, and the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, connecting the east and the west. America was no longer a cluster of settlements but a sprawled and united nation. The era from about 1850-1880 is the America we hear depicted retroactively in Copland's music and see in countless dumb paintings.

Thomas Edison's light bulb of 1880 changed everything though, and not just in America. Electrical work by Edison and adversary Nikola Tesla ushered in the Technological Revolution around the world and the relatively primitive tools of the Industrial Revolution slowly became replaced with more convenient (and often electrical) devices.

Now notice that the technology present in Harry Potter's wizarding world is consistent with real-world technology up until exactly this point. The Industrial Revolution was a boom in our ability to create and produce while the the Technological Revolution was a boom in our ability to make creation and production cheaper and less demanding of manpower. Yet only "muggles" need manpower to be managed for them in such a way. To a wizard, a lightbulb is illuminated with no greater ease than a candle. Both just require a flick of the wrist, so why even bother with the bulbs? Why buy a Model T when you've already had enchanted brooms for centuries? And who needs telephones when you can just force your head into someone's fireplace via the Floo Network? The Technological Revolution was mostly irrelevant to anyone with magical power, so that seems to be the precise point where the wizarding world and muggle world diverge.

Nicholas Hooper's occasional Copland-inspired music in The Half Blood Prince reminds me of the point immediately before the magic-tech divergence which is why I think it works so well. It puts the listener in the real-world era that he/she can most easily parallel with the world on the screen, making the imaginary world a little more accessible. I found it most obvious during the credit sequence. Listen for a couple minutes:

It's curiously reminiscent of "Hoe-Down," right? The 6th Harry Potter story line is arguably the most emotionally dark story in the series but, as the credits roll, the music transitions and turns the bleak ending into an upbeat harvest festival. It's a bold move but feels strangely okay. My guess is that it's because we already know this to be the veritable soundtrack of 1850-1880—the era that agrees most with the world we were just staring at for 2+ hours. It's an amazingly clever way of engaging the audience, don't you think? However, I've admittedly never heard the magic-technology divergence of 1880 explicitly mentioned anywhere else so I can't tell for sure if Hooper consciously wrote a masterfully manipulative score around it or if he just got lucky.

What's most interesting is that even though I haven't seen this idea discussed, the time period associated with the magic-tech split is definitely not limited to the Potter-verse. In all of the typical fantasy worlds I'm familiar with, any technology invented in the real world past about 1880 is represented by something magical, if at all. Even quintessential fantasy universes that seem more aligned with late Medieval/early Renaissance Europe often have more recent inventions like flint-lock pistols or steam-powered trains. For example, the game, World of Warcraft, has an entire class of items that can be "engineered" by players but even the most advanced of these items are still powered by either gears and cranks, steam, or 19th-century-style combustion engines. That's apparently where the line is drawn and it's fascinating to me that literally different universes can agree across all media about where their technological limitations are. Are these universes just complying with decisions made by the forefathers of fantasy or has this paradigm stabilized over time to its most sensical state?

(An "advanced" gun from WoW. Basically a decorated 18th-century blunderbuss with a steam pressure chamber up top and presumably some kind of mystic gem housed above the trigger.)

And how aware was Nicholas Hooper to all this when he wrote the 6th Harry Potter Score? Either way, his music felt appropriate. I'm curious how other countries responded to it though. Even today, we Americans hear Copland's music used repeatedly in the context of historic U.S. patriotism so referencing his musical nationalism brings us back to the magic-tech divergence pretty easily. But Copland was only one of many composers (and one of the later ones at that) in an era when music honoring one's home country was a worldwide trend. 1850-1880 sounds way different for, say, Spain than it does for America. Try watching those credits again or imagining your favorite Half-Blood Prince scene, but this time mute it and play this in the background:

¡Harry Potter y el Misterio del Príncipe!
...No?
Oh well...

What do you do?

I've met with three new people under my Craigslist Friend Project and I think I can finally say something about it. One thing I noticed during all three meetings is my tendency to feel comfortable when listening, but very uncomfortable when talking. Particularly when talking about myself. I respond to what others say with eye contact, head nods, and murmurs of agreement/understanding, and I have no problem finding the appropriate places to interrupt the person while they're talking in order to ask quick clarifying questions ("Wait, so this was before you were offered the job or after?"). This behavior is totally automatic for me and comes from being sincerely interested in the person talking. In other words, I'm an expert active listener.

However, I don't respond well when other people are sincerely interested in me. If I get asked a factual question like "Do you have any siblings?" I answer tersely. If I get asked a more personal question like "How was your weekend?" I speak vaguely or try to pass my answer off as trivial by saying something like "Pretty boring" or "It's a long story." Even if I don't say those exact words, the intonation of my answer is enough to suggest that I don't think what I'm saying is worth being interested in.

The questions I have the most trouble with are questions more directly related to identity ("What kinds of things are you interested in?" or "What skills do you have?"). The most notorious of these questions is, of course, "What do you do?" You've probably been asked this question just about every time you've met someone new in your adult life. I could write an entire book on "What do you do?" but the main problem I have with that question is that it links my personal identity to the projects I've obligated myself to. As a person who is admittedly obligated to very little, I feel like telling people what I do is a poor means of telling them who I am, which is really what they're asking.

I was recently at a barbecue attended mostly by older adults. "What do you do?" came up a lot between them and the conversations invariably revolved around the social roles each person felt they filled. There was a math teacher who only discussed his math classes, a social worker who just talked about the state of society, and a software engineer who contributed to conversations primarily by tossing in computer programming jokes. Even note my wording there. "A math teacher" versus, say, "a person who teaches math." It sounds perfectly normal to say that the thing they contribute to society is equivalent to who they are. And based on what these people wanted to talk about, it's reasonable to assume that they identified themselves by these contributions, too.

The work you do to enrich your society is the first (and sometimes only) piece of information people use to discover what type of person you are. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's actually an efficient way of learning about others and helping others learn about you since what a person does is often reflective of more complex components of their identity such as their values, skills, beliefs, or interests. It just puts me at a disadvantage. Telling people I'm a student is basically my excuse for not having a social role into which they can neatly box me. I don't really "do" anything. I don't have a career, long-term goals, a particularly developed skill, a robust knowledge on any valuable subject, or even a strong interest in any one thing over any other thing.

My answers to identifying questions don't represent the type person I am and the only thing I can do to protect my ego from that fact is to avoid those questions altogether. Right now, the type of person I am is the type who spends his time and energy trying to figure out what type of person he is. That's difficult for me to express and even more difficult for others to accept. It seems that to be comfortable telling people about myself, my options are to either find the kind of identity people expect me to have or to be okay with the fact that I just don't have that. Self-discovery might be an endeavor too big for the Craigslist Friend Project, but we'll see how far I can get.

Dirty, Filthy Sound

I finally got around to reading through This is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin. It's an excellent read even for non-musicians. Now, inspired by micro-scale analyses, I'm taking a look at what makes current popular music "tik" (you'll get that joke in a minute). It's deeper than just composing a catchy tune. You can engineer the next hit single down to literally a hair's width of sound. To appreciate that though, we need to know a bit about acoustics. If you never made it that far in your physics courses (don't worry, I didn't either), here's the illustrated, non-math version.

A pure sound is plotted over time as a sine wave, which looks like this.
------------------->
Keep in mind that this is just a single oscillation, so the sound it represents takes place over a tiny fraction of a second. The amount of oscillations that happen per second is the frequency in Hertz (Hz) and determines the pitch we hear. The height of the wave at any point (the amplitude) determines the loudness of the sound.

Sound is somewhat analogous to light though. The "white" light we see from the sun is not actually white, but rather a blend of many wavelengths of light that we don't perceive unless something external separates them for us, like a prism or an object that reflects only a certain color. Sound is similar in that a note produced by a musical instrument is not what we think of as a single pitch. The sound is composed of several different wavelengths stacked on one another (called harmonics), and are usually in multiples of the lowest frequency being played. So if a saxophone plays the middle "A" note, which is an oscillation of 440 cycles per second, what we really hear is a collection of layered frequencies:

440Hz (1st harmonic),

880Hz (2nd harmonic),

1320Hz (3rd harmonic),

1760Hz (4th harmonic)...

... etcetera, usually at decreasing levels of volume. Our brain then collapses the layers and tells us we're hearing only the first harmonic, the "A" at 440Hz.

When you add those higher harmonic pitches to the original sine wave at varying loudness levels, the shape of the wave starts to change. There's some intense math involved in the transformation process, but if your study habits are anything like mine, math homework is easily avoided with YouTube videos:

That animation shows us that by adding just the odd-numbered harmonics to a sound, the wave gradually becomes square-like. There are an endless number of final shapes depending on which harmonics compose a sound and what loudness each harmonic is at. And even though we only hear the 1st harmonic, our brain tells us what type of sound we're hearing based on that summative shape. Each musical instrument has its own, unique set of harmonics which is why we can tell a piano apart from a saxophone, for example, even when they're playing the same note.

Oh my, Saxophone! What sharp spikes you have!

The sum of the saxophone's unique set of harmonics creates sharp and rapid ups and downs which is part of what makes the sound much more cutting and abrasive than that of the piano. With computers, we can synthesize even sharper changes -- some too sharp to occur naturally.

These two staple synthesizer shapes are particularly strange because of the instantaneous amplitude changes in each oscillation. This will never occur in nature since it's impossible for an object to go from one position in its vibration to another position in zero time. Imagine a ball bouncing. No matter how hard you throw it at the ground, some amount of time will always have to pass for it to go from the ground to the height of its bounce. Synthesizers do a pretty good job of approximating these impossible jumps though, giving us the opportunity to hear unique and interesting sounds we wouldn't otherwise be able to experience. For fun, here's a range of frequencies for each wave form. Pay close attention to the lower frequencies and see if you can hear the shape. They sound about how they look.

Even if your ears are musically untrained, you can probably hear the sharp edges in the sound. You may not be able to count them at such high frequencies, but you can feel them -- a sort of rapid popping at the lower frequencies moving toward an artificial, electronic buzz at the higher frequencies. There's a sweet spot in these shapes from about 30Hz-200Hz where you can distinguish both the note being played and the shapes' characteristic popping. Make a melody with these frequencies and you'll have a tune where every note sounds like it's coming from something being violently ripped apart. The result therefore sounds destructive, cutting, and dirty.

And that's the hot thing right now. American popular music at the moment leans toward dance music (the extreme in visceral stimulation) so think of the potential these wave forms have! Imagine if you put a square or saw wave melody to a drum track that vibrates the room and then set the whole thing to a tempo of about 120-130 beats per minute to emulate the heartbeat of a dancing nightclub patron. You'd have one of the most physically energizing sounds possible! Oh, wait...

This general formula for success is already all over Top 40 lists. As much as I hate to subject you to Ke$ha, Tik Tok is pretty easy to parse: Square waves during the verses; low-frequency saw wave during the chorus; unrelenting drums; and a tempo of exactly 120 BPM. And did you catch the two saw wave bits in the first few seconds of the video, thrown in for good measure? If you want a more recent chart-topper and a bit more of a listening challenge, check out Britney Spears' Till The World Ends, which has squares and saws running at the same time.

The key to being a pop artist is to understand what's trending, then pack as much of it in your songs as possible. And that might mean exploiting even subtle cognitive processes like the way the saw wave's ripping sound evokes aggressive energy. Certainly Ke$ha's song wouldn't be as popular or dance-able if the synthesizer were replaced with, say, a piano (though our friend, Saxophone might be a contender). If Ke$a's producers can just tap into a formula of trends to create a hit track, shouldn't anyone with that formula be able to mechanically do the same? Consider this the intro to an inevitable future blog post entitled, "How To Write A Hit Single."

Tall Order

I was at the Northwest Coffee Festival this past weekend. The festival also heavily featured chocolate since the two have similar flavor profiles. Samples varied in bean species, origin, farming methods, roasts, brew/extraction methods, and preparations. To those sensitive enough to flavor, each of these things alone has a dramatic effect on the end result. But the general pattern I noticed is that the more time and effort required to make the coffee or chocolate, the better it will taste -- even down to things outside human control. With chocolate for example, there are three main types of cacao trees:

1. Forastero: Resistant to disease, can grow in several climates, grows quickly, and has a high yield of fruit.
2. Criollo: A more fragile tree. Requires specific climates, grows slowly and has a low fruit yield.
3. Trinitario: A blend between the above two and the precise midpoint in their distinctive qualities

Can you guess which one is considered the most delicious bean? Exactly. Criollo. For some reason, fragility seems to be associated with quality and I wondered why that is. The quick and dirty biological explanation is that the criollo can afford to spend more of its energy further developing qualities that happen to be relevant to a good flavor when less energy is spent making poisons like disease resistances and insecticides (which we are evolutionarily inclined to dislike anyway). We could infer then that the criollo bean tastes the best because the elements contributing to flavor are more chemically complex than in the forastero or trinitario. But why should complexity lead to better flavor at all? We could again argue from a biological standpoint and say that the composure of the blah receptors blah..... chemically... blahdy blah co-evolved.... micronutrient.....yadda yadda etcetera. But this link between a thing's complexity and its quality is in everything. Here's a jargon-less Internet reference:

Without reading into meaning, accessing previous knowledge, or responding to personal associations, the Trogdor on the right is cooler. I enjoy it more than the Trogdor on the left. I wrote about what makes something cool a while back by talking a bit about how we decide we like something based on our interpretation of it. There's something even simpler in this case though. There's a sort of basic, surface-level, sensory pleasure we got from observing complexity.

It seems like at pretty much every level, conscious or unconscious, what we really take pleasure in is experiencing order. It's even conceivable that our brains are able to appreciate order down to a micro scale, as we might with the criollo bean. Though certainly this is trumped by other things like personal preference as demonstrated by the accelerating resurgence of pixel art

The simplicity in pixel art is appealing to some either for the sake of nostalgia, artistic intent, resistance to convention, or whatever else. Just like I might prefer what others would consider a poorly made cup of coffee if I take pleasure in it because it, say, reminds me of my father or if I think the barista is an artist trying to convey a message through the flavor. But then the desire to experience sensual complexity is outweighed by a desire to experience something that stimulates more complex cognitive faculties such as memory or interpretation. Cognitive or sensual, we still have a tendency to favor complexity and order.

And there's something kind of existential about that. Coffee and chocolate aside, all matter of creation is the process of actively resisting entropy. As beings who seem to be both designed and programmed to embrace order, what is the purpose of life if not to do exactly that? Maybe I won't create an artistic masterpiece or a powerful bit of technology in my lifetime -- Maybe I won't even create a good cup of coffee tomorrow morning -- but thinking that I exist to try is inspiring. If creation defines purpose, then the only question left for me to ask is, "What are my creative limits?"

It's amazing how therapeutic a cup of coffee and a bit of chocolate can be.