As black as they wanna be?

by liberal japonicus

A totally frivolous post below the break.

I've probably mentioned this, but I think I would have gotten further as a bass player. Admittedly, the distance I traveled as a piano player makes that a low bar, but when I watch this video and realize that two North Korean cadre members can do this, it only reaffirms my belief. If the music doesn't do it for you, do skip ahead to the latter 1/3 of the video where they start slapping. As they say in North Korea, 'only a miracle like this can occur in North Korea!'.

Just in case anyone was wondering, this post does not constitute in any way, shape or form support for North Korea.

Post your own frivolity below

Comments

[CharlesWT]

Not as creepy as some North Korean musical performances I've seen.

[russell]

well that was cute.

lemme show you how the slapping thing is done.

the first thing I always look at when I'm new on a gig is how many strings the bass player has.

four strings, we're gonna have a good night.

five or more, it's gonna be wank-a-rama.

plus, a little slice of the great Carole Kaye, being as black as she wants to be.

[hairshirthedonist]

Les Claypool has been biting Larry Graham’s style.

[russell]

I'm sure the slapping thing came from a 100 different places.

But the winners always write the history, so this guy and this tune is generally where it's all seen to begin.

[sekaijin]

Now, if they could have seen Larry Graham doing his thing with Sly & the Family Stone from their Ed Sullivan joint, or any Bootsy Collins clip with Funkadelic or his own Bootsy's Rubber Band on YouTube, a nation of squares would be in the aisles.

Maybe the revolution that would be unthinkable.

[CharlesWT]

South Korean K-pop has so embraced hip-hop and rap that some people are bitterly accusing them of cultural appropriation.

[nous]

I have considered acquiring a 5-string, but that is mostly just because half of the stuff I listen to is tuned down and a 5 string would save a lot of tuning and string gauge problems.

Capo and go.

[wj]

South Korean K-pop has so embraced hip-hop and rap that some people are bitterly accusing them of cultural appropriation.

"cultural appropriation" -- well, now I know what the converse of "cultural colonialism" is.

Seriously, you'd think some people had never taken a history course. Or they'd be aware that stuff has been moving between cultures approximately as long as there have been cultures.

[nous]

I teach a music oriented writing class that is half international students and get a lot of writing about k-pop and Chinese rap. They are adamant that their embrace of hip hop is not appropriation so much as it is syncretism and post-colonial empathy.

There's a bit of a Blazing Saddles vibe sometimes.

[russell]

a nation of squares would be in the aisles.

As the man said, free your @ss etc.

some people are bitterly accusing them of cultural appropriation.

All I have to say is, if Clyde Stubblefield did not die a rich man, there is no justice in this world.

I have considered acquiring a 5-string

No worries, nous, I'm just talking trash.

:)

A fun thread, lj.

[sekaijin]

"As the man said, free your @ss etc."

I actually am curious as to how these North Korean musicians learned about popping and slapping, because it's an example of something that indicates that at least among some circles, they're not as isolated as what a lot of people on the outside imagine. They certainly get K-pop, manga, and video games one way or another, and no matter how isolated their internet is, to the extent that they have access to it, their regime can't filter everything out.

So for anyone who wants to condemn them on charges of cultural appropriation, well, what would they have them do?

No culture can survive without being appropriated one way or another. It's been going on since time immemorial, and those floating accusations of appropriation are kidding themselves.

[cleek]

why use a Fender twin for a bass amp?

[cleek]

So for anyone who wants to condemn them on charges of cultural appropriation, well, what would they have them do?

i believe the proper term here is Asian Fusion.

/try the impossiVeal

[sekaijin]

"Not as creepy as some North Korean musical performances I've seen."

Since this is a fun thread, if you want creep, here it is:

https://youtu.be/rCQ3iJLuw8M

And:

https://youtu.be/ukBcC-sK3wQ

[cleek]

why does NK music always sound like late 70s Euro disco?

[russell]

I actually am curious as to how these North Korean musicians learned about popping and slapping

dennis rodman

[sekaijin]

"why does NK music always sound like late 70s Euro disco"

Well, time slips a cog crossing the DMZ. Give them another 20-odd years and they'll make it to grunge.

I suspect, in all seriousness, this (just my ballpark analysis - take it with as many grains of salt as you like): It doesn't have any obvious dissonance (which I'm sure would be considered counter-revolutionary and decadent); it can be arranged to precision (so that the musicians can play it note-for-note and not stray from it - judging from at least the first clip, they're all playing from charts - improvisation being some sort of bourgeoise filigree); it's melodic and repetitious (so it can be understood and enjoyed by the masses easily), and it can be recorded straightforwardly, either live, or track-by-track, by-the-numbers.

It's really a luxury art that feigns commitment, packaged for the people.

[CharlesWT]

"SEOUL — As a little girl, Ryu Hee-Jin was brought up to perform patriotic songs praising the iron will, courage and compassion of North Korea’s leader at the time, Kim Jong Il.

Then she heard American and South Korean pop music.

“When you listen to North Korean music, you have no emotions,” she said. “But when you listen to American or South Korean music, it literally gives you the chills. The lyrics are so fresh, so relatable. When kids listen to this music, their facial expressions just change.”"
How K-pop is luring young North Koreans to cross the line

[Hartmut]

I never subscribed to 'All East Asians look alike' but at least the Reds have either a clone factory or two running or put a bit too much effort into certain parts of android (or rather gynoid) development. Has anyone seen Dr.Goldfoot recently?
But it's true, they'd feel right at home at the Eurovision Song Contest.

The Russian/Soviet attempts at musical robotry were slightly less succesful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTSA_sWGM44

Dusting off some oldies is more their thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1PPYO76rHw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr0WwY5Bulw
(I genuinely love these two renditions)

[John Thullen]

That Sly and the Family Stone vid gave me goosebumps.

I think back in the day when some parents got a load of Sly and the Family Stone, they asked their kids: "What's next? I suppose you'll be moving to North Korea now."

I say the NFL invite these North Korean musicians to perform the Super Bowl half-time show.

Just to view the heads exploding from the overhead satellite.

"why use a Fender twin for a bass amp?"

After John Lennon's voice was sent thru a Leslie loudspeaker cabinet, why can't the North Koreans innovate too?

I once nearly and accidentally tried to plug my guitar into a small space heater that looks pretty much like my fairly new and little Yamaha THR Series practice amp.

Which illustrates my utter ignorance of equipment.

And not that it would have improved my noodling around, but maybe a warmer sound would have been produced.

That's an UGH-worthy pun.

"It doesn't have any obvious dissonance (which I'm sure would be considered counter-revolutionary and decadent); it can be arranged to precision (so that the musicians can play it note-for-note and not stray from it - judging from at least the first clip, they're all playing from charts - improvisation being some sort of bourgeoise filigree); it's melodic and repetitious (so it can be understood and enjoyed by the masses easily), and it can be recorded straightforwardly, either live, or track-by-track, by-the-numbers."

So, like our music industry's above the hips post-Elvis, but pre-Beatles Pat Boone, Fabian, and as a matter of fact, the later movie Elvis as well.

Or American Christian rock, utterly culturally supportive and anodyne, not that there is anything wrong with that.

Actually, it reminds me of how pop music was portrayed on those 1960s sitcoms when the kids in the family would go to the sock-hop, jingly, jangly, inoffensively non-black to the max, not a minor chord within hearing distance.

I think it's amusing that North Koreans might view musical dissonance and improvisation (What izzat, jazz?) as bourgeoisie, when the western "bourgeoisie", whatever that is, and generally speaking, viewed both as undermining, decadent, and dangerously subversive.

Stravinsky and Debussy' like Little Richard, caused riots, and there were no Antifa in sight.

Of course, both gained acceptance, unlike in North Korea where the smiling ladies might be lined up and shot by an anti-aircraft gun if they strayed from the script.

I'm assuming. They don't look like they've been forced to do something against their will.

[russell]

Bootsy.

because, Bootsy.

[wj]

if you want creep, here it is

For those exercised about cultural appropriation, I'd point out that those North Korean folks in the video, whatever they are petforming, are playing it exclusively on European/American instruments: piano, electric guitar, trap set, etc. For those who haven't thought about it, those aren't the only musical instruments mankind has developed. Just the ones which have taken over the world.

[Hartmut]

Actual traditional East Asian music can be quite dissonant to our ears.
A Russian composer and music critic of the 19th century cam up with the hypothesis that all genuine Chinese music can be played using only the black keys on the piano (unlike the cheap imitations so popular in his days).

[hairshirthedonist]

I'm sure the slapping thing came from a 100 different places.

I don’t know if this was in response to my Claypool comment, but the stylistic similarities are well beyond two guys slapping. It’s uncanny.

[John Thullen]

Geez, Russell, that Bootsy video caused me to stand up so quick to limber up that I knocked my chair backwards and a picture fell off the wall.

[CharlesWT]

To my unmusical ears some Chinese sounds like a truckload of songbirds running headlong into a pile of empty barrels...

[John Thullen]

Hartmut, that vid of the Russian reminded me a little of Robert Mitchum, Lorne Greene, and William Shatner doing their corny half-talking hits from the 1960s, and maybe 70s.

[cleek]

all genuine Chinese music can be played using only the black keys on the piano

the pentatonic scale rules the world.

[russell]

all genuine Chinese music can be played using only the black keys on the piano

this might be something of an... oversimplification.

[Hartmut]

Well, the guy had some ideas a wee bit half-baked but imo his intentions were laudable (i.e. his call to go for the real stuff or at least to adopt it in a way that does not violate some fundamentals just to please an uninformed audience more easily).

This guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Avshalomov actually did it. The wiki entry is btw silent about his role in saving the traditional Peking opera style from the Maoists. His music is definitely not just fashionable chinoiserie.

[Girl from the North Country]

I had no idea Peter Green had died.

Albatross, and Oh Well were the sounds of my teens. And as BB King famously said "he has the sweetest tone I ever heard. He was the only one who gave me the cold sweats."

RIP.

[McKinneyTexas]

A couple of non-musical items that you might find worth your while. Neither are long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWs4WA--eKU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv9AUFpRGyc

[nous]

Cleek - why use a Fender twin for a bass amp?

I'm guessing the player on the left was using a guitar amp because she was playing everything above the 12th fret, which puts her entirely in the land of guitar frequencies. It also lets her cut through a bit more without stepping all over the sound of the other player.

I'm wondering if she's playing the Twin through the speakers in the combo or if she's bypassing them and running them into the speaker cabinet below.

Dug Pinnick of King's X used to run a clean bass amp and an overdriven guitar amp simultaneously with the EQ split so that the higher frequencies all went through the guitar amp and sprouted enough fuzz to thicken up the sound. He always has a tasteful tone.

[CharlesWT]

A South Korean teenager doing some straight-up rapping without a lot of flash. But the incomplete closed captioning is almost as incomprehensible as the language.

Teen Swag —Sandy

"하선호 aka Sandy is a rising teen rapper in the underground K-Hip-Hop scene with a seriously impressive flow. She started gaining traction as an artist after her appearance on a hip-hop competition show appropriately titled, High School Rapper, and since competing has changed record labels while, presumably, still attending school."
7 Female Korean Rappers You Should Know About: From trap rap to punk-influenced MCs, it's the women taking K-Hip-Hop to the next level...

[sekaijin]

Mr. Trololo in the Hartmut video struck me as a bung-up of Gordon McRae and Slim Whitman.

As for K-pop, so many of my students are into it, and it has taken Japan by storm - something that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. I've tried to see something in it given that it's developed a solid identity beyond its origins as a knock-off of J-pop, but maybe my ears are just not young enough to get anything out of it - or I'm only looking at the blockbuster acts (BTS, Girls' Generation, etc.) and taking that as the exemplars of the scene. (CharlesWT's ref on female Korean rappers is something I should check out.) So much of it is too staged, too manufactured, and if I'm going to a live performance, I want real singing and playing, not lip-synching and genuflecting.

At the same time that identity it's built for itself might be leading into some unexpected territory - if it really is true that bunches of K-pop fans bought up blocks of tickets for the Trump rally in Tulsa to deflate his numbers there, that is an encouraging sign of an emerging social-political consciousness. If that can be leveraged in some way for these acts to liberate themselves from their rotten, exploitative management, that would also be a huge breakthrough.

If there is anything crying out for a #MeToo movement, the female acts in K-pop are it - they are ripped off and abused every way imaginable even worse than the boys. No wonder so many of them kill themselves.

As for Peter Green - RIP. A huge talent wasted by drug abuse who paid big time for it with his sanity (had to slip a Don McLean joint in there).

[Hartmut]

As for the strange migration of a Eurovision song:
View at your own peril.

The (German) original:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejQ0N2SMZNA

Japanese girl group:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzmFMOS8Qtg

Jewish wedding entertainment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVwGKo2pOmc

[cleek]

Peter Green died? that sucks.

i truly thought he already did that. guess i was thinking of Bob Welch.

[cleek]

I'm guessing the player on the left was using a guitar amp because she was playing everything above the 12th fret, which puts her entirely in the land of guitar frequencies. It also lets her cut through a bit more without stepping all over the sound of the other player.

i'm guessing the amps were props. seems unlikely that any bass player with those chops would use a guitar amp - they just don't have the wattage to make low frequencies loud and clear without distorting.

[sekaijin]

"As for the strange migration of a Eurovision song"

The original version of "Genghis Khan," for some reason, was a huge hit in Japan back in its day. God only knows why. Probably the only German-language tune any Japanese of that generation knows.

I'll venture to guess - probably because it became one of those rousing karaoke box warhorses the office ladies just loved to cut loose on after work, where they could diss their bosses over their bad hairpieces and yak it up over which young guy was the cutest in their division.

But the telethon thing - when that one guy came out, I honestly thought, for a split second, that it was Sacha Baron Cohen in yet another guise. It would be the sort of thing he'd do.

[Hartmut]

Exactly my thoughts concerning S.B.Cohen ;-)

[sekaijin]

Thanks to CharlesWT for the K-rap link.

They all definitely have the flow, way beyond what I'm hearing most Japanese rappers have. I still feel that at this point, though, too many of them are still at times aping black rapping mannerisms. But I'm wondering if the whole of rap outside of the States is at the point where the British Invasion was circa 1964-65 - when so many of those acts thought they all had to sound "American," Jagger singing "cry" as "craaaiy," and so many of them doing blues numbers lick-for-lick from the originals so closely it was no wonder white audiences thought they had written them themselves (and which had the effect of ripping those bluesmen off of royalties when they plagiarized songs, and some record companies credited the white acts as composers on the numbers that weren't plagiarized).

My guess as to how the Koreans have taken the pole position internationally outside the native English-speaking world for rap is because they have an interface from the Korean diaspora in the U.S. More of them are fluent in English even when they hadn't been raised at least in part in the States, and they code-switch and code-mix without self-consciousness. When young Japanese artists rap, it usually comes off embarrassingly, and sometimes flat-out painfully.

Sandy, the one that CharlesWT highlighted, raps in a bung-up of street Korean and English in her flow. She's definitely got something going for her.

[CharlesWT]

Sandy rapping with male rappers with audience reactions.

하선호 (Sandy) Rap Collection

[russell]

It's a strange old world, isn't it?

Sandy is bringing some sh*t.

McK's videos are... hilarious, in a NSFW way.

Just want to take a moment to recognize the genius - the sheer resilience and infectious life force - of the African diaspora.

Kicking old school. Even older. Some deeper roots.

From the Bronx to Korea.

[CharlesWT]

The video that was first to break YouTube's number of views counter.

PSY - GANGNAM STYLE

[nous]

Most of my asian and asian-American rap fans in my music class point to 88rising as the Death Row Records of asian rap.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/26/how-88rising-is-making-a-place-for-asians-in-hip-hop

My latinx students, meanwhile, are split between banda and reggaeton with some trap thrown in the mix.

[russell]

From St. Petersburg, yet another thing I don't really understand, and fortunately don't have to.

Doesn't that woman ever blink?

[byomtov]

all genuine Chinese music can be played using only the black keys on the piano

I don't know about "genuine," but random pounding on the black keys sounds a lot like what you hear in some Chinese restaurants.

[russell]

if you pound on random black keys, you are playing a pentatonic scale. a lot of, not just Chinese music, but traditional musics of all kinds, make a lot of use of (approximately) pentatonic scales.

there are various reasons for this, which are related to the physics of what makes notes "sound good together", but that's probably for another post.

if you extend the principles that generate a pentatonic scale two steps further, you get a 7 note scale that is (approximately) like a major scale.

or, if you're George Russell, a Lydian scale.

if you keep it up long enough, you get something like all 12 pitches in our chromatic scale.

the "approximately" part here accounts for the fact that European music, starting in the 17th C., more or less tweaked the pitches generated by the overtone series so that all 12 pitches would be evenly spaced. This set the stage for the development of the relatively sophisticated harmonic system of European art music.

Chinese music, like many musics in the world, favors pentatonic scales, but Chinese musicology does recognize a 12 pitch system.

[sapient]

I'm not a musician, so I don't really belong in this thread, but for awhile, I was obsessed with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUarruYTA-c

I had no interest or idea about Charlie Puth, but recently thought about this, and looked it up again. I discovered that he's a Trump supporter.

It gives a lot more depth to the mix.

So much to cry about.

[CharlesWT]

I listen to rap in a number of different languages. I don't know whether it's the stylings of the performers or something about the language like hard vowels, short syllables, or something else. But I prefer Korean rap.

"Being dubbed as the birthplace of hip-hop, America surely leads the way in the eclectic genre. With classic hip-hop groups like Public Enemy and De La Soul to modern-day hitmakers such as Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West, it isn't difficult to see why the biggest rap stars hail from America. Even so, while the U.S. might be on the map as the hip-hop capital, there are MCs from other countries who are just as nice, even when they're rapping in other languages."
15 Rappers Who Kill It In Other Languages: Meet the Kendrick Lamars of the world.

[cleek]

if you pound on random black keys, you are playing a pentatonic scale. a lot of, not just Chinese music, but traditional musics of all kinds, make a lot of use of (approximately) pentatonic scales.

fun tip:
first, note that black keys come in groups of two and groups of three.

and if you start your black key adventures on the rightmost key of any of the groups of 2, and go upwards to the rightmost of the next group of two, you've played a minor pentatonic scale - aka a 'blues' scale. and if you want that saucy 'blue' note, it's the one between the second and third key of the 'three' group.

ta da, you're a blues pianist! though you'll only play in the key of D#.

[hairshirthedonist]

ta da, you're a blues pianist! though you'll only play in the key of D#.

This is my go-to any time I get within arm's reach of a piano, which isn't all that often, despite the piano in my living room (i.e. the room that's supposed to be the nice room - you know, the one without a TV - but that has been turned into a Lego workshop).

[hairshirthedonist]

Oh, and reading a WaPo article just now, the ad in the middle of it was "Why to Avoid the Pentatonic Scale" and how it makes "solving the guitar puzzle" impossible.

Coincidence?

[russell]

Have a little grease with your blues.

[russell]

Pinetop.

[byomtov]

there are various reasons for this, which are related to the physics of what makes notes "sound good together", but that's probably for another post.

Isn't this partly physics and partly just experience, especially getting attuned to certain chords and progressions early in life?

[russell]

Both.

The physics part is the ratio of the pitch frequencies. Simpler ratios tend to be considered more consonant. More complex ratios, less so.

That said, some cultures (I'm looking at you, Balkans, and you too, Middle East) have an affinity for more irregular scale forms and dissonant harmonies.

[Nigel]

Perhaps; perhaps not...

Our brains appear uniquely tuned for musical pitch
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/our-brains-appear-uniquely-tuned-musical-pitch

It would be interesting to apply such techniques to aficionados of different musical traditions.

[Nigel]

There is this...

Perception of musical pitch varies across cultures
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190919142301.htm
...People who are accustomed to listening to Western music, which is based on a system of notes organized in octaves, can usually perceive the similarity between notes that are same but played in different registers -- say, high C and middle C. However, a longstanding question is whether this a universal phenomenon or one that has been ingrained by musical exposure.

This question has been hard to answer, in part because of the difficulty in finding people who have not been exposed to Western music. Now, a new study led by researchers from MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics has found that unlike residents of the United States, people living in a remote area of the Bolivian rainforest usually do not perceive the similarities between two versions of the same note played at different registers (high or low).

The findings suggest that although there is a natural mathematical relationship between the frequencies of every "C," no matter what octave it's played in, the brain only becomes attuned to those similarities after hearing music based on octaves, says Josh McDermott, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

"It may well be that there is a biological predisposition to favor octave relationships, but it doesn't seem to be realized unless you are exposed to music in an octave-based system," says McDermott, who is also a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Brains, Minds and Machines.

The study also found that members of the Bolivian tribe, known as the Tsimane', and Westerners do have a very similar upper limit on the frequency of notes that they can accurately distinguish, suggesting that that aspect of pitch perception may be independent of musical experience and biologically determined....

[cleek]

Have a little grease with your blues.

i can't even imagine being able to do what one of his hands is doing.

[hairshirthedonist]

i can't even imagine being able to do what one of his hands is doing.

I don't know if it's a thing for people who play guitar, but I really don't get how you can play one thing with one hand and another thing with the other. It makes my head hurt.

It's not like picking with one hand and fretting notes with the other, where the two hands are working together to accomplish more or less a single task. It makes me wonder if starting as a musician on the guitar (other instruments, too) and staying with it for a while without learning piano (maybe other instruments, too) might actually put you at a disadvantage in trying to learn piano, at least if you want to use both hands the way you're supposed to.

[Girl from the North Country]

Dr John: phenomenal as always.

Pinetop Perkins: absolutely wonderful.

Thanks, russell.

[cleek]

people living in a remote area of the Bolivian rainforest usually do not perceive the similarities between two versions of the same note played at different registers

makes perfect sense that they'd perceive two tones an octave apart as being two different 'notes'. they are!

the best reason for saying two different Cs are the 'same' is economy of notation: you don't need 88 different names if you want to identify every note in western 12-tone chromatic music, you only need seven letters and a way to notate "between this and the next" (going both up and down).

but take sheet music - it doesn't say "Play an A - whatever octave you like!" it spells out, if you can read it, exactly which A to play. so, in that sense, A 440Hz and isn't an A 880Hz, even to western music.

[russell]

I really don't get how you can play one thing with one hand and another thing with the other

Organists do all of that, plus something else with their feet.

Boggles my mind.

Pinetop Perkins: absolutely wonderful.

Yes, indeed. The man won a Grammy at age 97.

So much good music, so little time.

[Nigel]

It was a little more than that:

...Western listeners in the study, all of whom lived in New York or Boston, accurately reproduced sequences such as A-C-A, but in a different register, as though they hear the similarity of notes separated by octaves. However, the Tsimane' did not.

"The relative pitch was preserved (between notes in the series), but the absolute pitch produced by the Tsimane' didn't have any relationship to the absolute pitch of the stimulus," Jacoby says. "That's consistent with the idea that perceptual similarity is something that we acquire from exposure to Western music, where the octave is structurally very important."...

[hairshirthedonist]

Yeah. Even if you can tell that one version of C is different from another because it is in a different octave, they both still sound like C somehow. Like the same color, but brighter (or something like that). It's not that Western music-exposed people can't hear a difference. It's that non-Western music-exposed don't hear a similarity. That's what I'm getting out of, anyway.

[russell]

the absolute pitch produced by the Tsimane' didn't have any relationship to the absolute pitch of the stimulus

In the mbira (approximately, "thumb piano") tradition in Zimbabwe, pitch relationships are less important than the pattern of the notes played. Different players may tune their instruments to quite different pitches. Not just a different key, but with the same relative pitch relationships between the notes, but with quite different pitch relationships between the keys on the same instrument.

But the songs played are still immediately recognizable to the listeners and to other players.

It's a big world.

[hairshirthedonist]

Now you're just making stuff up, russell. Knock it off!

[cleek]

Even if you can tell that one version of C is different from another because it is in a different octave, they both still sound like C somehow.

but they aren't identical. sure they sound nice together, but you can still tell there are two notes being played. and you can translate from one octave to another and preserve the note names. but A 440 is not A 880. anyone can tell them apart.

so maybe these people simply don't think 'sounding nice together' is enough to say they're the same note.

[nous]

When I was at St. John's College, one of our music tutorial exercises involved using a demonstration monochord, tuning the two strings to the same pitch, and then moving the "node" for the second string to find the ratios for the overtone scale. Great exercise for seeing how the sound and the math go together.

Whatever aesthetic value gets associated with the overtone scale does not alter the way that we can pick out by ear which waveforms have more or less interference. Consonance and dissonance are technical terms. All the "good" and "bad" associations are culture freighted on that objective information.

Per the invocation of organists, I give you Cameron Carpenter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvbEEhee3GU

o_0

[byomtov]

Pinetop Perkins is new to me.

Thank you, Russell.

[russell]

Cameron Carpenter

That is just crazy.

Pinetop Perkins is new to me.

Yeah, Pinetop is a national treasure. Glad to pass it along!!

[Snarki, child of Loki]

The notes "sound good together" when their harmonics (multiples of the major frequency) match. That happens when frequencies are related by a simple proportion (3/2, 4/3, 2, etc).

What is more interesting, and seems to be physiological, is when two frequencies sound BAD together. You've maybe never heard that, because you have to actively work to make it happen:

When two frequencies are close, you hear a single tone with "beats" as the volume pulsates. When they're further apart, you hear two separate notes. It's that in between zone where it sounds really bad, and rough.

Strangely enough, even in 2020, there isn't a completely acceptable theory of human hearing. There are several theories that explain parts, but they all have counter-evidence that you can demonstrate for yourself with the the right set of frequencies. And the "mix together the remaining valid parts" theory is not disprovable, so not scientific.

[CharlesWT]

When two frequencies are close, you hear a single tone with "beats" as the volume pulsates.

I once worked at a place where we had a mini-computer in a room with a large UPS that emitted a loud 60-hertz hum. Sometimes, when some of us were in the room to work with the computer, I would hum something approaching 60-hertz. This would cause them to poke their ears and look at the UPS like they were expecting it to explode.

[hairshirthedonist]

Cameron Carpenter

Right? (But the shoes...)

[hairshirthedonist]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/we-get-older-we-get-more-tolerant-discordant-music-180954813/

[russell]

(But the shoes...)

Lets you heel-toe the foot pedals without stepping on intermediate pedals.

Is my guess.

[Nigel]

...making stuff up...

No, fiction has to be more plausible than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbira#Tuning

[cleek]

but are they authentic OrganMaster shoes?

[cleek]

but are they authentic OrganMaster shoes?

[cleek]

i must really want to know.

[hairshirthedonist]

Now that I've clicked on cleek's link, I'll be curious to see if I get ads for those shoes when I check the weather online.

[russell]

keep those algorithms guessing!

[wj]

keep those algorithms guessing!

For those of us who ain't got rhythm, algorithms are the only option.

[CharlesWT]

Al Gore Rhythms...

[John Thullen]

Charles, that's your best comment, ever.

That's a compliment.

[CharlesWT]

That's a compliment.

[wj]

Ah, music!
https://xkcd.com/2340/