Musings on Music: Music is Everywhere!

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People who are familiar with me know all too well how much I love music. Music has changed my life more times than the number of moons on Jupiter. But as I walk through the beautiful picture that is my life, I couldn't help but notice that everything is musical! Music is nearly impossible to get away from; there is no doubt about that. I have known people who never listen to music on the radio; they only listen to the radio to hear talk shows. Even talk shows have theme music, and all those commercials have music in the background; many of the commercials even have jingles! The news programs on the television have music! Video games have a score! Films and television programs of all kinds have a score! Music is absolutely everywhere! And that has only made my life better; if music was not so ubiquitous, my life would be symbolized by a pile of dry leaves, crumbling away into dust. But because of music, my life is a series of rainbows, birds, grass, tall trees, beautiful flowers, and thousands of pretty colors. I am sure that many people agree on the true wonders of music; music can soothe, heal, and turn everything positive. Even when I am away from all technology, the sounds of nature can be very musical to the ears. That is where the term birdsong came from; even people many centuries ago thought the birds sounded musical. I would not be surprised at all if the earliest forms of music were inspired by nature sounds. From birds to crickets; from frogs to insects; from waterfalls to ocean waves; from wind to rain; many things in nature have a sound, and these sounds combine to form the musical piece that makes our planet so alive. It may sound different in the United States than it does in South Africa; even within the United States, it may sound different in Florida than it does here in Michigan! But I feel that it is all part of the same heavenly composition that makes everything so wonderful. Now that we spent a little time outside, let's go back to our sound equipment. As a sound collage/audio mixing artist, when I am by myself, over my head in centillions of ideas, the ideas twist, mutate, and mix with each other, and I begin to realize things. For example, I was once listening to some recordings of people speaking; some recordings were of newscasters, others of motivational speakers; some were of speeches at award ceremonies. But I wasn't listening so much to what they were saying at this point; I was listening to the overall sound of their voices. I thought about how people's voices have inflection, and how the inflection can basically be thought of in terms of musical notes. Since the recordings I was listening to were stored on my computer, I was instantly able to launch my audio editing software and do a little experimenting. So I started highlighting words, or even parts of words, and slowing them down extremely; sometimes I took a quarter of a second of audio and stretched it oout to over two minutes! The point is, even when you just speak, even though it's not musical per se, the vocal cords still create specific frequencies. So when I slowed down clips of people talking, I was able to obtain sounds of certain frequencies, which meant I had obtained musical building blocks from a clip of a speaking voice. I could change, copy and mix these frequencies into new musical sounds unrecognizable as the clip I had stretched out. I called this technique ambient fragmentation. I distinguish it from my regular sound collage; in my sound collage, the clips are obvious; you can hear clips of familiar songs mixed with clips from radio shows, movies, and so on. But in ambient fragmentation, clips are slowed down, sounds of certain frequencies are isolated, and they are mixed and manipulated into new compositions. So watch out; if the mere sound of your hand rubbing against the wall gets recorded, it just might get slowed down and grow into part of a composition. Every day of my life, I hear something musical. I never tried to get away from it, nor do I want to; music is very important in my life. However, there are times when it shows up when I am not expecting it, so I know that you can not get away from it. And as I have learned from experiments, nature sounds and even speaking voicees can be formed into music. Remember the old Patti Page song from 1959, famously redone by Julie Andrews in 1965, The Sound of Music? The opening line, "The hills are alive with the sound of music"; that statement is true. Whether you are on a mountain or in a valley, there are sounds to be heard. And where there is sound, there is music.