World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

This clip is from the session Notes and Neurons at the World Science Festival 2009, which asks the question whether responses to music are hard-wired into the human mind or culturally determined. I hope, for the sake of my ethnomusicologist friends, that there’s a good deal of the emotional response that’s culturally determined, but I wouldn’t be surprised if notes and intervals were hard-wired into us.

Without going too far into (or knowing too much of) the science behind it, groups of notes form harmonies because their wavelengths resonate together in a pleasing way. Other combinations don’t really work. Try walking up to a piano and hitting a C and an F# right in the middle of the piano (not near the top, where the wavelengths mesh more easily). You’ll see what I mean.

The pentatonic scale (used in the video above, although not explained to the audience until after the fact) contains only five notes (root, third, fourth, fifth, seventh, in Western terms), so those intervals are likely to fall on any scale worldwide. For example, in Western music, we (mostly) use an eight-note scale—but in traditional Asian music, for example, they use a thirteen-note scale. The pentatonic is the lowest common denominator of both.

If you’re wondering what this pentatonic scale is, you’ll here it in most funk bass lines and most rock guitar solos. It’s very popular in modern music.

Anyway, that’s your music lesson for the day. Next time: the blue note!

So I was searching YouTube for some English major rap songs (don’t ask) and found, much to my chagrin, that not only have people made quite a few English major rap videos, but numerous people have already beaten me to my long-held dream of writing and recording a rap song about Geoffrey Chaucer (in Middle English).

One, though, really puts me in my place. His name is Baba Brinkman, and, although he raps in modern English, this is some of the most brilliant English major rapping I have ever seen. This was performed live at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005. (The second and third are the best, in my opinion.)

Amazing song and video by Sigur Rós. It’s for their song “Glósóli.” It’s a little long, clocking in at 6:14, but well worth the time.

These guys sing almost entirely in Icelandic, so it all sounded like gibberish to me. Well, I found out today that they’re actually singing gibberish—they made up a nonsensical language that they call Vonlenska (“Hopelandic”) that sounds like Icelandic, but doesn’t actually mean anything. They still sing a good bit of Icelandic, but they lapse into Vonlenska periodically, sometimes switching back and forth in the middle of songs. Interesting.

I also found out Sigur Rós wrote the entire soundtrack for a documentary about the misfits of Icelandic society. Like, the producer didn’t just use Sigur Rós songs—Sigur Rós wrote an all-original soundtrack for it, and a rather lengthy one at that.

Anyway, I know I just wrote about these guys a few posts back, but I’m still really enjoying them. Thanks to Nicole and Nick at work for sharing them with me. I hope Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky were a good trade, because these guys are amazing.

Note: I did not use this song in my wedding. But it would be really cool to have the bridal party walk down the aisle to this song:

(That’s not an “official” video—just a fan who wanted to make his own video. If this song sounds familiar, I know they’ve been using it on ESPN as background music for some football segments.)

There’s a big entrance at 3:18, although it dies down toward the end of the song and builds up right up to the end, which leads into the bride walking down the aisle.

I’m well on my way to planning weddings. Great. Now I have to do something to prove I’m not gay. At least I talked about football in this post.

I’ve been having some recent conversations at work about music, and out of one of them, Sigur Rós came up. I can’t believe I haven’t discovered these guys yet. They’re absolutely amazing. Their album Takk (they don’t exactly speak a lot of English) is amazing. Here’s a song off of that album.

Musically, they’re in the same vein as Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai, although they’re quite different. It’s like pure, unbridled emotion in the form of melodies and counterpoints. There is some singing, but it’s all in Icelandic.

I got turned off to them because the first album of theirs I heard was their rare EP with Mogwai, which is more like ambient noise than music. Not so with their other stuff. Their album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust is really good too. Not the most engaging stuff, but absolutely beautiful.

As an aside, the group of us from work are all going to see Watchmen next weekend, so we get to talk about music and good movies. (Well, hopefully it’s good.) We’re going opening night (Friday), so I’ll try to get a review up here the next day for all those wondering how it is.

Smashing Pumpkins, Cheap Trick, Hanson members form band

I do this every few years, and it’s always fun. Here’s the soundtrack to my life.

“Mona Lisa” – Guster
song | lyrics
This song neatly sums up how I feel right now. I’ve come through a lot, emotionally, and I’ve emerged on the other side with some minor scars, ready to help anybody in the same spot I was in.

“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – Rolling Stones
song | lyrics
My life motto.

“First Love” – The Maccabees
song | lyrics
Not too familiar with the lyrics. Truth be told, I just like the song.

“Latter Days” – Over the Rhine
song | lyrics
I requested this one specifically when they played at our wedding. Not at all a wedding song, but one of my favorite songs. Sad and beautiful. I don’t think any scene with me set to this music would at all be fitting, but I like it, musically and lyrically, so it’s on here.

“Fly Me to the Moon” – Julie London
song | lyrics
I was lacking a touch of class. A certain je ne sais pas.

“No Rain” – Blind Melon
song | lyrics
Another song I could swear was about me.

“Rock and Roll High School” – The Ramones
song | lyrics
Flashback to high school!

“Butterflies and Hurricanes” – Muse
song | lyrics
For those who don’t know, I have a savior complex. I want to save the world, and I get mad when I can’t. This song captures that.

“Colorblind” – Counting Crows
song | lyrics
Some days I wake up numb. Not nearly as often any more, but I still have my days.

“Oxford Comma” – Vampire Weekend
song | lyrics
Good band, metaphor about an obscure construct of the English language. Perfect!

“A Lack of Color” – Deathcab for Cutie
song | lyrics
This is really a more depressing soundtrack than I thought it would be…

“Doing the Unstuck” – The Cure
song | lyrics
That’s better! The Cure know how to do a happy song well, on the rare occasion that they decide to write one. This is a song about letting go and having fun.

“Sideways” – Matt Caplan
song | lyrics
I think this is a song about an ADHD guy falling in love. Not entirely fitting, but close enough.

“Love Love Love” – The Mountain Goats
song | lyrics
Brilliant song by the Mountain Goats.

“Heroes” – The Wallflowers
song | lyrics
Let’s close with that savior complex, shall we?

You need to check out the Maccabees. No, not those Maccabees. These Maccabees:

http://www.myspace.com/themaccabees

Make sure to listen to “First Love.”

I don’t know that I’ve ever talked about St. Rescue in this blog. We had broken up shortly before this blog was launched, so it wasn’t really in the forefront of my mind. Justice Jam last night (which was a huge success, by the way) got me thinking about it again, since we played at the last one.

St. Rescue is a band I was in from 2006 – 2008. It was a bit of an interesting case, because we were a Christian band, but none of us liked a lot of popular Christian music. Our favorite bands were Radiohead, Pearl Jam, Mogwai, and Angels and Airwaves.

Anyway, rather than trying to explain what we sounded like, I’m just going to refer you to our MySpace profile so you can hear some of our stuff. “Exposure” might just be our best song, but “Cold War” is the one I had the biggest hand in writing. (I came in one practice with the bass line, drum part, and main guitar riff and just taught everyone their part.)

Playing in St. Rescue was probably my best experience as a musician. The music was complex, creative, and challenging—none of this cookie-cutter pop-rock nonsense. Ok, ok, the vocals are a little rough, but the musicianship is excellent.

Since we broke up, I haven’t joined another rock band. I’m in a really good church band (we’re thinking about recording, actually), but we don’t exactly play rock music. I’m still debating whether or not I should get back into it. Rock is actually the hotly-debated new addition to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (it falls between love and esteem), and I can only listen to my Radiohead CDs for so long before I start wanting the real thing.

For those who don’t know about it, you need to check out Pandora. Basically, you put in a musical artist or even a song that you like and it populates a whole radio station around music that sounds like what you entered. You can enter multiple artists, and you can give it feedback as it goes so that it plays more music that you like and less that you don’t. Here are some radio stations I’ve created:

• Guster, Innocence Mission, Tilly and the Wall
• Vampire Weekend, Decemberists, Frightened Rabbit
• Over the Rhine
• Radiohead, The Cure, Mogwai
• Dropkick Murphys

Aside from David Hasselhoff showing up once on that first station, I’ve had a good experience so far.