Halfway through the quarter! It’s crazy how fast it feels like this study is moving along. I’m guessing that these past two weeks have seemed pass quickly because I’m constantly throwing myself at new information. Sometimes the sheer amount of information in front of me can feel suffocating, but usually I come away from it with a profound sense of respect for the infinitely deep topic I’ve chosen to pursue. The fact is I love music so I don’t really mind if I drown in it.<\/p>\n
That being said, these blog posts are certainly a great way for me to catch a breath of air and put my thoughts together in a coherent way. In fact, I’m thinking of utilizing the blog more by pooling more of my thoughts, and resources here. I’m planning on collecting my notes as well as the exercises (from Tonal Harmony<\/em> and Schafer’s Ear Cleaning<\/em>) I’m doing somewhere on this blog (I’m thinking of creating a new page, but I might find some better format). Basically, I want to start making this blog more accurately represent everything I’m actually doing in hopes that it’ll help me organize, understand, and feel more motivated about what it is I’m actually doing.<\/p>\n Speaking of which, I think it’s time I start writing about what it is I’ve done rather than jotting down ideas for the future.<\/p>\n Last Thursday my band played at a punk show at the garage under the CAB. We got asked on pretty short notice to play, and we don’t identify as a punk band. Regardless, we said yes. We played our songs way faster than usual, and threw in an impromptu punk song in which Blaise (our drummer) switched onto vocals and I switched onto drums. It was one of our sloppiest sets, but I had a lot of fun with it. It was also really cool to be both exposed to and (sort of?) accepted into a side of the Olympia music scene which I wasn’t really too familiar with.<\/p>\n We then played a show the Saturday after that at the Metcalf Manor alongside another Olympia band, Swoon, and some out-of-towners. Swoon’s set was great, and Blaise and I picked up one of their CD’s (it was their release show). Our set consisted almost entirely of “newer” material. The highlight for me was our semi-improvised jam (we’re calling it Blackberry jam for the time being). Unfortunately I didn’t stick around for the last band because my stomach was in need of some solid food. I spent the rest of the night rewatching Princess Mononoke <\/em>with my roommate, Justin. The reason I mention this because about and hour and twenty-four minutes into the movie there’s a piece of music that’s entirely percussive. Between the instrumentation and the syncopated rhythms the song creates a really tense, tribal vibe which fits the scene perfectly. The next morning, I showed it to Blaise and we discussed making a song that featured only percussion instruments. I’ve also been working with him on finishing a song he’s been writing for a while called “The Space Between.”<\/p>\n I’ve barely done any music production these past few weeks. I texted Nicole earlier today though, and am planning on finishing up “Source of Life” with her soon before I move on to my next song. In the mean time, I’ve been coming up with a lot of musical ideas on the piano and guitar. I’m having a lot of fun experimenting with them, but I usually find myself stuck, unable to develop the ideas into anything I’d call complete. I’m going to start recording some of the motifs and posting them on here, mostly so I don’t forget about them. I’m also going to start writing some of my chord\/lyrical ideas down in a journal that I got just so that I can develop them outside of my head. I’d really like to see myself complete more songs though, I’m starting to lose track of the various ideas I have. I also need to start setting aside more time to just listen to music…<\/p>\n I’m almost done with Part II of Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone<\/em>. Though the material hasn’t gotten any less dense, it is starting to connect to topics I am more familiar with. Part I was an introduction to the fundamentals of sound. I learned about how all sounds are composed of sine waves, and sympathetic resonance. I learned about simple and compound tones, and that timbre is (for the most part) determined by a note’s overtones. Part II takes the focus to the effect that two tones have on each other when sounded together. I learned about combination tones (a phenomena I had never noticed or heard about before), and about the “beats” that tones with similar frequencies produce in our ears. Though I have been familiar with discordance and concordance in musical harmony, I hadn’t really understood the physics behind it. I think the most interesting part of my study has been learning more about the art of harmony from Allen Forte while also getting to read about Helmholtz’s explanations about the physical and physiological phenomena that creates the foundation for it.<\/p>\n Tomorrow I plan on finishing the last chapter of Part II, which addresses the concept of chords, working through some more of Tonal Harmony in Concept in Practice<\/em>, and watching the first part of Howard Goodall’s How Music Works<\/em>. Earlier today I also went to West Bay Park to check out a spot there that has some interesting sound qualities. I found out that that spot is called Rotary Point. Tomorrow I’ll follow up with more research, and hopefully I’ll be able to find out why exactly that spot creates the kind of resonance that it does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Halfway through the quarter! It’s crazy how fast it feels like this study is moving along. I’m guessing that these past two weeks have seemed pass quickly because I’m constantly throwing myself at new information. Sometimes the sheer amount of information in front of me can feel suffocating, but usually I come away from it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1096,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[],"tags":[99],"geo":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1096"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}