white noise and four-chords
Our room has a mountain stream right outside the window. The sound of it is a constant white noise that's about like an air conditioner or noisy fan. Actually, it's quite nice to sleep to, but it's no babbling brook.
The thing about white noise is that technically it's a combination of all frequencies put together. It's the exact equivalent of what you see on the television when no real signal is present and all possible colors shish around on the screen. So, you've probably had the experience of being somewhere where the air conditioner is loud, or a blow-dryer is blowing, or in the shower, and thinking that you hear a radio, or a television show, or people talking, or the phone ringing. All frequencies are there, and your brain is picking from them, trying as it always does to make sense of things.
All this to say that the other night I heard in the river a chord. It sounded to me like not just a major chord, and not just a major seventh chord — that laid-back chord so used in 70s pop (it's the opening four notes of "Color My World") — but a IV Major 7. That is, it sounded like a chord that was the fourth degree of some key.
Furthermore, there was the voicing. A chord can be voiced a million ways. Even with a simple C major triad, you can put the E on bottom and the G on top, you can play it high or low on your instrument, you can put lots of Cs in and several Gs and only one E on top (as in the glorious final minute of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms), and so on. The particular way this was voiced made it exactly resemble the IVM7 that forms the title phrase of the 70s song "Baby Come Back."
And that's my life.
The thing about white noise is that technically it's a combination of all frequencies put together. It's the exact equivalent of what you see on the television when no real signal is present and all possible colors shish around on the screen. So, you've probably had the experience of being somewhere where the air conditioner is loud, or a blow-dryer is blowing, or in the shower, and thinking that you hear a radio, or a television show, or people talking, or the phone ringing. All frequencies are there, and your brain is picking from them, trying as it always does to make sense of things.
All this to say that the other night I heard in the river a chord. It sounded to me like not just a major chord, and not just a major seventh chord — that laid-back chord so used in 70s pop (it's the opening four notes of "Color My World") — but a IV Major 7. That is, it sounded like a chord that was the fourth degree of some key.
Furthermore, there was the voicing. A chord can be voiced a million ways. Even with a simple C major triad, you can put the E on bottom and the G on top, you can play it high or low on your instrument, you can put lots of Cs in and several Gs and only one E on top (as in the glorious final minute of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms), and so on. The particular way this was voiced made it exactly resemble the IVM7 that forms the title phrase of the 70s song "Baby Come Back."
And that's my life.
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