This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination. But those are just the ones that made it big. The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks. Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do. This week we explore some of these instruments.
Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 4 – Turangalila Symphony by Olivier Messiaen
Do you know the difference between analog and digital? I remember learning about it when compact disc technology changed the way that we transport and listen to portable music. Before that the primary mode of quality audio reproduction was the vinyl LP (sure, 8-tracks and cassettes were in there somewhere too, but most audiophiles don’t take the magnetic tape format as seriously as either of the discs). Records are analog and compact discs are digital. What does this mean exactly? The simplest I can put it is that digital is like integers, whereas analog is like EVERYTHING. Do you remember learning about integers in elementary school? It’s a subset of real numbers which includes whole numbers but not fractions/decimals. The concept can bend students’ minds in elementary school because it is often introduced along with their first taste of negative numbers. Integers include negative numbers because they can be whole values. So, a digital signal is going to be a bit like a number line. You’re either at that number or you’re not. You’re on or you’re off. We call our fingers and toes “digits” because they are discrete, unambiguous units. We either count a finger or we don’t. There’s really no halfway in digital. With analog on the other hand, we cover every single point in between the integers. And since you can’t really speak of “every single point between the integers”, we sum that up as essentially infinite. Think about the difference between digital and analog clocks: digital clocks will display a precise reading at any moment, but will essentially freeze into that reading for moments at a time. It’s either reading 3:47:45 or 3:47:46, but there’s no possible reading in between the two. If you think about the second hand sweeping around the face an analog clock, the concept is different: it literally hits every single possible position that it can, essentially an infinite number of them. When we read an analog clock we are always approximating simply because the hands, and the gears that drive them, are always in motion, working to cover every single possible position within their ranges.
A comparison between records and compact discs exhibit this principle too: the needle on a record player will inhabit the groove etched into the surface of an analog vinyl disc at an infinite number of points between the beginning and end of the record, whereas the digital signal encoded onto a compact disc contains a finite number of discrete data points. Granted it is a large number (the audio on a compact disc is sampled at a rate of 44,100 times per second, which means that an hour of music on compact disc will contain more than 150 million samples), but it is a finite one.
So, which one is truer to our life experience? Well it’s a perplexing synthesis when you come down to it. Real life seems seamless, continuous, and analog. But our minds constantly parse reality into concepts, discrete objects, memorable moments. Actually, real life is digital if you want to get really picky. If everything is made of atoms, then we can reduce everything to discrete particles. But we don’t tend to think of it that way, even though our sensory equipment is essentially digital – rods and cones give our eyes a level of resolution on par with today’s megapixel cameras, and the nerve impulses which emanate from our inner ear mechanisms do so in discrete electric bursts – our minds reconstruct all of this in an essentially analog experience, but our brains are hard at work overlaying on often digital cognitive map upon this.
The nature of our musical instruments reflects this tussle between digital and analog perception in the manner that different pitches are accessed and controlled by the musician. Pitch is essentially a musical interpretation of the acoustic concept of frequency, which is simply how quickly something is vibrating. A rate of vibration is analog – there are infinite frequencies at which a string, column of air, block of wood, etc. can vibrate. But our minds don’t do very well with all of this possibility, and for millennia music theorists have been chopping up the infinite spectrum of vibrating frequency into discrete musical pitches that we tend to regard in our minds as digital entities. The standard concept in most of the music made today is to chop each octave into twelve equal parts called half steps. 99.9% of the music you hear on a daily basis can be played effectively with the resulting pitches. It is this concept which guides the design of keyboards such as those found on pianos, organs and marimbas. If you are playing one of those instruments you are either playing C or C#, but you simply cannot access the infinite space between them. The advantage to this is that you can never play out of tune, but the disadvantage is that you cannot use the space in between notes for expressive devices like vibrato or portamento. There are also instruments which treat pitch in an analog manner, not the least of which is the human voice. Any fretless string instrument works this way too – the player has access the infinite spectrum of frequencies. The advantage is that the player may use the expressive techniques which rely on the subtle adjustments of frequency like vibrato and portamento; the disadvantage is that intonation becomes incredibly exacting and is therefore a primary area of discipline in learning the instrument.
Some instruments fall somewhere between the extremes of analog and digital – woodwind and brass instruments (to my limited knowledge) have digital components which must be tuned like analog ones. And some instruments, like fretted guitars, turn analog instruments into digital ones. But, is it possible to create an instrument that very deliberately combines the best qualities of both? A French cellist named Maurice Martenot thought so, and he built one in the 1920s, devoting the remainder of his life to perfecting and promoting the instrument, which has come to be called the ondes Martenot. The ondes Martenot uses the power of electronic circuitry, still revolutionary at its time of invention, to make techniques available to the performer which borrow from both analog and digital conceptions of musical instrument construction. It is one of the first electronic instruments and still one of the most compelling and fascinating. Watch this video to get a sense of what it can do and how it is operated:
Through the magic of electronics Martenot was able to devise a unique musical instrument that is able to operate in both the analog and digital realms. The keyboard is clearly a digital method of input, picking discrete frequencies from the sweep of the infinite spectrum, while the ring allows for navigation through its entirety. A clever touch – Martenot allows the player to add vibrato to the notes played on the keyboard in the ultimate melding of analog and digital that electronic music makes possible. Composers found that the ondes Martenot effectively imitates the ultimate analog musical instrument, the human voice, but with eerie resonances. Some of the greatest music of the twentieth century, for example Olivier Messiaen’s sprawling and colorful Turangalila Symphony, composed in the late 1940s, makes use of the stunning instrument:
You can hear the whole symphony and see the ondes Martenot in action here:
Our minds instinctively overlay digital structures upon an analog world. Traditionally, designers of musical instruments have had to choose between the two approaches regarding the manner in which the pitches are selected by the performer. Thanks to the magic of electronics, however, designers of more recent instruments, the ondes Martenot especially, have taken the opportunity to think outside the box, yielding results which synthesize the two cognitive approaches in arresting and effective ways.
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