The Shapes of Sound

I just finished watching Vihart’s “Twelve Tones”. In standard Vihart fashion, she draws too many pictures and drones on in a mysteriously compelling way. This video discusses twelve tone rows in music, which are sequences of twelve consecutive notes that can be arranged in any order with a few rules (I don’t remember them exactly but something like you can’t go back to the note you played two notes before the current and all notes have to be played). The sequences were designed to break the rules of music in order to escape the patterns that had bound music for so long. Typical twentieth century stuff.

Anyway, that’s not the interesting part. Well, it was, but I didn’t really understand it much and didn’t pay enough attention to make any sense of it. What was interesting was the part near the end. 

At the end of the video, Vihart says she likes making shapes with twelve tones. She arranges twelve consecutive notes (by half steps) into a circle, starting with C and going to B (or it might have been A flat and going to G; I’m not quite sure where she started and stopped, but all twelve notes include A flat through G and then start over, so C to B works the same way). It looked like your typical circle of fifths but each note was a half step later instead of a fifth later. Then she sang various sequences of notes and drew the patterns they formed onto the circle. The sequences were largely dictated by the patterns on the circle so they would look nice, but they sounded nice as well.

If this sounds interesting at all you can watch the video below. It’s half an hour long though. The circle bit starts at 24:42. 

This got me thinking. Do people who are musically inclined break sounds down into basic patterns? Like, of course they do, even I do it to some extent. But do they really break them down into their own component parts that all become woven together into an intricate musical tapestry? 

Throughout the entire video, she composes pleasing harmonies out of these seemingly random twelve tone rows. It didn’t even look that difficult, she just sort of made them. I’ve never understood how people do that, but I think I’m starting to get it. 

I’m not musically inclined. Like yeah I can appreciate good music and whatever but it remains a solid chunk. I can’t break it down to see its structure past the most obvious parts. 

See, this is why I don’t like the blogs of teenagers. They always become buckets of narcissism, with every single post revealing some deep dark secret about the author while he tries to make himself sound special and unique and point out the twelve mental disorders he has that plague his life. I hate it. It’s obnoxious. And here I am doing it too.

Anyway, one time Brendan and I were listening to an Imagine Dragons song on the way home and he said something about the drumming in the song. It took me a solid 30 seconds to isolate the drum part from the rest of the song so i could hear it. It’s not that I can’t hear it, it’s just that it’s really hard to separate it from everything else. Like I said, the song is just one big mush of pretty sounds. Like, look at the waveform below. You can’t just pull out the guitar part or the drum part. It’s all one thing. That’s like a really extreme version of how I am. Obviously I can to some extent, but not very well.

And since I can’t do that, I can’t really break music down and see its patterns. If you know me at all (does anyone outside the tribe even read this? Honestly I’d be surprised if half the tribe read this), you know I take crappy artsy pictures of everything. It’s my jam. Seeing is cool, and the pictures make some half-assed attempt at capturing what I see. Sometimes the pictures are actually more interesting than the thing originally was, but not usually. 

Actually, I think this is why the default artsy picture format is a closeup shot of something with the background out of focus, for two reasons: one, seeing things close up is sort of interesting because we don’t do it that often, and two, seeing things with the background out of focus is interesting because it’s halfway impossible to see that in real life, since you can really only put your full attention on something if your eye is actually focusing on it, so you can’t see a blurred out background without accidentally unblurring it. Also, you can only get significantly out of focus backgrounds on phone cameras if you get really close, so there’s three reasons for the default artsy picture, as well as the fact that they’re just easy to take.

Back to what I was saying: I’d say that on average I’m better at seeing than most people. This isn’t me just being an arrogant prick, I just think I tend to notice more. On a purely physical level I’m actually pretty terrible since I need glasses to have anything more than a few feet away be in proper focus. But I think this is why I’m decent at taking pictures or drawing. Just like how good musicians can break down music and (presumably) see their underlying patterns, I can sort of do the same with visual stuff.

So this is starting to make sense of how musical talent in composing can come so naturally to some. If you can break down sounds into the patterns that build them up, then you can probably make your own or add things to existing sounds. In the video, Vihart created sort of random twelve tone sequences (random in that she only made a couple adjustments to make it sound decent), and then added in a bunch of harmonies to flesh it out into an actual song. And it sounded good. If she can break things down into their shapes, like at the end of the video, then of course she can add more shapes to complement the existing ones. I do it all the time, but with visual shapes. Her shapes are just made of sound instead of space. 

So the question is, can you learn to hear, or learn to see?

I’d say mostly yes. I learned to see like I do now. Five years ago I was pretty bad, and now I’m only kind of bad. It’s quite the improvement. But seriously, taking a couple art classes taught me to notice things and see more. But looking back, I was already better than most people my age, so I didn’t necessarily start from nothing. If you were to start from nothing, can you even start at all? In other words, if you have no talent in something, can you even develop the skill?

I guess the answer to that question is that most people don’t have zero skill in most things, especially in the areas that we use literally every day like hearing or seeing. So while a person could suck at seeing and noticing now, they could probably learn to do so if they wanted. Likewise, I could probably learn to hear better if I tried.

The hardest part is figuring out how to learn that. I guess I could take a music class or something, but I’m worried it would go like a literature class where I desperately try to pull out meaning and imagery from a book even though I can’t really find any. Even so, it might be worth it. 

Seeing well is one of the coolest things and I can only begin to imagine what it would be like if I could hear half as well as I can see. And I’m not even that good at noticing the things I see. I wonder what it would be like to be as good at seeing as Gregory Heisler (one of my favorite photographers) or as good at hearing as someone like Mozart or even Bon Iver or someone. Even experiencing what Brendan or Cameron experiences would be cool (Brendan denies being any good at this but I don’t believe him, and I’ve never talked about it with Cameron but I imagine he’s better than most). 

Hopefully, someday I will be able to see the shapes of sound.