Local & Global Listening
“Musings on the Sound of a SonicCare Electric Toothbrush”
(a Local Listening Assignment, by Matthew Steckler)
I’m surprised and charmed they went with a C pitch… isn’t every practical appliance with a single tone tuned to A440 (don’t know where I got this assumption… ring tones?)? The C that is most constant in the tone from any angle is not the fundamental, but the first harmonic. You would have to pass the bristles past your ear to hear the lower fundamental. Also closer to your ear one hears the “ffffff” white noise sound associated with TVs. I experimented quite a bit with panning the toothbrush L to R, R to L, back and forth, by my ear and then center, etc., and a beating occurs from the fundamental become more, followed by less, audible. From center position, the higher harmonics are more audible, particularly the ones that start to form a diatonic scale in the 4th octave (the 9th and 11th in particular for some reason). I almost never hear the second harmonic in the series of most tones (the 12th ). Ironically it is more difficult to get this harmonic out clearly on a saxophone than its higher neighbor the second octave. I also heard my roommate using the brush on his teeth (it is his brush, not mine), and of course the variances in angle, pressure and muffling create changes in the timbre, and even a slight Doppler effect as he walks about the house with his damn brush, kind of like power tools in a metal shop. The physical vibration of the tone is quite pronounced as one might expect, making for a very impure, rich tone with many variances possible.
“Musings on Sounds From A Quiet Apartment POV”
(a Global Listening Assignment, by Matthew Steckler)
Would have gone to the park, but today is the coldest day of the winter so far. It isn’t hard to tell this even in my living room, where frosty gales thrust toward the window panes. The house is situated near a highway, and there are different layers of sound that this produces. One can always tell the unruly vehicles from the straight-up sedans; the latter produce a constant gentle hum (perpetual as there are always some of these in motion), while the former – the commercial trucks, motorcycles and such – produce an irritable disturbance in the peace. The calmer layer of the sedans mixes gently with the sound of gas heat emitting from the radiator, like two paint coats over the sonic void. Strange how the presence of sounds like these protects and comforts us against the fear of pure silence, and yet we try to get rid of them altogether in the recording studio. When the gas heat drops out for a few moments, the old floorboards are uneasy at the threat of pure silence, and let out a crack in protest. The bird chirps outside are more distant today, but as punctuated, staccato events they are most noticeable. As a hemophobe, my biggest fear if we strip all these quiet sounds away would be to hear my heart beat too much, to hear the blood coarse through my veins and even to hear the cells committing vile acts of osmosis with neighboring nutrients. Thankfully, I am a city boy and can always count on something louder than that. What I do hear, however, are the intersections where nature and artifice meet. While in some parts of town the man-made world dominates the natural one, here in this quiet residential area the balance is more harmonious, evenly engaged in a dialogue. What they say to one another may read something like a coming to terms, a world long since overrun by gadgets that finally wants to acknowledge the living things, though on its own terms. A city park is a bit like an Indian reservation, the government gives nature back a small piece of what was once all hers.