Two week-old hat...

I originally wrote this as a response to a posting from Logan, and realized it'd probably be better as a post...

More situations with a variety of difference tones? Yes, please! That'd be awesome. I've had a fascination with what results when two guitar strings are tuned and/or fretted in such a way as to create an interval of a major second or less (i.e. C & D, C & Db, etc), an affliction whose acuteness stemmed mostly from becoming aware of the method behind this band's madness, which involved near-unison, but not quite, notes strummed quickly, repetitively, and at high volume.

I guess my initial openness to something perhaps as strange as the music of Arab on Radar stems from a search for alternate approaches to playing guitar which maximize the instrument's visceral potential, or at least lead to questions such as "That's a GUITAR making that sound?!"

As a tangent from this as well from as the earlier discussion of experimental music often being used for horror films, a piece by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima," comes to mind. I think that, given our cultural background, it becomes something of a physical ordeal to process information like tone clusters, which I would guess is probably why it was chosen as part of the soundtrack to Kubrick's movie version of "The Shining" - as an aid to heightening the feeling of sensory overload. I was pleased to find that this piece was also used recently in a scene from "Children of Men" in a context removed from outright horror, placed instead in a climatic setting of senseless militaristic violence perhaps more closely aligned with the piece's actual title.

The initial unsettled feeling I experienced when first hearing these dissonant (and what I learned later were sometimes microtonal) clusters of pitches quickly passed into, well, a sort of enjoyment as a result of my being unsettled. This was illustrated when, in class, I paused between the two speakers trying to find the point where someone (who was it again?) said they felt ill as a result of the pitch(es) being projected by the two speakers, sadistic as it may have seemed.

When I found out more about the phenomenon of difference tones last year in a physics of music course, I was thrilled to discover that something to which I had intuitively/perversely been attracted actually had something to do with my perception of these notes adding that additional tone which was allowing me a certain subtle texture achievable without the use of an effects pedal, as well as its lending of an additional element of physicality to the sounds I was making.

If I can find a means to host some clips of audio, I'd like to put up some links to examples of this interest of mine reflected in guitar parts that I've written and recorded with a band.

Also, apologies for using Wikipedia. It makes things too damn easy (and sometimes isn't factually correct, either).