Understanding Music

Music is one of the most complex forms of communication there is, and unless you're listening to a recording alone in a dark room, no two performances are even close to the same. The old adage, "goes in one ear and out the other" is literally true. Once the music has happened, it'll never be heard the same way again. Ever.

However, music can be written down so that the printed form is exactly the same every time you look at it. Music uses a "system" for recording the notes to be played, the relative speed and volume in which they're to be played and the musical instruments to be used to play them -- which includes the human voice. But because there are no two human beings who think, feel or do things exactly the same way as a machine might, this infinite human variability creates the wonderful potential for different performances of the same pieces of music. Likewise, there is infinite variability in those that hear the music, too. This dual-variability is why music is so complex -- it's never performed the same nor is it ever heard the same. But it always communicates something in the process. This paper is intended to help you understand how music is designed by the composers so that you'll be able to listen for specific kinds of musical nuances which, in turn, will help you design visual representations of what you hear with your ears.

Geometry

Stand in front of your display area where your viewers might be and just look. Your yard/house/shrubs, etc. all have 3D physical properties. There's left-to-right width, top-to-bottom height and front-to-back depth. Likewise, most people have a head that turns left and right (width), up and down (height), and eyes that can focus close and far away (depth). Can you see everything all at once, or do you have to move something to view an object on the left side of your house, or the top of your roof, or the base of your front steps, or the bicycle by the garage? Well, it's quite obvious how lights can be used to move the viewer's attention from one place to another in your display, isn't it?

Musical sound can do the same thing because the ears on either side of your head can discern left-right, up-down, near and far dimensions, too. When you couple the music to the visual effects, it opens a whole new and pleasurable experience for the viewer. As you're standing in front of your display are, close your eyes and think about a piece of music you can't wait to use in your show. Is it quiet and calm? Is it wild with lots of drums, guitar riffs and horns? Is it a duet with a piano on one side and the vocalist on the other? Is it an orchestra on stage with violins in the front left, heavy kettle drums in the back, a snare drum back-center, a harp or piano on the back-left, maybe a flute, clarinet or saxophone in the center, trumpets and trombones on the back right and maybe violas on the front right and double-basses way off on the far right? Maybe it's the 'Hallelujah Chorus' from G.F. Handel's oratorio, 'Messiah' where you hear the orchestra in front and the massive choir behind them standing on risers. As humans, we sometimes "move with the sound." When an actor is on the left or right side of a movie screen sometimes his/her voice will come from speakers on that side of the room, too. A train the comes to the station gets louder as it approaches and then the noise moves from left to right as the train passes, doesn't it? Are you starting to see how sound has "geometry" too? Maybe then you can also see how you can use music to highlight different props or areas in your show.

Other Dimensions

But sound has much more than left-right, top-bottom and front-back dimensions to it. It has loudness, for example. Have you ever gone to a movie and at a certain part of the movie, the sound is REALLLLLLY LOUD!!!? It kind of pushes you back in the seat, doesn't it. Or have you ever leaned forward in the seat to hear some dialogue that's especially soft? Music does that, too -- and often, only a moment apart. Loudness can be used to help simulate depth in your show because loudness will push the viewer back while soft musical passages can draw his/her attention in. Loudness can also be thought of as light intensity where the lights are super-bright for super-loud passages and softer/dimmer for quieter sections.

Human hearing spans a wide frequency range. In this context, music has a pitch dimension. At the high end, piccolos, flutes and violins generally rule; at the low end, tubas, bassoons, double-basses and some percussion take over. Horns, clarinets, saxophones, violas and the like are generally mid-range instruments. All instruments are capable of playing very wide ranges of pitches but when you push a musical instrument outside its "normal" range, the sound it makes can become a bit strange, unpredictable and downright awful. But here again, music shows it's "height" component. You can use that as you design your lighting sequences.

Another dimension is timbre. Timbre is what the sound is apart from its loudness or pitch. Timbre is what allows you to hear the difference between a horn and a violin even though they may be playing the same note. Vocally, female and male voices generally have different timbres, which is partly because of different physical factors in the throats of the singers, the lengths of their torsos and sizes of resonating cavities inside their heads and chests. In a way, the speakers that you use to listen to music emulate these factors by having "woofers" and "tweeters" -- large or small speakers inside the speaker cabinets. So as you listen to your show music, consider what instruments are highlighted and use that to create different highlights in your lighting.

Speed

Musical speed is called 'tempo' and it's related to how fast the music is moving. We typically measure tempo in terms of 'x number of beats per minute' where a lot of beats is generally considered 'fast' and few beats is 'slow.' This isn't completely correct though, because music has a lot of mathematical components built into it and here's where things get a little wacky because music has different kinds of notes. It has 'whole' notes, 'half'-notes, 'quarter'-notes, eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second and even sixty-fourth notes. And believe it or not, there's even a 128th note, too. The wacky part of this is that these fractional notes work just like fractions in math where the tempo of a whole note is the same as two half-notes because two halves make a whole. Or a whole note can be represented by four quarter-notes, or eight eighth-notes. You get the idea. Well a slow tempo of perhaps one beat per second (60 beats per minute) sounds a whole lot faster to the ear when instead of playing only one note every second, the musician plays four notes per second: to the listener, it sounds four times as fast. In any event, you don't need to know what the exact tempo is, but you need to be sensitive to what the speed "sounds" like. If it seems fast, it likely requires a lot of energy