Bâ™, C, D, Eâ™, F, G, A, Bâ™
There’s something that resonates with me about the B flat scale. I don’t know why. I like the sound and feel of it. A lot of pieces of music are written in it (although I do not know if it is actually the most popular key), incidentally, and so I imagine that others like it a lot too. I wonder why that is? Is it just the result of convention? Is there something about the way we (those who like it a lot) are constructed that fits that frequency rather well?
Consider having a listen to Robert Krulwich’s NPR piece called “Have you heard about B flat?”. It’s got light humour sprinkled around liberally, and some amusing music. And there are a few pieces of information about the (apparent) unreasonable ubiquity of the note B flat in Nature. He tells you about B Flat and alligators, B flat and a staircase, and he ends with B flat and a black hole, and I’ll quote from the website for this one:
In September, 2003, astronomers at NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory found what can be described as sound waves emanating from a supermassive black hole. The black hole can be seen in the Perseus cluster of galaxies located 250 million light years from Earth.
Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England, analyzed the waves and announced, “We have detected their sound….” The sound he found (which is really the waves passing through gas near the black hole) translate to the note B flat.
But this is not a B flat you or I can hear. It is 57 octaves below middle C. A piano, by comparison, contains only seven octaves. So if a black hole hums, it hums at a frequency a million billion times lower than you can hear.
-cvj
It’s an equal tempered scale, so you might think it doesn’t matter. But i’ve heard the Moonlight Sonata in C minor, rather than the original C# minor. It’s only a half step down, but it’s clearly not as good. Many modern electronic keyboards can shift the sound up or down, and you play whatever. So, one could play the easier C minor, but have the sound come out C# minor (assuming the musician isn’t totally thrown by this – i have relative pitch, so it doesn’t matter to me).
Why does it sound different? Well, the Moonlight uses up quite a bit of keyboard. It can’t be played on a five octave 61 key organ style keyboard, for example. And, the ear doesn’t have the same response up and down the scale. Three octaves below A 440 is only 55 Hz. That’s near the lower limit of human hearing.
If we were ever in a truer form before we solidified our experiences, the way we all like to do, how would we see the “earlier understanding of sound?” This may be part of the integration that we need to recognize again? The “sound label” I use on name will help to clarify a little more. “All” in good fun 🙂
This summer he published “This Is Your Brain on Music†(Dutton), a layperson’s guide to the emerging neuroscience of music. Dr. Levitin is an unusually deft interpreter, full of striking scientific trivia. For example we learn that babies begin life with synesthesia, the trippy confusion that makes people experience sounds as smells or tastes as colors. Or that the cerebellum, a part of the brain that helps govern movement, is also wired to the ears and produces some of our emotional responses to music. His experiments have even suggested that watching a musician perform affects brain chemistry differently from listening to a recording.
Not only BHs sing in Bb (surely some of them prefer F#), but also, a veritable inflationary period occurred in music in the last three centuries.
“At the beginning of the 17th century, Michael Praetorius reported in his encyclopedic Syntagma musicum that pitch levels had become so high that singers were experiencing severe throat strain and lutenists and viol players were complaining of snapped strings […] At La Scala in Milan, the A above middle C rose as high as 451 Hz.”
Yes! Lots of them…. Phrygian indeed, and others among the modes. I’m not sure if I have a favourite…Maybe it is Phrygian. I also like arious modifications of the minor scales…. etc. All been so long since I’ve done much… planning to start again…. will almost be a beginner again….
-cvj
Clifford,
Do you like any modes, outside of the regular major and minor scales?
In the past, I liked playing around with modes like Phrygian, Phrygian Dominant, and Locrian.
Locrian has sort of a weird sound I like. It’s missing a major 5th interval.
I was use to playing the guitar with all the strings tuned down a half step (ie. where the E string was tuned to E flat, etc …). It was slightly easier to do things like string bending between notes.
One time I tried playing a 7-string guitar with all the strings tuned down a half step, where the extra (low) B string was tuned to B flat. It sounded kind of odd at first. It seemed like the sort of sound which takes an acquired taste to get use to, whether something was played in B flat major or minor. In contrast on a normal six string guitar, it’s always tempting to play in the key of E major or minor. (Or with all the six strings tuned down a half step, E flat major or minor).
You have perfect pitch??!
Bee can watch too!
http://beelinetv.com/
The stars might not sing in B flat, but B is listening in her flat.
Bb is probably popular because trumpet, tenor sax and other
instruments are Bb instruments but are written in C.
So it is easier for a trumpet player to play a song in Bb
(because they act as if it is in C).
B flat is a pretty common key for jazz and marching band music, but less so for classical music (doesn’t go well with A-strings). And probably not common in pop music (basic guitar chords are C, G, and D).
Golly, and i thought this would be full of apartment jokes. Then again, the Beatles thought C major was the be all and end all of chords, and Mahler did like D minor some. Who would have thunk that a blackhole would have a B flat harmonic resonance frequency??? Could Pythagoras and Kepler have been “tuned in” to the subtle music of the heavenly bodies; was Oderberg and Roark just reiterating???
I recall a (very likely apocryphal) tale about Eric Satie, who upon finding a stray B flat, was so disgusted that he had to call for his butler to remove it.
And here I thought the preeminent occurrence of the note was “Jumping Jack Flash”.