So, it's been months since the last new music post from Ol Uncle Reeree. I could make excuses like "I was working" or "I was spending time with family" or even "A tiger ate my arm and it took a little while to grow another," but you wouldn't care. You, my adoring, merciless public need music. Without me and my home recordings what can entertain you? The never ending fountain of flawless studio tracks that flow from Pandora? Videos on Youtube of every cute puppy that has ever lived? Tens of thousands of hours of Netflix movies? Bah!
Well, despite speculation, I have not given up on music altogether. And here we have more of the fruits of my not-giving-up-edness. This is a somewhat fictional love song about me trying to be a good little engineer in school and trying to avoid the confusion and inefficiency of romance. Let me know what you think:
P.S. I have it on good authority that this may be the first pop song to mention Green's function.
When I was a kid taking piano lessons and starting to write small pieces I remember talking to an adult who was a bit less excited about music. "Eventually we'll run out of new songs altogether. There are only so many notes, and only so long of a piece that people can tolerate. Musicians copy each other a lot already." I was initially shocked by this, but as much as I disliked it, it seemed to make sense. I began to wonder how much music was really left to be found. Was this really true, or just an assertion based on general musical disinterest?
Knowing a little more math than I did then, I can think about the question a bit differently now. Here's my shot at figuring out how many songs there are to be found:
First of all, I'll be using simple counting techniques that that most people learn in middle or high school. Nothing fancy. For example: if a person rolls two six-sided dice (with different numbers/characters on each face of each die) the number of possible combinations is equal to:
6 x 6 = 36
Add another die with unique characters and you just multiply by 6 again. Simple.
Well, we can put some limits on what constitutes a musical piece. To keep things manageable, we'll limit the length of a piece to 3 minutes. Also, we'll cut out sounds above 20kHz, since that's beyond the range of human hearing. For resolution we'll use 16 bits, since that's good enough for CDs. We'll only handle mono stuff; the second channel added by stereo may inflate the numbers artificially.
So we'll find the total number of unique mono CD quality recordings that fit within 3 minutes. Each bit can be one of 2 possibilities (a 1 or a zero), so our base will be 2.
2^(16 bits per sample x 44,100 samples per second x 3 minutes x 60 seconds per minute)
2^127008000 = 2^(1.27 x 10^8) = 10^(38234000)
Okay, so take a 2 and double it more than 100 million times. That's a lot of twos. Or 10 raised to the 38 millionth power, if you prefer. But what does it mean? It means that there are that many different 3 minute songs that you could record at CD quality. It would take about 25 billion years to play them all back one after the other (unless I've made a mistake in my arithmetic, which is very possible). Right now, though, the difference between one unique song and the next could be the addition or omission of the slightest pop or crackle, or delaying everything by a fraction of a second, or any of a number of other trivial changes.
So, let's try a more constrained estimate based on musical principles. We'll look for the number of unique melodies that exist. We'll limit the possibilities to 8 measures of 4/4 with the equal tempered chromatic notes over 2 octave (25 notes). The fastest note that we'll allow is a sixteenth note. Let's see what we get:
25^(16 notes per measure x 8 measures)
25^128
10^(128 x log10(25))
10^179
Okay, so now we have a lot of tens, but not NEARLY as many as the 3-minute songs that we counted earlier. Again, this time we weren't counting full songs, but melodies, which some might consider the basis of a song. So, how much is 10^179? Well, wikipedia is telling me that there are 10^80 atoms in the known universe. That means that if each atom in the universe were actually a portal to another universe of equal size, each of the atoms in each of the universes would have their own 8-bar melody, and there would still be a lot left over.
So, if there are any readers that I haven't yet scared away with math, here is today's piece of music recorded over the Thanksgiving holiday:
So, having a family complicates the "how to fill an ipod with music" problem. I like to have it play at random in the car or while we clean the house, but I'd rather not have my 6-year-old singing along with "She's got leeeeeegggggss!", or worse yet: "Get one the scene! Like a sex machine!" To remedy this problem, I had a couple of options: 1) remove all rock, blues, and R&B music from my ipod OR 2) Gently edit the music to make it more family friendly.
I didn't like option 1 because I LOVE old R&B and blues. I'm drawn to it, probably because I'm completely incapable of producing it, coming from a comfortable middle-class upbringing. So I decided to explore the other option...
Upon trying option number 2, I figured out that my hand is incapable of the subtle editing that would be required. Simply gating out the work "sex" from the chorus of James Brown's "Get up" proved pretty jarring. So, some of you may recall last year when I decided to go ahead and destroy the song entirely.
This week I decided to give a Marvin Gaye tune the business. I didn't find a good place for a guitar solo or a polka band, like I gave to Mr. Brown, but I did manage to drop nearly all of the cheesy house remix tricks that I know.
Do you remember way back before you were married when you lived with a bunch of guys in an apartment and one of them used to sing "Monday is the best, you can wear your butt!" all of the time? And do you remember how that used to get stuck in your head, looped for hours at a time? And then, maybe the person who got the song stuck in your head in the first place would suddenly start clapping inhumanly loudly and giggle when you winced in pain? And then, maybe you would find the neighbor's underwear mixed in with your laundry and you would never actually get around to returning it because you could never think of an appropriate way to do it, and because you're not really sure which neighbor it may have been anyway? Well, here at Reeree's music factory we certainly remember those days. We used to wonder what the instrumental parts were like to the "Monday is the best" song. Was it really even a song at all, or maybe just some college's football cheer, or an ancient druid chant, or a grade school mnemonic device?
The wondering drove me into a frenzy. After years of suffering, my only hope to avoid more loss of sleep or productivity was to record the song myself, allowing it to take shape and drift out of my head into the internets where it could find others to afflict. My children helped me in my quest, providing the vocals that I was too shy to deliver. I contributed synthesizer, drum machine, vibraphone, electric guitar, bass guitar, and sampled string parts.
Hope you enjoy the tune. And have a very happy Monday!
Finally got a little track put together during baby naps on my night shift. When I don't have something significant to express, but still want to play with sounds, I often play little "what if" games. This time I wanted to try a buzzy analog synthesizer bass line with my lap steel and some jangly electric guitar. A drum machine and some Rhodes electric piano got thrown in for good measure. It was nice to play a bit, but it will be nice to sleep a bit, too, before the kids get up for school.
I've long wanted to take the time to write and record and album of music. For years that never really happened. I would record snippets here and there, but technical shortfalls and other obligations kept it from ever becoming a reality. Another problem was focus. Since music is a release for me, I typically sit down and play whatever I feel like, instead of putting together the complimentary and coherent ideas that and album should have.
A couple of things have changed over the last year and a half. For one, we planned to have a baby and have done much associated with preparing for Lucy's arrival. This meant it was easier to focus on one theme more often, because it was always on my mind. Second, my equipment and my proficiency with it has slowly continued to improve, allowing me to take on slightly more ambitious musical projects.
The result is a small five song album (or EP, I guess) called family portrait. All of the songs but the last one have been posted here before. The fifth song "for my valentine" was recorded while I was in Arizona for a work trip while Sarah was at home pregnant. Too shy to sing out in the hotel room, I drove a few miles outside of town and recorded alongside the highway. You can hear cars passing by every now and again. To present the song collection, Sarah and I put together album art, as shown below. In the next week or so I hope to burn disks and print cases to send to family.
The disks sent to family will have the uncompressed and remastered versions of the songs (I've learned a bit more about mastering over the last year :) ). The ones posted on Soundcloud are mp3's. Also, the version of Lucy's Lullaby on the disks will have the ukulele solo replaced by a lovely violin solo played by our good friend Treesa Gold.
Sarah and Lucy are back home. Sarah's mother has been an angel helping with everything from grocery shopping, to diapers, to postpartum sisterhood. It's hard to watch the woman you love go through so much physical and emotional pain without being able to do much to help. Knowing that this time was coming, I wrote and recorded another song for Sarah and our baby.
