Essay #1: THE CALL OF THE WILD, The Overtone Series

Epilogue: "...this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself—one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred.” ~ Jack London, The Call of the Wild, 1903

(Author's aside: Take a moment - under 2 min. - to listen to Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zorathustra" in conjunction with this essay. Here is a 2012 YouTube of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra performing. ) Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s collaborative 2001: A Space Odyssey, a 1968 cinematic tour de force, would be incomplete without its gripping opening orchestral theme, a majestic strain plucked from Richard Strauss’s 1896 musical tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, “Thus spake Zoroaster.” Strauss inaugurates this “Sunrise” fanfare tentatively, as a hesitant but intrepid traveler might explore after happening upon an unfamiliar and imposing stairwell, a startling casing of giant steps far broader than built for humans, polished magical marble treads too wide for mortal stride, stairs tacitly throwing down from heaven a playful gauntlet, a booming voice from clouds above, “Who dare proceed?!” These gigantic, mysterious musical steps are the first five notes of Strauss’s piece, beginning with a primeval contrabassoon, growling an almost imperceptible but foreboding tremolo (along with organ and tympani, the three share the same note), a whisper, an expectant voice on the wind. The first mystical note forms the foundation upon which Strauss’s gigantic stairs emerge, ascending into his masterpiece. So now what if I told you that those very first five notes in Strauss’s famous composition, those five gigantic steps, cleanly trace a precise pattern already hidden inside your own voice every single time you open your mouth? Not just some of the time. All of the time. Whenever you use your vocal chords, those five steps are hidden there, inside. ...five exquisitely-spaced tones (and many higher ones as well, tones not highlighted in Strauss’s piece) hidden right inside your voice and in other musical notes, too. Each time you laugh, cry, wince, or groan, Strauss’s magic giant stairwell adorns your voice. And what if that same mystic stairwell was also in the voice of everyone you know? Your wife or husband, your newborn, even your pets? On cool, early spring dawns, birds tease you awake with this delphic song. Wolves cry to the moon by it. Whales call out to each other hundreds of miles through our oceans with the magic. The hermit thrush, a tiny little one-ounce bird gracing North and Central American woodlands, goes as far as to flaunt Strauss’s lapsed copyright by shamelessly breaking the pattern out into bold melodic flourish much as Strauss did only way higher and more flamboyant. Copycat. [1] To hear for yourself that ethereal avian wonder, try searching “hermit thrush” on YouTube. Yes, you, the hermit thrush, wolves, the blue whale, and Richard Strauss all share this ancient mystic song. It was always hidden in your voice though you perhaps never paid much attention. Welcome to double-secret-probation Club Vertebrata, Animal House. Musicians have known of this secret for centuries, and we pedantically hide the magic in plain sight behind the clinical label, the “overtone series,” a pattern of tones couched inside a single voice and hovering gently “over” it, always riding up and down on voices and notes everywhere they go, following along like some colorful inescapable bedazzled kite, tethered by invisible and invincible twine, forever bobbing up and down on the breeze. When the voice goes up, the pattern goes up. When the voice goes down, the pattern goes down, but voices could never loose this pattern. It is baked in. The overtone series is a subtle sonic vestige of any resonating sound-making structure fixed at two ends and creating a note, like a wire on a cello or a musical pipe open at both ends, or the vocal folds in your own larynx, your voice box, and even a bird’s syrinx. This most common thread of phylum Vertebrata, the overtone series, thus traces back hundreds of millions of years here on Mother Earth. The pattern as often as not issues from some sound-making device manipulated in order to transmit meaning. It is perhaps a pervasive tell-tale of acoustic communication. Might not be far-fetched to declare the overtone series one signature of conscious life, an exquisite fingerprint of awareness. Certainly our brains instinctively tell us this particular resonant pattern is extra-special in the world of life surrounding us. In everyday conversation, we do not talk about this pervasive pattern, in part probably because the pattern is so darn well-hidden from us by our own brain. The overtone series is well-disguised. It hides behind its own fundamental tone on the bottom and may also be filtered by our auditory processing which seems to unify the many tones into a single perceived simple whole, making perception a lot less less noisy and cumbersome to deal with while still affording a large convenient arrow-sign, “Alert! Look over there! That particular glittery sound is special. There is a very good chance something from Club Vertebrata is attached to that special sound wherever it came from. Trust your intuition. You can feel it. You don’t need to know why.” In 1984, DNA pioneer Francis Crick suggested our thalamus operates as a filter for processing of senses, helping us weed through the overwhelming bombardment of external stimuli we confront with life’s daily survival challenges. Subsequent decades of related research expanded Crick’s basic idea. Turns out we do possess all manner of visual and auditory biases and filters making our own senses easier to cope with. Back in the 80s, much related attention focused on visual stimuli. We are after all a very visual species. In more recent decades, auditory processing has been increasingly linked to the thalamus as well. The special way we perceive the overtone series as a single unified voice may very well be part of that processing. LAUREL AND YANNY - FOLLOWING OUR GUT In the Spring of 2018, the world received a surprising opportunity to peek inside the rabbit-hole underlying the voice, the complex vocal and aural processes we usually take for granted. A North Georgia high school freshman working through vocabulary exercises on computer was presented with a digital recording of the word “laurel” from Vocabulary.com. What Katie Hetzel mysteriously heard, however, was something entirely different. She did not hear what she was supposed to. She was confused. Katie clearly discerned the unmistakable but delightfully articulate gibberish, “yanny.”

Was she on the wrong computer program? Was the software malfunctioning? Yanny was definitely not on the word list. Katie asked around. For fun, she shared the discovery with friends, this seductive Slytherin incantation sounding one way to a select tribe of initiates but entirely different to the world’s Muggles. Teachers and students alike were confused and bemused just like Katie. Two people sitting side-by-side would hear entirely different things at the very same moment. The whimsical discovery crept into the digital wild. Almost instantly, Ellen Degeneres, Reese Witherspoon, Wendy’s, Skittles, and the San Francisco 49ers were all hanging on the viral Yanny Twitter Train.[2] For a heady moment, Laurel and Yanny were the most spectacular comedy duo on the interwebs. An impromptu Twitter survey of a half-million users suggested 53% heard one word and 47% heard the other, the English-speaking universe rent asunder like the Biblical veil in the temple, a divide in the Cosmos. No in-betweens, just two articulate but inconsistent realities. People perceiving both manifestations were exceedingly rare, like Harry Potters. Maybe these gifted people who could hear two languages at the same time were brought here to save the Universe. Every once in a while, somebody might hear one word one day and then the other word a day or week later. This happened to my younger daughter. If this did happen? Then the hearer typically proved incapable of forcing perception to flip-flop on demand. The switch was harder to pull off than seeing the 3-dimensional secret surprise inside an autostereogram, the colorful 3-dimensional illusion made famous by the Magic Eye book series in the late 90s.

VISUAL AND AUDITORY ILLUSIONS – “SEEING IS BELIEVING” Visual illusions confirm our persistent distortions of the world. The famous “Checker Shadow Illusion,” for example, proffers two crisp, adjacent boxes not even 2 centimetres separate, one noticeably darker. Wait, no. It isn’t darker at all. They are exactly the same. “How can this possibly be?” We do a double-take. “Yes, the one is surely darker, noticeably so! But this Professor Adelson from MIT says they are the same!” So we cut two small holes in a makeshift paper screen in order to cover most of the illusion while revealing only the two checkers in question, discovering once and for all if our own mind really beguiles us...carefully scrutinizing the boxes while the rest of the illusion, the visual noise, is blotted from awareness. Voila! The thick velvet curtain of perception recedes, revealing the clever-but-deceptive Wizard that is our own brain, goes with us everywhere. Nothing is as it seems. At all times, we walk around in a sort of foggy Oz, and context always matters. We are always in a visual Oz and also always in an aural Oz. We are wired to be. The ears and attendant processing, just like eyes, ceaselessly bend reality in a myriad of subtle little ways in order to afford quick access to deeper realities mattering more to us than the distortions. There is almost always some higher meaning behind the distortion, some meaning more important than the sacrificial reality.

Our inner Wizard of Oz synthesizes dozens of actual overtones in higher octaves into a singular heard note, a lone voice. The overtones are, in fact, what make the sound into one voice. They are the secret code, the special sauce, the useful detail collectively endorsing the higher meaning, “This sound is legit. It all came from one very special place, from something alive.” As Malcolm Gladwell poetically phrased it, “Arousal leaves us mind blind.” These types of built-in filters, imperfect though they sometimes be, help reserve substantial mental energy for more daunting questions, “Is this living thing friend or foe? Is it a food? Or the village chief? Weak? Or powerful? Poisonous? Or nutritious? I will call out to friends through the forest for help...with my own voice, my own sign of awareness.”

ILLUSIONS AND THE ARTS – SEEING THROUGH ILLUSION One priority challenge for emerging artists is arguably to penetrate illusions that simultaneously shroud and adorn the canvasses we elect to master. If our canvass is visual, we need to thoroughly comprehend visual illusions. If our canvass is music, then we need to know auditory illusions. How can we possibly learn to rearrange color and sound in new and interesting ways if we never bother to decipher attendant distortions and biases that no one can ever escape? ...These built-in distortions simply make us all human, make us all living things. Studying illusion is one way we grow into more nuanced artists. ...And the overtone series is one whopper of an illusion, a pretty darn cool illusion, many tones sounding as though they are one voice, tones all around us, all the time, everywhere we go, an illusion helping keep the private voices of 7 billion people clear every time they communicate with one another. That is until the one day a little corner of the Wizard’s curtain accidentally falls away from the curtain rod for a split-second, perhaps a few frequencies in the digital recording are off by the tiniest margin, and suddenly millions of people in two competing camps begin hearing two entirely different words at the exact same time, the Tower of Babyl resurrected, Laurel and Yanny. Our aural processing circuits conceal a surprising array of auditory illusions, many relating to tones and notes. Another captivating illusion, “binaural beats,” like the laurel-yanny illusion, helps us quickly perceive our own inner-Wizard. Whenever each ear hears a different steady tone and the steady tones are sufficiently near to each other in frequency, then the brain perceives a distinct “beating” that is not really there at all, a pronounced pulse that does not really exist...an irresistible sensation created entirely in the brain. To hear this for yourself, simply navigate to YouTube and search “binaural beats”when you have a pair of earbuds or headphones handy (It is important to separate the sounds that each ear receives. This illusion will not usually work well with speakers), and then listen to any of the examples that pop up in your search. The neat thing about binaural beats is that, as with the visual Checker Shadow Illusion, we can quickly confirm our own brain’s substantial distortion of reality. When both ears are fed the pair of tones simultaneously, our hemispheres are forced to reconcile; and then we can not avoid the illusion even if we want to. The sensation of pulse imposes whether we like it or not. We can’t make the illusion go away. Our conscious intention has no say in the matter. We can not bypass the circuits in our brains creating these wonderful imaginary beats. We perceive an aural version of the outer world that exists only in our minds. With laurel and yanny, our brains discern a voice with the attendant overtone series, and our aural processing rapidly and aggressively filters known patterns, presenting to us the distilled“heard” version, the human voice. The word “laurel” includes frequencies that in higher overtones resemble the gibberish “yanny.” Our auditory circuits perceive a range of possible interpretations. For those hearing “yanny,” the processing filters selectively discard some“laurel” details and vice versa. With binaural beats, we don’t need half the world’s English-speaking population to disagree with us in order to be thoroughly convinced our brain does not always present a sound to our consciousness exactly the way it entered our ears. Our brains prioritize the information our senses receive in ways we can not always so easily bypass. We will explore the overtone series in this book because the overtone series is important to music. The series is not especially complicated, but it is a pronounced feature of musical sound (not to mention living sound)and is widely thought to be the basis for most music, a key foundational and instinctive ingredient attracting us irresistibly to musical communication. Even if you do not think you hear the overtone series, you always do. It is all around you,everywhere. Perhaps regard the overtone series as the magic fairy dust riding atop notes, the airy spirit hovering over the violin in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, for example, who inexplicably and uncontrollably compels us to weep when we hear Shostakovich’s masterpiece. The overtone series is a binding agent in music reaching across awareness and seizing our heart strings in a relentless enchanting embrace transcending all genres of music, transcending all living creatures with voices.

“IT CAME TO ME IN A DREAM” (….Sort of.) It came to me around 6 a.m. as I was waking up one morning, truth be told, this lightning bolt idea. There is this trick that I use whenever I face some major problem in life and answers are not arriving forthwith. No lightning bolts… No light bulbs. Just me in the Sahara by myself, except with some big mental problem and nothingness, no easy answers.

I will share this useful trick. But first my problem, or problems. This book has been quietly percolating in my head for a few years, certainly more than five years to be honest. All the scaffolding has been here all along, the basic musical ideas here from the get-go. The biggest problem has been contriving ways to arrange ideas so that others, especially die-hard music folk, might generously permit interest to germinate in themselves, might surrender a parcel of mind-share to my musical whimsy. Music theory can be pretty dry at times, especially for those for whom music is not a first love. I wanted this book to appeal both to seasoned musician and to the curious alike, to those with limited musical knowledge. I suppose a target audience might be the high school teacher to early college professor, with all ideas readily accessible to the student. I wanted to make some of the basic math more attainable and fun, and more memorable as well, easier to internalize. I wanted to rearrange somewhat a few musical models we use to flesh out basic feelings in music. And I wanted to do all this with language that isn’t too clinical. I wanted to write about music in a poetic prose kinda way, to be “The Last of the Mohicans of Music Theory,” if that is even possible. And since I don’t have nearly sufficient material to fill a “Last of the Mohicans,” I slowly found myself gunning for more of an“Old Man and the Sea” of music theory instead. There was also this problem of “wandering off reservation,” me being a musical Mohican and all. I hoped to challenge a few conventional musical maxims of the past 400 years, or perhaps at least to rearrange one musical model just a little, to make some very basic music theory a little more intuitive. Technical fields tend not to take kindly to 50-something-interlopers arriving unannounced and messing around with the native technical jargon...”wandering off reservation.” Was my endeavor doomed from the start? Enter Stage Right,“The Dream.” My trick is this: Whenever struggling with a really big ‘life problem,’ some problem for which answers are slow to emerge? I habitually ruminate on the problem while falling asleep or first waking. I sometimes do this for days or weeks on end. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. If a problem is important, then I do this over and over. I ask the question either out loud or quietly as consciousness perches on the threshold of the other realm, on the cusp of dream. I stand at dream’s doorway, hesitantly dozing, and offer up questions to the subconscious as if to an oracle. I even affectionately call it “The Oracle,” my subconscious. And then I just wait patiently, days, weeks, or months if need be, hoping the The Oracle perceives my politeness and deigns to reply. The question (and problem) on the morning at hand was, “Which song?” I had already been wrestling for months over where and how to begin this book, and I found myself irretrievably drawn to advice offered long ago by my kindhearted and wise cousin, a retired and beloved high school band director who, like other band directors I have met in recent years, loves music and teaching so deeply that he was unable to stop teaching upon retirement. They are sacred vessels of our musical heritage, such band and choral directors. They carry unquenchable torches for music for lifetimes. They are special people. When I had first shared with cousin Dean my desire to write this book a few years back, he responded with a generous and useful tip. Dean is a man of few words, always choosing carefully, and in this instance, he thoughtfully encouraged, “You should look into the overtone series.” He was right, perhaps even more right than he dared guess. Dean did not know the details of my musical story. What my cousin Dean seemed to know, either implicitly or expressly, was this: We can not penetrate the deeper human connection to music without unraveling the overtone series. We just can’t. Music starts there; and a book like this should start there. So after months of wrestling with the early ordering of this effort, I had finally settled on the overtone series as one of the focuses for early chapters. Next problem: How do I transform that crusty overtone series into something fun and interesting? How best to attract attention to this feature of musical sound? To refashion the overtone series from a drab pile of numbers and curves into something more? How to show it for what it really is? Something beyond words? This question also I offered up to the Oracle of Dream, and after several weeks the Oracle mysteriously responded, “Go find a symbolic song.” “Really? Just? ...Hey! Where did you go, Oracle?! Don’t leave me hanging, Oracle! Which song? Which SONG?! I need an answer. Don’t leave me flapping in the wind like this! I need to get started on The Book!” Silence. Sahara. Endless dry sand. Parched lifeless breeze with no voices, no answers. So I asked and waited, waited and asked, each and every single night as I drifted asleep, each morning as I groggily emerged, “Which song?” I repeated this question for roughly three weeks; and then one morning, out of the blue, I awoke hearing quite clearly (I kid not) that hypnotic opening theme from Kubrick and Clarke’s science fiction film, Richard Strauss’s iconic masterpiece, the “Sunrise” section of Also Sprach Zoroaster playing in my head. I bolted upright, “Eureka! What a crazy-useful idea!” The clearer the song grew in my head, the more excited I became, “That song has such an epic feel. It will be the perfect solution as a symbolic mascot for the overtone series.” 6 a.m. Roll out of bed, “This is so great. I need to look into the history of that song. Need to dig down to its roots.” I began stumbling downstairs to forage for my laptop, humming the Strauss piece to myself, “Those opening notes are sooo wide. This is perfect!” I kept humming, and then it zapped me again, this time zapping me while I was wide awake, one billion volts straight from the Oracle shot through my veins before my feet touched the bottom step, “Wait NO! This can’t be. This can not – No...freaking...WAY. Those notes are just sooo wide. Is that even possible?” I collapsed on the downstairs couch, popped open the laptop on the coffee table, compulsively hopping through search engines. After locating the title of the Strauss piece, I navigated to a Wikipedia overview. My eyes scanned feverishly down the screen, “Bingo. JACKPOT!” “On its first appearance, the motif is a part of the first five notes of the natural overtone series:octave, octave and fifth, two octaves, two octaves and major third (played as part of a C major chord with the third doubled).”[[footnote]] A dizzied, astonished fog seized me for the next two hours.

I had been supplicating my subconscious in quest for a symbolic song for weeks. And the furtive Netherworld of Sleep had finally reluctantly delivered, but had generously delivered in spades, “Sunrise” of Also Sprach Zoroaster, no mere mascot for the series, but the actual ordered overtone series itself deliberately fashioned by Richard Strauss as a kind of giant cornerstone for his classical masterpiece much the way Michaelangelo had hand-cut The David from an 18-ton block of marble. Imagine that. Also Sprach Zoroaster was itself a “star child” of the overtone series; and I might even go as far as to make the friendly wager that Kubrick never even knew that part. Don’t misunderstand me. I do not question for a millisecond Kubrick’s musical literacy. The man was a genius. I suppose my guess goes more like this. Kubrick originally did not perceive the Strauss piece as the opener for 2001. It was merely an early sample track as guidance for a composer. Kubrick reportedly culled through roughly 400 pieces of music before eventually settling on the soundtrack that we hear today.I suspect he might have been vaguely aware of the song’s Nietzche heritage. He wanted the feel, and he was juggling a lot of cinematic detail to get this movie polished and off to market. Before 2018, I had never even watched the Kubrick-Clarke movie in its entirety before, believe it or not. I know: Thwack my knuckles with a slide-rule and suspend my Game of Thrones and Marvel privileges. I totally deserve it. I should be ashamed, “And you call yourself a science fiction fan. Pffft!” You may safely bet I have now watched the movie...several times.

A SHIFT IN HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS AND A SPECIAL MOVIE

The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey is challenging. Even has an intermission. How many movies can you name off the top of your head with intermissions? And that intermission ina movie with less than 20 pages of dialogue? There is almost no talking, for crying out loud, themovie dominated by glacially slow actionsequences. No wonder Rock Hudson walked out on the screening dazed and confused. He could not be blamed, but healso did not have a clue what he was doing. Hudson might as well have been spewing out his first mouthful of Italian Chianti because he had never experienced the taste before.2001: A Space Odyssey is a masterpiece meant to be observed, not watched, in order to be properly enjoyed. It is nowlike an aged bottle of wine for the sci-fi genre, the finest there is, The Standard. Renowned filmcritic Roger Ebert wrote 29 years after 2001’spremier, “The overnight Hollywood judgment was that Kubrick had become derailed, that in his obsession with effects and set pieces, he had failed to make a movie. What he had actually done was make a philosophical statement about man's place in the universe, using images as those before him had used words, music or prayer. And he had made it in a way that invited us to contemplate it -- not to experience it vicariously as entertainment, as we might in a good conventional science-fiction film, but to stand outside it as a philosopher might, and think about it.” I was almost exactly 1 year old when 2001 premiered; and this movie premier occurred just a little over 1-year, 3-months before Neil Armstrong would first set foot on the Moon. Believe it or not, I still possess vague recollections of that latter year though I was merely 2-years, 4-months-old at the time, barely able to speak. The Moon Landing happened on a Sunday, and I recalled being expectantly hurried through the basement halls of church in my mother’s arms away from the nursery. Everyone was rushing home to eat lunch that day and await the early afternoon, when the first living being in history (that we know of) would set foot on the celestial body orbiting our Mother Earth. The moon landing was a cosmic baby step of human consciousness, a fundamental reordering of Humanity’s collective self-perception. Here Kubrick and Clarke had showed up just hours before that opening curtain, the Moon Shot, laying down a giant cinematic welcome red carpet for the event almost exactly one year in advance. “2001”explored big themes: space travel, evolution, consciousness, and artificial intelligence, but all in a primal, minimalist sort of way; and music played an expansive role in that effort. Ebert connected the music to the movie in this way,“Alone among science-fiction movies, ‘2001’ is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe. No little part of his effect comes from the music. Although Kubrick originally commissioned an original score from Alex North, he used classical recordings as a temporary track while editing the film, and they worked so well that he kept them. This was a crucial decision. North's score, which is available on a recording, is a good job of film composition, but would have been wrong for ‘2001’ because, like all scores, it attempts to underline the action -- to give us emotional cues. The classical music chosen by Kubrick exists outside the action. It uplifts. It wants to be sublime; it brings a seriousness and transcendence to the visuals.” I would go as far as to proclaim that Richard Strauss’s Sunrise transports us from the primal to the divine in under two minutes, finally coming to rest on an exuberant and very spiritual but tacit “Hallelujah” issued straight from a pipe organ. Sunrise does the same with 2001 as it did with the Nietzsche work that inspired it: It moves beyond words in a poetic way. Our most thorough exploration of music theory demands words...and math, and this book will not not depart in requiring words and math; but I hope that you find yourself agreeable to accept this invitation by me to move beyond words together in the pages that follow. In this book, my deepest hope is to entice you to approach a threshold, a place where, at least some of the time, music and dream collide and together elude words.