You will of course have watched last week’s World Darts Championship coverage on the BBC. Therefore you will have noticed they used the song Friend or Foe (by my band Cassette Electrik) on their ‘Friend or Foe’ segment:
Next stop: soundtracking curling @ the Vancouver Winter Olympics
Ben Burtt is the sound designer behind some of cinema’s most iconic sounds – the light saber, Darth Vader’s voice, the X-Wing fighter, Chewbacca, and all the other brilliant effects from Star Wars.
Not only that, but he’s also worked on many other Hollywood films from the Dark Crystal to Wall-E. When a friend suggested we went to a talk at the National Film Theatre given by Burtt I leapt at the chance.
Ben showed how the sound design for Star Wars had come about, not just through his own personal interests, but through the overall evolution of film in the 20th century.
He started with a truly strange clip made by Edison in 1894 – showing a man playing a violin with two men waltzing together in front of him – which apparently is the earliest surviving film that has synchronised sound. Being cumbersome and expensive it didn’t go mainstream until the late 1920′s. Everyone knows The Jazz Singer was the earliest talkie, but Burtt showed a clip from a Don Juan film dating from a couple of years earlier with synchronised sword clash sounds in a fight sequence. Ok, they sounded like knitting needles clashing, and the whole picture was absurd to the modern viewer, but it was a small seed leading to the modern action movie genre.
After that, Burtt presented some of the influences and ideas behind Star Wars: a magnificant 70mm excerpt from Lawrence of Arabia (man, that film needs to be seen on that scale on that print – absoutely extraordinary. With regard to Star Wars – think Tantuine), some Tarzan clips of Cheetah (think Chewbacca), and Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts (fantastical and alien creatures)
Then we got into how he actually made the sounds for Star Wars. Now, we’ve all read bits and bobs about the sound of the light saber, etc, but this is what he said during the talk and therefore pretty much the definitive methods for creating these iconic sounds:
The Light Saber
Is in fact comprised of two sounds: 1) The flywheel from a film projector Burtt used to operate. This flywheel which when interfered with would slow down and speed up, producing a very musical change in pitch. On it’s own sounded very much like the hum of a transformer, but very smooth. Burtt said it was a nice sound but too smooth to match the aggression of the lightsaber so required another sound layered with it: 2) the rasp of a transformer from a tv set. A very buzzy, clicky transformer sound that sits over the top of the sound: you can hear the discrete clicks of it in the film layered over the top of the smooth swooping noises of the flywheel. This layered sound was then played by an amp in front of which Burtt waved a microphone mimicking the swoop of the lightsabers in the film, producing a doppler effect on the original layered sound. Voila!
Darth Vader
Excitingly Burtt recreated this for us on the spot using a scuba oxygen tank. The intense breathing sound of Darth Vader is the microphone placed inside the respirator while breaths are taken through the respirator. Produces that distinctive electronic rushing of air. Talking through it sounds just like Darth Vader! We applauded! Apparently lots more sounds were produced to accompany Darth Vader to simulate all aspects of his life support system, but were deemed too much, and the respirator sound is the only one that made it through to the final cut.
Chewbacca
This was a young bear in a Californian zoo that had been deprived of food for a day and then teased with food. The mournful and pitiful sounds of Chewbacca are that bear! We heard the original recordings and they are really not that different from how they ended up in the film. Poor bear – we saw a little film of him. But it suffered only a little to contribute to a great film.
Laser weapons
If you’ve ever twanged taut metal or been near railway tracks when there’s an approaching train, you’ll know that long stretches of metal resonate sound in a very pleasing way. Burtt auditioned many high tension metal guylines of pylons, and found the perfect one somewhere in the desert. Tapped with a wedding ring, it produces that lovely recoiling sound as the impact zaps up and down the metal. Recorded using a contact microphone.
Mosquito man
You know – the funny alien creature who tells the storm troopers where to find Luke. He has a sort of extended gas mask affair like a snout. Anyway, it’s a vocoder seeded by some Harrison Ford out-takes that Burtt found on the cutting room floor (or rather the bin of discarded audio)
R2-D2
Giving a robot a tangible character when it’s really just a glorified wastepaper bin is a challenge. It was solved using great sound design. Burtt avoided synthesizers for the most part on Star Wars, but used one for R2-D2. He said that he would come up with equivalent lines in English for what R2-D2 would be ‘saying’ and twiddle the filter and other knobs of a synth whilst reading the lines out loud, to try and articulate the words using the synth. He obviously got quite good at it! A similar challenge was required for the voice of Wall-E, which Burtt also produced. That seems to have been created using a formant/pitch correction type process.
Space-ships
Burtt and his team spent lots of time at vintage air shows recording turbo-prop aeroplanes (one of which crashed – I think he said no one was killed). Those recordings were then processed and pitch-shifted down to produce most of the spacecraft noises. For the record I think the hollow open roar of the X-wing fighter is one of my favourite sounds ever. I must pitch shift some turbo prop plane recordings!
I think one of the reasons the sound effects are so successful in Star Wars – and Ben Burtt certainly says this was their intention – is that they are mainly based on real-world sounds. This gives them a root in the world and a richness that can’t always be achieved by electronic means alone (certainly not in the mid 70′s anyway) Chewbacca sounds like a real creature because he’s really a bear, and spaceships sound like spaceships because they’re real military aircraft*.
*apart from the fact that spaceships wouldn’t make a noise in the vacuum of space. But then Burtt also pointed out that tyres always screech in the movies – even when driving through oil or mud. Film is hyper-reality, so let’s not split hairs…
Of course, the sound design is just one element of many that makes Star Wars the epoch defining film that it turned out to be – John William’s score, the primal tale of good vs evil, cool spaceships, maverick pilots, etc, etc – but it is an often overlooked factor – without good sound design we simply wouldn’t believe the fantastical things presented on screen.
Following Ben Burtt was a brief talk by Norman Wanstall, who is the British sound designer behind the early Bond films (Dr No, Goldfinger, etc), which Burtt said was a big influence on his work. Norman is a pleasing old school boffin type you could imagine working in the BBC Radiophonic workshop whilst wearing labcoat and tie. By a fun co-incidence, I’d just watched The Ipcress File the night before and then here was Norman who turned out to have also done the sound design on that too!
A Good Night Out!
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The harmonic content of pure oscillator tones generated by a Moog synthesizer – sine wave, saw tooth & square wave: |
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Sine wave (above): The fundamental can be seen at about 150hz as a strong white line |
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Sawtooth Wave & Square Wave (above): Both produce many — and different — harmonics giving rise to their distinct sounds |
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As an electronic musician I’ve always been fascinated by sine waves. They were present on my first Moog synthesiser as a sound generator option, and when sampling became available in the late 80s I learnt that any sound can be broken down into its constituent sine waves using Fourier analysis, and then reconstructed again. (Find out more about Fourier analysis in the Plus
podcast.) Virtually every sound heard today from any digital device — from HDTV to the iPod — is described as a sum of its sine wave parts in the digital realm.
Sine waves are unique in that they are the only sound in nature not to contain any harmonics beyond their fundamental frequency — they are the vampires of the sound world casting no harmonic shadow or reflections.
The piece of music I wrote for the Geekpop Festival, Sine Language, explores the idea of sine waves, and how they relate to other concepts such as the Western tuning system known as equal temperament, and even to ancient Greek cosmological ideas (listen to Sine
Language).
Sine waves are fascinating because they are theoretically perfect — they contain no harmonics above their fundamental frequency (or in musical terms, their pitch). Because of this, several overlaid sine waves of particular pitches aren’t always interpreted as discrete tones by the ear, but as just one sound whose timbre is modulating. The first minute or so of Sine Language introduces 7
differently pitched sine waves one by one, starting low and ending high. These 7 tones — which comprise the first half of the piece — are tuned to perfect fifths. This is unusual because fifths on a piano keyboard are actually not perfect. To understand why this is, a brief diversion on the history of Western tuning is required — starting with the ancient Greeks.
Apocryphally it was Pythagoras who noticed that harmonious notes were created by a blacksmith striking particular sized anvils, and this got him thinking about the mathematical principles of harmony. He went on to discover that dividing a string in two and plucking it produces a note that is double the original pitch of the string. So if the original string vibrates 500 times a second (i.e. a
frequency of 500Hz), and the length of the string is halved it will vibrate at double the frequency — that is 1000 times a second (1000Hz)
Image above: Two sine waves of the same amplitude, one half the frequency of the other
Musically, this means that we hear the 1000Hz tone as double the pitch of the 500Hz tone — this is called an octave. If you were to play both tones together, they would sound harmonious because for every one vibration of the 500Hz tone, you can fit the 1000Hz tone in twice. Our ears and brain interpret this as pleasant sounding — perhaps because it takes fewer receptors in our ears to
interpret and pass the information to the auditory part of the brain.
But a ratio of one to two is not the only ratio our ears interpret as harmonious. In one of those elegant surprises of nature, many other whole number ratios also sound pleasant to us, and by including other ratios you can construct a scale known as just intonation:
| Musical interval | Ratio of frequencies |
| C-D | 9:8 |
| C-E | 5:4 |
| C-F | 4:3 |
| C-G | 3:2 |
| C-A | 5:3 |
| C-B | 15:8 |
| C-C | 2:1 |
The ancient Greeks were so impressed with the neatness of this discovery, that they based a whole philosophy on it, which became known as the music of the spheres. At the time it was believed the orbits of the planets and the Sun were perfect circles centred on the Earth, and that these celestial objects moved in their orbits on crystal spheres. The spacing of these spheres were the
perfect mathematical ratios arising from musical intervals, and their movement against each other produced the music of the spheres. Though it was inaudible to human beings, it represented the perfection of the universe.
The ancient Greek concept of celestial spheres
However, beautiful as this idea is, there are several problems with dividing a scale up using just intonation and there have been many different attempts to solve it — but a permanent solution wasn’t found in the West until the 17th century.
Musically, the system of perfect ratios only works if you wish to remain in one key. As can be seen in the table of C major (above), all the notes are tuned perfectly for the key of C. So any piece of music you wish to write will have to start on C, end on C, and only use the white notes of the keyboard if it is going to sound “right”. This is because if you were to start on D, all the
equivalent ratios for the notes on the scale would be completely different, or in musical terminology, horrible sounding! On our keyboard tuned (using just intonation) to the key of C, the notes D and A have frequencies of 9/8 and 5/3 times the frequency of C. But according to just intonation, a perfect fifth above D is 3/2 times its frequency, which is 27/16 times the frequency of C (3/2 times
9/8); this is close to, but not exactly the frequency of A (5/3 times the frequency of C) on our keyboard. And this is before we even consider the black keys and how they should fit into the scheme. (For more discussion on mathematical ratios of musical notes read Music and Euclid’s Algorithm.)
One can imagine that staying in the key of C and using only the white notes is somewhat boring and can produce only a limited range of tonal variation. Musicians are generally adventurous types, not content with simply replicating what went before, and by the 1600s various systems had been developed in the West to allow for more movement among the keys. Such movement is called modulation, and
to find a system that allowed modulation between all the keys, say from C to D, without the key of D sounding completely awful was very difficult. Technically these out of tune notes were called wolf notes and were the bane of baroque and earlier composers.
Iamge above: A harpsichord (circa 1620) with split black notes tuned to sound good in different keys (Image courtesy Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments)
After the various attempts to solve this problem (including building piano keyboards with split black notes so the correctly tuned one could be picked for the key you were in, see picture above) the solution used today, called equal temperament, is the perfect compromise: keep all the octave ratios of 2:1 perfect, but average out all of the other notes of the scale. This means that
instead of one key being perfect and the others being wrong in their own unique and horrible way, all the keys are equally slightly wrong, but in such a way that is acceptable for all possible keys.
In mathematical terms this simply means that each of the 12 semitones in an octave are 1/12th of an octave higher or lower than their neighbours. The amount of detuning away from the “perfect” is sometimes referred to as the Pythagorean gap in deference to the original Greek idea of harmonic perfection.
Before equal temperament came what were known as well temperament systems. These were similar in that they allowed free modulation across keys, but weren’t quite so mathematically precise. For example, Werckmeister’s systems of the late 17th century involved specifying various flattenings and sharpenings of fifths and thirds. However, despite these not being the best mathematical
solution, they were sufficient for JS Bach to write the 48 Preludes and Fugues, in which there is one piece for each and every possible scale, major and minor, on the keyboard. This ability to write in different keys — and to modulate between them in the same piece — was simply not possible before well temperament was invented.
What all of the above means is that we are very used to hearing music in equal temperament and the sound of a perfectly tuned scale is quite unfamiliar and can even sound wrong to our ears. All this connects back to my piece as I’ve used a whole number ratio to generate the fifth note of the scale which produces a harmony more closely related to the Greek perfect harmony than the more recent
equal temperament.
The first half of Sine Language is constructed from just seven notes that are differently tuned sine waves:
A close up of the score of Sine Language showing the wave forms of each note. The ratios of the perfect fifths (3:2) and octaves (2:1) can be easily seen — the top wave, note 7, completes 3 cycles in the time note 6 complete 2 cycles, and note 6 completes 2 cycles in the time note 4 completes 1.
So the fundamental has been multiplied by a sequence of whole numbers: the frequency of every second note is multiplied by two (to go up an octave), and the notes in between have frequencies 3/2 times higher (perfect fifths). This is an arbitrary decision based on the fact that most music uses these numbers — 2, 3 and 4 — a great deal: time signatures usually have either 3 or 4 beats per bar
length, and often musical phrases are built up in multiples of 4 or 8 bar chunks (and sections, especially in classical music, tend to be 16, 32 or 64 bars long). It would require another essay to investigate the reason for powers of 2 to be so “natural sounding” in music, or whether it’s simply convention (other world cultures do use other systems).
The other simple mathematical idea of the first half is to use the same mathematical sequence to define the rhythm. I’ve simply decided that there should be one “perfect” bar in the piece of music towards which the first half builds and that the second half of the piece then uses this perfect bar as a launchpad for more freeform composition. This bar can be defined as the follows:
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The ‘perfect’ bar: showing the rhythmic patterns of each note |
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Musically this has the effect of layering triplets over duplets, a not-uncommon technique used in much music. Romantic music of the late 19th century does this all the time as the effect is to speed up or slow notes down against the pulse, but in such a way to be musically pleasing. For example you can play three notes in the time it would normally take to play two (known as a triplet) and
still end up in the right place in the bar for the next note. As doing this goes against the predominant pulse it is pleasantly surprising without totally disrupting the flow of the music.
In the case of the “perfect” bar I have described above, it sets up a pleasing pulsating sound which sounds cohesive yet clearly made up of discrete elements: you can listen to the bar (repeated several times) here.
The added twist is that the individual notes comprising this cascade of sound are tuned in a non-standard way, but because they are whole tone and whole number ratios, they still sound harmonious — if slightly unusual to the trained ear.
The first half of the piece, then, builds up to this defining bar by gradually introducing the pattern into the music. One by one the sine waves are introduced and gradually shift from a gentle volume wax and wane to a discrete jump in volume from zero to maximum. A shift from fuzzy analogue “in-between” volumes to binary states of off and on.
The diagram below is in fact the score of the first half of the piece and shows how these shifts take place. However, they are quite hard to hear as the ear tends to merge sine waves into a composite sound so that what you experience is subtly shifting harmonic content — at least up until the point where all the sine waves have reached the perfect bar and the distinct pitches are audible.
The score of Sine Language: you can see the gradually introduction of the 7 notes, and the introduction of the rhythm note by note, starting from the fundamental at the bottom of the score. (Click on image for larger version)
The second half of the piece is where the perfect bar is placed in a sampler — a musical device that can replay any sound at any pitch by slowing it down or speeding it up to the correct frequency. This technique has become so ubiquitous over the last 20 years that I hardly need to provide an example of how it works, but here is the perfect bar played back by a sampler, first at its orginal pitch, and then at different pitches, descending by an octave each time.
The second half of the piece is more arbitrarily musical than mathematical — once in the sampler, it can be ‘played’ as if it were a normal sound, such as the piano. Because of the nature of the sound though, the effect of playing chords with it is to create an interweaving, interlocking web of pulsating sine waves at mathematically interesting pitches, and certainly not those of equal
temperament. You can listen to the whole piece here.
Video directed by the flippers.
One catch, however, is that the sampler does play back the pitches at equal temperament (as this is the tuning system that the sampler uses), so the resultant music in this section is a perfectly tuned bar played back at equally tempered pitch intervals. The resulting tuning is therefore impossibly complicated, and I think should be simply described as the Pythagorean gap squared!
What completes the circle for me is that the culminated effect of the overlayed sine waves and tunings remind me of a JS Bach organ work, possibly even one of the fugues from the 48, and it pleases me that although this has been arrived at by a mathematical process, it has tended towards a similar output. Though I should hastily point out that I’m in no way claiming any of Bach’s genius and
understanding of harmony and melody — this is a passing (if happy) musical similarity!
First published in Plus Magazine March 2009.
All the musical kit I’ve ever owned, in rough order of acquirement. The vast majority I don’t have any more – selling stuff on, etc, but I don’t dare think about how much I’ve spent over the years…
Far be in from me to rant about stuff, but can I just make a little plea to the world’s TV and film composers to please stop using ‘Bowed Oil Can’ from the 1998 Spectrasonics Distorted Reality sample CD?
I know it’s a lovely sound and everything, but really, there are other sounds that can conjure up the desolate wastes of the artic, the Sahara desert, outer space, a criminal with intent, etc, etc.
Most of the time they don’t even bother changing the pitch, the lazy sods!
This is the sound right here.
I hear it on a weekly basis…I don’t keep notes or anything, but it’s on anything from CSI to David Attenborough, horror films to nature programmes, even documentaries about quantum mechanics, you name it, it’s been used!
I might have to do a track where I use just this sound and mangle it in everyway possible as a pointless exercise in proving something to a largely indifferent world of TV composers. Don’t think that’ll stop me though!
Once you’ve heard it you’ll hear the damn thing everywhere.
edit: another nice and therefore, overused, sound is the waterphone – another staple of horror films.
Tongue in cheek article written for Sound on Sound’s ‘Sounding off’ column.
Drum kits are fine musical instruments, but they should be kept out of electro music! They are not appropriate to the genre, are limited in sonic possibility and, in my opinion, ruin live electronic music. I’m in a gigging electro band and it’s depressing to frequently have to share the (usually tiny) stage with one of these outdated acoustic beasts that one of the other ‘electro’ acts on the bill insist on using.
Before I launch into the reasons for disliking the drum kit in electronica, I should state that, as well as writing electronic music, I do actually also love drums and percussion. I even play the drums, to enhance my understanding of rhythm and swing, and have performed at Glastonbury with the Brazilian rhythm band I am a member of.
However, the acoustic drum kit has no place in electro. Not proper electro, anyway. Not the electro of my youth, bands such as Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, and Orbital; and not the electro of now, such as Four Tet, Aphex Twin and Kid Carpet.
None of these pioneers felt the need to add an acoustic drum kit to their setup as a sop to tradition. Why would they? They had the infinite expanse of uncharted electronic percussive sound to explore, so why limit it to the cliché of a set of drums?
They’re rubbish in electro. They can only do one sound: the drum kit. Electro demands an innovative and imaginative solution to rhythm through the use of drum machines, or by using a sampler to inject any sound in the universe into the percussion section. Imagine if Pink Floyd had tried using a drum kit for ‘On The Run’ instead of anticipating the whole glitch movement in electronica by 20 years. Or imagine the Art Of Noise using an open hi-hat for the intro of ‘Close To The Edit’, instead of a VW starter motor! Of course, there are countless examples of innovative percussion sounds in electronic music; it’s what defines the genre!
Out in the real world, at gigs, drum kits are seriously bad news. Drums are too loud and frequency-wide to allow any nuance of interesting electronics through. So-called ‘electro’ bands who use drum kits should be ashamed. These are the sort of electro outfits that also have bass guitars and electric guitars. Well, I’m sorry, that’s not electro, that’s rock. I don’t care if you do have a laptop on stage adding a tinny percussion track or providing a synth sound for the keyboards, you’re doing rock. It looks like rock, it sounds like rock, and it sucks like rock.
The process of manipulating recordings of real drums and experimenting with drum machines extends the possibilities of sound and music, and has itself generated countless scenes and genres. Where would drum & bass be without the ‘Amen’ break? Or disco without the cheesy cowbell and toms? Or techno without the 909 kick? Or Chicago house without that 808 handclap?
Even just being able to program drums in a style that’s faster and more intricate than a human can play is enough to create entire sub-genres of furious hardcore and breakbeat. Squarepusher, I’m talking to you!
For proof that drum kits are limited by what the human can play, why not watch ‘Monkey Drummer‘ by Aphex Twin on YouTube, for a demonstration of what it would take a human (or monkey) to play even a simple piece of acid-techno.
If this is all true (and it is) you may be asking: ‘why, then, has the music technology industry worked so hard to replicate the sound of the drum kit for us lucky electronic musicians all these years?’ And it would be a fair question. But have you ever actually compared the sound of a Linn drum machine or a TR606 with a real drum?
We’ve been very polite over the years, but let’s face it, no drum machines ever really sounded anything like the real thing; they simply provided an approximate bass thud for a kick, a splash of white noise for the snare and crash, and a plunk of discordant metal for that well known item of drum kit, the cowbell. Realistic? No. Inspiring sources of rhythmic sonic impulse? Definitely!
Drum kits are lovely things, and they have, without a doubt, helped shape the popular music of the 20th Century. But we have to realise that it is now the 21st Century and we have loads of electro to create and celebrate. I’d like to proceed without the curse of the drum kit, thanks very much!
First published in Sound on Sound magazine in August 2007
Last month, legendary blues man Taj Mahal performed a one-off concert with Tinariwen, a band from Mali, to great acclaim. Though the two had never played a note with each other until the day before the concert, “one of them just started playing a groove and off we went”, said Taj, after the show.
In a review of the concert, the Guardian believed this synchronicity came from the fact that “they share what is called ‘assouf’, the sense of pain and loss that is central to their rhythmic and compelling blend of desert blues.” But maybe the answer is much simpler, that the music of the blues and the music of Africa mixed so easily because the two came from the same place.
Most people are aware that there is some kind of link between modern-day pop music and Africa, knowing that pop came from rock’n'roll, which came from the blues, and that the blues originated with the slaves of the American South in the late nineteenth century. But why do these modern styles sound the way they do? Why those particular rhythms, melodies and harmonies?
The answer lies in three hundred years of cultural export from Africa to all parts of the Americas. And, depending on where the Africans landed – invariably as slaves – their music adjusted, and blended, with the styles and cultures of their new homelands to form the rhythms and melodies we hear today.
But there is not just a similarity between these styles, it is the same music, evolving as it passes between cultures and people over time, combined and recombined again and again.
One of the earliest examples of this blending occurred in Brazil. The Portuguese landed in 1500, and brought slaves to work on sugar and coffee plantations soon after, sometime around the mid-sixteenth century. The majority were from the Bantu tribe, who lived in an area now known as Nigeria, and the Yoruba tribe came from what is now Angola.
As they settled, the Yoruba culture became dominant amongst the slaves, as did their religion, which became known as Candomblé in Brazil. The music and dances of Candomblé functioned as an important way for the slaves to keep a spiritual connection with their homeland, by keeping alive their traditions and beliefs.
The carnival, that most famous of Brazilian celebrations where authorities allow the normal rules of society to be turned upside down for a day, was another outlet for the slaves’ music, as well as a way for them to vent feelings of frustration. And, despite being a European import, the carnival became a central focus of Brazilian life, something that continues to the present day with the spectacle of the Rio Carnival.
An early incarnation of the Brazilian carnival arose in the northeast of the country, in the region of Pernambucu. In this area, the slave masters allowed the slaves to organise themselves into groups representing the nations of their homelands. Each group would crown a king and queen, and the king would represent his tribe for the year.
These crowning ceremonies happened with the full blessing of the masters, and would involve participants dressing up in the fineries of the European court, including a range of characters such as an ambassador, pageboys and even ‘slaves’, who would hold a parasol above the newly crowned king and queen.
Accompanying these ceremonies was a style of music called Maracatu, a fusion of African and European styles. The African slaves did not have access to their traditional instruments, so would use whatever instruments were to hand. As a colonial outpost, this meant military instruments, particularly the snare drum and the bass drum.
In Maracatu, the player of the snare provides a constant roll, which the bass drummer punctuates with syncopated rhythms. Meanwhile, other musicians play more typically African-styled instruments, such as the Abé, (shaker), and the gongué (cowbell).
Maracatu took on other aspects of Western music, most notably the time signature. Instead of the complex polyrhythms of Africa, Maracatu uses Western time signatures, such as 4/4 and 6/8 (four or six beats to the bar), and then builds songs from four and eight bar repeats – similar to electronic dance music today.
However, Maracatu rhythms retained an important element of their African roots. Instead of each four-beat bar being exactly divided into 16 equal-length semi-quavers as in the West, in Maracatu, the relative length of each semi-quaver can be longer or shorter, giving the rhythms their distinctive swing.
It is this swing that Western-trained musicians find most difficult to master, contradicting their training, which focuses on ‘keeping regular time’. However, this swing is what gives the music its dance-inducing vitality.
Maracatu is a very early example of a style that came from combining African and European music, settling into a recognisable form as early as the 1750s. But it lives on today, influencing musicians such as Chico Science, who blended it with rock, rap and funk to create a new sound – Mangue Beat – in the 1990s.
Elsewhere in Brazil, the first settlers’ music moved in other directions. In Rio, European salon music, including the Polka, the Mazurka and the Waltz, had a greater influence. Such styles combined with the slaves’ Lundu music. The colonialists considered the Lundu to be far too lewd but, once combined with European music, it produced a lyrical dance style known as the Modinha, which also became popular back in Portugal.
The fusion of European and African styles also led to the Samba – today, the iconic Carnival music. After the emancipation of the slaves in 1888, it developed in two different directions. One strand emphasised the lyrical European melodic aspect of the Modinha, while the other, Samba Batacuda, employed large African drums – ‘bataque’ – to create a heavily percussive and syncopated music. These drums shifted the Samba away from melody and towards the rhythm and, like Maracatu, this rhythm has a very pronounced swing. It is this second, more percussive, style that forms most Samba music we hear today.
In 1950, Antonio Jochim took the syncopated rhythms of Samba and blended them with Jazz, American song and French impressionism to create the Bossa Nova (the ‘New Way’). It was an immediate worldwide hit, with songs such as ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ popular across the globe.
Similar styles emerged from other Latin American countries at around the same time. From Cuba came the Rhumba, a secular version of the ‘Bat’, a ritual dance of the Cuban religion, Santeria – similar to Candomblé. From the Dominican Republic came the Meringue, while Argentina contributed the Tango. All these styles were fusions of African and European music.
While many people still listen and dance to these Latin styles today, the dominant form of popular music in recent decades – rock’n'roll and its direct descendents – came from African music’s development elsewhere, namely in the southern states of North America.
There were significant differences between the music of the slaves in North America to those in the South America. In North America, members of the same tribes did not stay together, as often occurred in the south of the continent, and the masters rarely tolerated their religious practices. As a result, the music of North America had fewer roots in ritual and religion; instead, it was more a simple expression of their experiences living in a foreign land forced to work under terrible conditions.
The Field Hollers of plantation workers is the earliest instance of slave music we can find in the southern states of North America. The colonialists gave these work songs their name, while their church hymns heavily influenced the music’s style. Over time, such songs developed into gospel music, still a vital part of black communions today, and, latterly, heavily influencing the Soul music of the 1960s and 1970s.
The music of the Field Hollers developed in other ways, most obviously into the Blues, often spread via travelling musicians. As a development of Field Hollers, the music had clear African influences, but there were other connections. The original Blues instrument, the banjo, is an adaptation of an African single-stringed gourd instrument called the ‘hodu’, and the chords used may also relate to Africa. Some music historians believe that the distinctive ‘flattened’ thirds, sevenths and occasional fifths are an attempt to translate the modal tonality of African music onto Western musical scales.
Bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta, such as John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James, took up the electrically amplified guitar in the 1940s, giving the Blues a new tone. This innovation led to European and American Blues-Rock of the 1950s and 1960s, played by such groups as the John Spencer Blues Explosion, the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix.
Mainstream popular music is a fusion of Rock’n'Roll, Latin and Jazz, combining the melodies and harmonies of the European tradition with the syncopated upfront rhythms and percussion from the African slaves brought across to the Americas. Today, when we listen to modern styles such as R&B and UK Garage, we can hear the syncopation and triplet rhythms of African music,
So it should come as no surprise that a band from Mali and a Blues man, who grew up in Massachusetts, can almost instantaneously fuse their musical styles together to create a blended sound. Rather than coincidence or a similar sense of pain fuelling their synchronicity, it is history that explains the Taj Mahal and Tinariwen phenomenon, for both man and band play a groove that, at heart, is much the same.
First published in AK13 magazine in July 2004.
