30-05-2008, Primavera Sound Festival, Barcelona

3rd Bridge Helix From Experimental Punk to Ancient Chinese Music & Universal Physical Laws of Consonance This article is a written excerpt of my lecture I gave at the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona about my self built musical instruments. I explained what kind of instruments I make, why I make them and for which bands. I showed the audience my own copies and played a little on those instruments. Additionally I gave a deeper explanation about one particular instrument I have created, the Moodswinger. After finishing this instrument I rediscovered this instrument is not only a musical instrument, but also a educational measurement instrument which shows a universal system of consonant values based on simple physical laws. I discovered all musical scaling systems all over the world are derived from this basical system, inclusive the worst inharmonic deviated tuning system of all these variations, our Western 12-tone logaritmic equal tempered scale. - Yuri Landman

The Beginning I bought my first guitar and bass guitar when I was 18. I always had a fascination for direct and simple punk rock structures instead of highly practised virtuose guitar playing used in symphonic rock and hard rock. In line of this estethical rule I refused to take traditional guitar lessons from a jazz or blues guitar teacher. I took notice of some chords and know where to put my fingers for a C7 or minor D-chord, but I have never practised long enough to play them well. I cannot even play Nirvana’s Polly properly for instance. I develloped my playing technique in a different direction. The band I appreciate the most for their color of sound is Sonic Youth, especcially their first recordings. Derived from the noise droning soundscapes from Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth developed a new way of experimental punk rock, mainly focused on untraditional playing techniques on customized guitars with drumsticks and screwdrivers put under the strings and heavily detuned string combinations. I knew Branca’s name from a short biography in the Dutch ‘86 Pop Encyclopedia, describing his guitar symphonies and mentioning his self created ‘mallet guitars’; table shaped string instruments with a large amount of strings with rods between the strings and hit with drumsticks. Unfortunaltely I have never seen close-ups of the instruments. For years I worked with prepared guitars placing objects under the strings and mainly play them on the other side of the string part where the pick up is not taking up the string attack directly. Like a tuning fork the opposite string part resonates on the attacked string side. When placed on the middle of the string both sides have an equal tone and the resonation has it’s optimimum. When placed on another position however the tone is much more interesting, because the resonation is causing a strange clock-like sounding multiphonic tone.

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Zoppo & Avec-A Together with my school friend Cees I started a band called Zoppo. We recorded songs on a Tascam 4 track and put out albums and singles. I played bass and odd prepared guitar arrangements and took care for the sound quality. Although limited in possibillity with only 6 strings during the recording proces this prepared guitar techniques gave quiet good results because of their sometimes unexpected aleatoric moments and it was just searching for a few hours and modify the tuning until it fitted in the already recorded guitar lines which formed the song structure. Originally we were a two piece studio band, but after two albums we started playing live and the reconstruction of the arrangements became a problem for me. Most of the time I remember how I prepare my guitars, but the moment of recording has besides the preparation many other parameters too. Different from playing the guitar traditionally the sound can be 100% different and impossible inharmonic with only slight deviations of all this parameters like eq, distortion, tuning and third bridge positioning. And additionally when you stand up on the stage wearing the guitar traditionally on your shoulders the screwdriver slips off because of the gravity and moves while you are playing the song because of the string buzzing. Because of this increasing annoyance of not getting my sound under control with a normal guitar I started creating a custom built instrument. This was around 2000. I quited Zoppo because of a comic book store I then owned and started a less professional pressured band Avec-A with Valentijn. Because I was mainly focused on creating suitable instruments for sound enhancing at one moment I was not making music anymore at all. So my carreer as a musician dried up. The final and current result from my experimentalism has become not the music, but the instruments themselves to create music with. Building for other bands At one moment there were almost 20 wooden string instruments lying on my attic, not used at all. Then the idea raised to approach international bands for cooperating on my project. The plan: I created a string system for an experimental guitarist to offer him/her more sound possibilities. In return this would lead to an increasing attention for my work, maybe turning it into a commercial business. I first approached Liars who had just released Drum’s not Dead. After meeting them in Utrecht at a gig in Ekko they appreciated my offer and let me decide what to make for them. I had made a few third bridge guitars and decided to make for them an improved version of an earlier prototype. This became the Moodswinger. I made two exact copies, so I wouldn’t regret giving my instrument away. After Liars I approached Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth and created on some of his ideas a symphatetic 18 string biheaded droning guitar. For Jad Fair I created a 2 string instrument with 12 additional plucking thumbs. I approached Amadeo of Blonde Redhead, for who I still have to built something, hopefully soon I will be able to fulfil my promise to him. Recently I made a 3-way stereo guitar for Blood Red Shoes.

Zoppo, 1998 at the Noorderslag Festival, Groningen, Holland

Avec-A, 2004, at The End, Amsterdam

The attic

From left to right: The Springtime for Laura-Mary Carter, the Bachelor QS for Jad Fair, the Moonlander for Lee Ranaldo and the Moodswinger for Aaron Hemphill.

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The Moodswinger

Bradford’s Pencilina, which already mentions the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 on the upper neck and 1/4, 2/5, 3/5, 2/3 and 3/4 on the lower neck.

Back to the Moodswinger Afterwards the Moodswinger had a strange side effect on my musical perception, which is the subject of this text. The instrument contains the most worked out third bridge scale until now. I’ve not seen any other third bridge instruments with this string division scaling. One precedor though is good to mention, because it formed my ideas; the Pencilina made by a guy Bradford Reed from New York called Bradford Reed. Bradford’s Pencilina comes the most close to my instrument, but is more individual in approach. He can play the instrument very well, but trained a long time for it. My main goal was to create an instrument on which every guitar player could easily play a tune. I was trained as a chemical analist, studying maths, science and physics, so I quiet well understood what was actually happening with the third bridge technique. But for Liars I had to devellop a system they would understand too. My English was very bad around then, so it had to be in the instrument. This leaded to my current research on string resonance, physics and microtonal scaling. I didn’t know Aaron had studied microbiology, so afterwards it was pretty easy to explain him how the instrument worked. He immediately understood what happened. On internet I found a site about a slide instrument called the Analude made by a mathematician named Steven Rowat which contained a color dotted system indicating microtonal harmonic positions. Around then I didn’t understood quiet well how Rowat had constructed his colored scheme. He based it mainly on the just intonation theory of Harry Partch, using commonly used ratio’s like 16/15, 9/8, 6/5, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 8/5, 9/5, 15/8, 2/1, etc.. Later on I discovered these are frequency ratios instead of the string ratios. I work with mainly string lengths, because this is much more clear for relationship between the several string positions. The string ratios are the inversions of frequency ratios. For 6 months I develloped a sort like color dotted system which explained the tonal cohesion of all rich tonal positions on my instruments. This was more clearly for myself then the double colored system Rowat worked with. With the colors I created families of tones. So the 1/2 position is grey for instance. 1/3 and 2/3 positions are the red dotted family. 1/4 and 3/4 orange. 1/5, 2/5, 3/5 and 4/5 yellow, etc.. Just following the colors of the rainbow.

I discovered the left side of the octave middle was a mirror image of the right on the scale. So the idea rose to put on two more scales on the neck as well on both sides of the string division scale. The normal logaritmic scale like used on guitars and a logaritmic scale going into the opposite direction. With these two logaritmic scales I could read out the attack tone and the complementary humming tone coming from the opposed string part.

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The Ancient Chinese Guqin I still didn’t see any relation between my overtone scale and the logaritmic scale on the guitar. This has always surprised me, Why aren’t they equal to eachother? Then one day I was looking at the irregular pattern on the neck of the Moodswinger and suddenly I remembered the Turkish Saz Cees had once bought on a vacation trip. The Saz has, different from other European instruments, an irregular fret positioning. Perhaps this system had similarity with my scaling system. The Saz has a lot more frets in the first octave, so this was too difficult to compare with. After searching a bit on internet I found the answer, an ancient traditional Chinese instrument, the Guqin. Although the two instruments are played in totally different way, I had recreated something very similar. That was strange. Apparantly I discovered something which was already discovered 4000 years ago. Everett M. Rogers wrote a book about diffusion of innovations giving one group the name ‘Laggart’, the ones that always come after everybody has been there. The opposite of the more known term ‘Early Adopter’. I was a little late with this rediscovery, making me probably the biggest Laggard of all time. I did research on other Non-Western Instruments and suddenly I recognized on almost all string instruments all over the world exactly the same positions, all derived from the scale I had worked out on the Moodswinger. Sometimes a few positions were left out, on other instruments some different pitches were put in, but always the 2/3, 1/3, 1/2, 1/4, 3/4, 4/5, 3/5, 2/5 appeared on the scales. So this cleared out musical scaling is not traditionally formed but traditionally modified slightly from a basic universal physical system. This struck me deeply. I had always thought it was just people who had made something up and agreed on eachother and with cultural and traditional rules what sounds good and what sounds less good. This is untrue. Simple physical rules mainly stipulate what sounds good, not only subjective normative rules. That’s the difference between objective false and subjective false.

The ancient Chinese Guqin and below the Moodswinger string division scale. All positions except the blue ones are similar on both instruments. The most left and right dots on the Guqin are probably 1/9 and 8/9, two ratio’s most often occur in almost all other musical scales in the world, because they match harmonic properly with most of the other dots.

I compared the Moodswinger scale with pictures of other instruments and discovered the similarity in scaling on almost every other traditional instrument from all places on Earth.

From top to bottom: The Moodswinger, the Russian Bailalaika, the Chinese Dan Gnuyet, the American Appalachian Dulcimer and the Iranian Tar.

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Western Musical Evolution In most Western books about musical tuning Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician of A2 + B2 = C2, is mentioned as the inventor of the harmonic relations between tones and string lengths and he develloped a system called the Pythagorean tuning. In reality he wasn’t the inventor of the system, Babylonian texts of 3500 B.C. also described this tuning system. And he also didn’t invent the relation between string length and consonant tone combinations. Besides the Babylonians the Chinese were allready at least 1000 years earlier with this discovery. Anyway, let’s give Pythagoras some credit although he didn’t invent it, he for sure was very busy with calculating. Pythagoras did his musical thinking with the help of an instrument called the Monochord and develloped his Pythagorean tuning which led to a big development of transposable music, one of the key signatures of Western Music compared to Non-Western music. My Moodswinger, I later discovered, follows to a certain level the same principles as the Monochord and the Guqin, that’s why I had the rediscovery without knowing anything about Pythagoras or the ancient Chinese scaling system. After Pythagoras, the musical tradition of the Middle Ages of church choirs bended his system slightly back to the physical just major scale and an alternate just scale called the minor scale. Bach worked with a new mathmatical tuning system which repositioned these major and minor scales to a transposable system again, but again not improving consonance compared to the physical system. The true physical harmonic values only can relate to the fundamental tone, but never among all tones mutually. Later on other alternative tunings were used, but every other made up mathmatical system is a compromise. Under influence of the colonisation at the end of the 19th century Eastern music came to Europe and Debussy integrated the then to our ears odd intervals again in Western music. Meantone was not longer the solution to use when playing these tones, so Western music took its last escape: the logaritmic equal tempererd scale, abbreviated 12-TET, currently used in almost all pop music, leading to an increasing false tonal relationship between the tones. In Europe this option was known for allready 400 years, but always rejected because other systems sounded better, were more physical consonant. But the increasing tonal freedom forced the Western music to use this tuning. Strangely enough listening tests have been done among Western audiences and the conclusion was the audience mainly preferred this inharmonic structure of today’s logaritmic scale. Not because it sounds better, but they got used to this false system, describing it as rich or colorful and the just tuning as boring, cold or empty. However a test from 1948 in Holland done by A.D. Fokker had a contradictory conclusion. The audience were mainly trained musicians and they didn’t prefer the 12-TET at all. I assume Eastern people probably would consider it also ‘messy’, ‘nervous’ and unsilent. Which it is physically. That’s why we consider Eastern music sometimes relaxing or empty, depending on how you interprete their works. Not very strange this test had different results, because it took place before mass recorded pop music, mainly written in 12-TET, and daily radio and television broadcasting as a unconscious indoctrination stipulated the esthetical norm of what sounds good.

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Modern Noise Rock Back to punk rock experimentalism. For a very long time I’ve wondered why the sound of Sonic Youth is besides atonal and noise also atmospheric, sweet, and silent at the same moment. Sonic Youth used the screwdrivers, this is perhaps considered as a punk statement mainly, but instead of creating atonal noise, they created pure consonant tones with it. They weren’t aware of it in 1980, but I think Glenn knows about the physical background of it, because he is also very interested in inspired by the work of Partch. When I showed Ranaldo my Moodswinger he told me Branca’s third bridge instruments were far more primitive. Just fields of strings with a rod inbetween and he used it probably in an aleatoric way with coincidental tone combinations. But I doubt if he used it so randomly, I don’t think so. Branca also built a double body guitar, which, similar to the screwdriver technique, looks like an artistic and humoristic dada statement, but in fact this also contains truth about consonance. The Moodswinger scale, based on the same values Harry Partch worked with, is a mirror image. Branca’s guitar is a mirror image too. So probably Branca knows quiet well what is happening and his double bodied instrument is not a joke at all. It has to do with harmonic truth of two opposed string parts. The natural overtone series and their complementary series which are the basics for musical tuning systems. Branca and Sonic Youth went back to the more physical harmonic rules. And of course many sound patterns used in experimental Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo with rock are deviations from the major and minor scale and therefore lesser consonant, screwdriver but there is a paradox. Out of the swamp of dissonance new primitive creatures come alive and climb out of the swamp lake. Those primal creatures may sound odd but when watched closer they share the harmonic physical values for consonant sound with the Chinese traditional music. Pop music is false in its solid pattern, because it is off key related to the physical just intervals. Experimental rock instead is in a certain way less false than popmusic, because this kind of music not solidly sticks to the false 12-TET tuning, but slightly bends the tones to more consonant values. The third bridge system is one proof for this, but I can also explain a similar situation Glenn Branca with his double bodied about amplifier feedback related to overblowing which is following the same rules of siamse twin guitar the natural overtone series. Heavy distortion enhances the overtoning range of a string vibration, also returning back to those physical laws. That’s why heavy metal is played on only one or two strings instead of all six. The natural overtone series don’t match with the off key inharmonic 12-TET tones of the other strings which complete the chords. I assume similar phenomenons are present at electronic equipment which is used in an altered way like circuit bending or the overdriven Roland 303 used in acid house music. Velvet Underground used alternate tunings often tuned unisono or in octaves which also leads to a ‘quiet’ driven sound. On Sonic Youth’s Sister I hear guitars which almost remind me of the sound of an trumpetting elephant. This is no coincidence, but the result of the physical forces. So my conclusion is all these extended techniques used in experimental rock lead to a more natural just harmonic structure compared to the traditional techniques used in mainstream pop music, which is harmonically off the road instead of the assumed middle of the road. Besides the harmonic truth in extended playing techniques I also assume tube amplification swallows atonal inharmonic values to a better harmonic structure similar to the clitting light fields in a plasma lamp. And similar I believe also tape compression at tape recording and vinyl records restructure the musical pattern to more clitting harmonic values. But I cannot proove this with measurement results and this assumption is too far from my work as an instrument builder, so I leave this research to other people. But this is why I believe people are still using old equipment. Because it sometimes physically sounds better and not because the musicians are nostalgic.

Plasma lamp

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The Helix of Consonance Finishing this text, I hope it explains the atmospheric sound of Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Polvo, Yo La Tengo and many similar bands who are working with altered techniques mentioned above. Their often loud walls of noise sound chaotic at first, but behind this field of noise there is a certain silence too. Now I won’t go as far to declare the experimental rock bands mentioned are making similar music as the Chinese did. That’s not true, because this only counts for the structure of the sound, not for the chord progressions. But with the extended playing techniques there are just borders being crossed to the 12-TET and those crossing borders bend backwards to the long ago discovered basic physical laws. I would like to compare this devellopment of modern art rock with a helix shape. The first string sound was The shape of a helix created by primitive people, then this sound was constructed in it’s most pure intervals, leading to the invention of the Guqin. This is the first cycle in the helix up taken up to the first level. Then the Pythagoras deviations were used and bended back to the second level of consonance during the Middle Ages. Bach went off the road again with calculated false pitches. Different other tuning systems went back and forth on the helix everytime a step further shifting between physics and maths for the best possible solution. With electricity it became possible to arive at a new level of physical consonance, the result of experimental rock with his variety of extended playing techniques. The harmonic values told on Western musical lessons are deviated values and are a subjective normative value and not physical consonant truth at all. The old ancient physical laws are polished away by a simplistic 12 tone scheme which allows many possible solutions within the system, but fails when you go outside the system. I consider flattening the color of sound with the logaritmic 12-TET-tuning became nothing more than painting with Ravensburger. Painting with numbers. Creating music by following the rules of the logaritmic scale used on guitars and keyboards is working with just 12 slightly poluted colors and without even knowing yellow and blue generates green. The origin of pretty sounds is largely faded away in Western musical training. If I had known this when I was 18 I would have approached nice harmony with more attention instead of rejecting it. Gladly enough experimental rock took, with the help of electricity and extended playing techniques, Neptune with their self created equipment in its own specific way its music up to a next level in the helix of physical consonance. I am curious what the next helix level will sound like. Drawing by Glenn Branca from the 1985 exhibition Classical Space

Sources: Further reading about the relation of physics and music: On the Sensations of Tone - Hermann Helmholtz Science and Music - Sir James H. Jeans Genesis of a music - Harry Partch Prepared Guitar Techniques - Elgart/Yates Guitar Duo In Dutch: Princiepen der Europese Muziek - Matthijs Vermeulen De Compositie van de Wereld, Chapter Het paradigma - Harry Mulish Related internetsites: www.pencilina.com/ - Bradford Reed’s site www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/english/index.html Dutch text about the hearing test of A.D. Fokker

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