90 Miles Out of Atlanta #13: Happy Jawbone Family Band & Continuing Inquiries Into the Nature of Sound
90 Miles Out of Atlanta is a column about life around music and a writing experimentation space.
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Happy Jawbone Family Band, Family Jewels
Many weeks ago I read this:
Want to be a real bone-head? Join the happy jawbone family band family fan club and get cool free stuff! How do you join? IT’S EASY! Just draw a picture of something you care about and send it to: P.O box 322 Westminster, VT, 05158. Expect goodies to arrive shortly thereafter!
So I drew a picture of my dog and mailed it.
On Tuesday I received a package from Brattleboro, Vermont, weirdo capitol of the U.S. Inside was a purple cassette of Happy Jawbone Family Band rarities, a letter to me and all the other Boneheads who sent pictures of things they care about, a hand-numbered photocopy of a piece of writing called “The Return of the Hotel Double Tragedy,” a 2011/2012 catalogue for a cassette/record label in Omaha, a Hollywood Characters trading card of the woman who won an Oscar for playing Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, a Garbage Pail Kids card of Totem Paula, a small print of an elk in rearview, the first seven pages of a one-act by Tennessee Williams, a black pawn, several small Uno cards, a sheriff’s badge and two blue feathers.
In the letter they apologize for taking so long to answer fan club requests but for the past year they’ve taken part in a public challenge to write and record the GREATEST ALBUM EVER RECORDED. It comes out October 15 on Mexican Summer.
The first song on the cassette is “I Have to Speak to Rocky Balboa.” In the liner notes, Luke Csehak writes: my favorite recording of our new album, but you really gotta listen to the whole thing. We worked really hard to make saturate every second w/ devastating emotional prowess.
I put the cassette in my deck and pressed play. The cassette contains magnetic patterns imprinted on plastic tape, and these represent the conversion of sound vibrations that Happy Jawbone Family Band made in Vermont at some point in the recent past. My sound system reconverts these into vibrations in speakers and the air molecules around me begins to move in wave patterns. My ears capture these, amplify them, convert them into electrical signals that zap deep into my brain.
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Frederick A. Saunders, “Physics and Music”
On Sunday I walked to the music library and checked out The Physics of Music, Introduction to the Physics and Psychophysics of Music, Physics and the Sound of Music, The Experiencing of Musical Sound: Prelude to the Phenomenology of Music, and Music, Sound and Sensation: A Modern Exposition. The first is a collection of articles that are older than me, and its cover is orange. From the first chapter, “Physics and Music,” Frederick A. Saunders, July 1948: Sound is a word used in at least two senses: (1) the sensation produced in the brain by messages from the ear, and (2) the physical events outside the ear. The context usually makes it plain which meaning is intended. Thus we can avoid long arguments over whether a sound can exist if there is no one present to hear it.
In my early research into the nature of sound I’ve imagined sound waves as wavelike because when I google sound waves that’s what I find. But Saunders says wavelike waves are actually quite rare. The overwhelming majority are complex: multiple waves combined. He offers six orange illustrations of sound waves in side view. First, the rare wavelike wave, evenly spaced, smooth. The second, a chord struck by four tuning forks, like jagged blip-blip lines from a heart monitor. The fourth, a repeating Matterhorn, is from a violin.
Saunders says: The ear, in fact, is a surprising organ; it does not always tell the strict truth. Ghostly harmonics arise somehow in the ear itself. The sensitive basilar membrane, where sound is detected by a series of nerve endings, has been proved to respond to different frequencies at different positions along its length. The membrane is spiral-shaped. In the case of a soft, pure tone, the membrane is disturbed only at the place appropriate to the frequency. But as the same tone grows louder, new disturbances mysteriously appear at the point where the harmonics of this tone would be recorded. The source of the false harmonics is probably traceable to a natural imperfection in the action of the mechanism of the middle ear.
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John S. Rigden, Physics and the Sound of Music
In Physics and the Sound of Music, John S. Rigden writes:
Physics… music… quantitative vs. qualitative, objective vs. subjective, empirical vs. aesthetic, impersonal vs. personal, rational vs. emotive, head vs. heart, bloodless vs. sentimental, uncouth vs. refined, square vs. groovy. Although these words do not accurately express my thoughts, they unfortunately convey with correctness the thoughts of many people.
Music… physics… both human activities with all the beauties and foibles attending any human enterprise.
Physics… music… delightfully different, enchantingly similar.
He adds: Just as complex molecules can be broken down into simpler units called atoms, many complex sounds can be broken down into simpler units called pure tones. A pure tone by itself sounds rather dull and uninteresting. However, if properly selected, a group of pure tones sounded together determines the quality of tone of every musical source: the velvety tone of a flute, the expressiveness of a Stradivarius, the radiance of a trumpet, the plaintively nasally character of an oboe. Moreover, the sound of an entire symphony orchestra emanating from the speakers of our hi-fidelity stereo sound systems is simply a collection of pure tones. The tinny sound of an inexpensive record player differs from the full sound of a hi-fidelity system because the latter has been carefully designed to leave unaltered many pure tones making up the total sound.
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Life Science Library, Sound and Hearing
On Monday I went to the regular library and came back with an armful of books about ears and sound. I started with Sound and Hearing because it has a psychedelic ear on the front and trippy pictures throughout. Things I did not know but do know now:
1. A sound so weak that it causes the eardrum to vibrate less than the diameter of a hydrogen molecule can be heard. (Having learned this, I looked online to confirm: hydrogen molecules are the smallest molecules of all.
2. The ear’s ancestry can be traced to strangely shaped creatures, spined and armored but jawless and toothless, that swam the vast, warm oceans some 300 million years ago. These creatures are the oldest known animals with backbones.
3. Hearing itself came about somewhat later in evolutionary history, when some fishes developed air bladders. Subjected to the pressure variations of a sound wave, an air bladder contracts and expands, continually disturbing the fluids of the fish’s body.
4. Curiously, really acute hearing developed as animals began to live in air, a medium that transmits sound less rapidly than water.
5. The modification that made hearing in the air possible was the development of the middle ear. Its beginning can be seen in the frog.
6. Animals that live in water don’t need middle ears.
7. Middle ears are analogous to the circuits that connect the different parts of a high-fidelity phonograph—the needle and pickup to the amplifier, and the amplifier to the loudspeaker.
8. If an engineer were to duplicate the ear’s function, he would have to compress into approximately one square inch a sound system that includes an impedance matcher, a wide-range mechanical analyzer, a mobile relay-and-amplification unit, a multichannel transducer to convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, a system to maintain a delicate hydraulic balance, and an internal two-way communications system.
