Twelve bassoons... and pyro

Apparently, yeah, that's what Handel's Royal Fireworks Music calls for. Plus, of course, a contrabassoon. And a serpent. Or so says some tuba dissertation I downloaded, Wikipedia doesn't mention the serpent. Still, that's a lot of bassoons.

The piece itself sounds like fun. I guess 18th c audiences liked pyro just as much as modern ones. The first performance was a blast; it burned down the specially built concert hall. Here's a modern performance on period instruments, I love the tall baroque contra, and the drum line of tympani. I don't see a serpent though.



For modern pyro, here's a couple examples. Rammstein's act includes a lot of fire effects. I can't imagine trying to play under the conditions onstage: notice the sheet metal firewall in front of the keyboards, trying to protect the electronics from the heat. All that fire looks pretty dramatic, though. If you like this sort of thing, their song Rammstein puts their singer in an H.R. Geigeresque costume which also includes flamethrowers.


A more poppy example (well, euro trance perhaps) is Cascada. A little less pyro than Rammstein, and a totally different esthetic. What strikes me about both of these groups is the relentless focus on the show, on the audience's experience. They are both about telling a story, evoking an emotional response, and they use every tool at their disposal in the service of their show.

More visuals: a sonogram

Thinking about tone color gives me an opportunity to geek out. I found a spectrogram generator (here's the code, and here's Wikipedia on spectrograms), and applied it to the F scale I graphed earlier. I put the frequency axis on a log scale, so that intervals are a constant length. There's tons of things visible here, you can get a direct sense of how strong the different harmonics of each note is. The fundamentals of the low notes are quite weak compared to the harmonics. And different notes can have quite different relative harmonic strengths, note to note: this reflects the changing color of each individual note. You can see the whole and half steps going up the major scale, not just in the fundamental, but also in each harmonic. The higher harmonics look a little wonky, interval wise though. The first harmonic (the octave) is basically parallel to the fundamental, the second (a twelth above the fundamental) also looks like a scale, though not perfectly smooth steps. Eg the upper D-E step (above the staff, D4-E4, so the overtone is A5-B5) looks much wider than the harmonics below. I think this is basically a departure from harmonicity, as James Kopp has written about. For that matter, the two E4's don't line up: I guess played them at different pitches. It's processing like this that allows pitch analysis and correction software to do what it does. Looking further up in frequency, I can still trace the scale up to around the sixth harmonic or so, but it becomes harder, as the harmonics become closer together. There's also things which I wouldn't expect to be there, eg there's dim bands between the fundamental and the first harmonic on the high E-F-E. It looks to be an octave below the second harmonic, so might be some kind of weird period doubling effect. Or an artifact. The fuzzy constant bands below the fundamentals are almost certainly artifacts, they change when I change things like the sampling window (these graphs done with 4096, or about 0.1 seconds).


Another view of the same data can be gotten by plotting in 3D. Here, the changes in intensity of every note are much clearer: not only the Bb3 I caught before, but a lot of other notes as well: the G3 after crossing the break, both E4's. And not just intensity (ie volume) but also color: the fundamental and the harmonic are not changing together.



I also turned the whole thing on its side, which shows all the notes put on top of each other. There's a strong but broad peak in the range 400-700 Hz, a formant, a weaker one around 2 kHz, then a cutoff around 2.3 kHz. That first formant is why the harmonics are so strong, and the fundamentals are so weak, at least until you get up high.


And finally, Melodyne's view of it.

Auditions

I flirted with the idea of making a video for the YouTube Symphony, and even went to the trouble of trying to record one of the excerpts, with enough lighting that you could almost see me. I dragged most of the lights in the house into the room where I was playing, propping them up on things, with wires everywhere. Making video is not that easy, however, if you want to do it well, beyond the minor task of actually playing well. It was fun thinking about, though, and I briefly practiced a few standard excerpts. That in itself was instructive. I mean, I've spent months slowly working my set of scales from less than 60 bpm to around 70 bpm, then Marriage of Figaro is supposed to go at 144? I tried skipping all the way there, setting the metronome to 144. Then playing one note. Two notes. Practicing two notes. Then three. In different orders. Then four. Pretty soon I could play small snatches of it at what seemed like an astonishing tempo. And you know, it sounded okay, at least to my ear. I could see how, with a lot of work, it might be possible to work the whole thing out at that tempo. And people do.

The reality is that performance is very competitive. Above a certain level, everybody is very good. The video below is from one of the finalists, and here's the link to the whole batch. All that effort to play the exact same thing as everyone else -- it seems more like a sport than an art. Every sprinter runs the same 100 m in the 100 m dash, the question is who runs the fastest. How different is deciding jobs and careers based on a few bars from the Marriage of Figaro?

What you learn from visuals

This is another take on the F scale I posted yesterday. (Yes, it's true, I did multiple takes when trying to record a simple scale!) I didn't use it because I ran out of air, and didn't get all the way down, but I did notice something from looking at the waveform. You can see the individual notes on the waveform, as the different tonal colors and different volumes of each note produce slightly higher or lower extremes on the waveform. That I'm kind of used to, though it might not happen on some more acoustically ideal instrument (probably not a bassoon!). And on the upper E and F, you can see the tone waver, as I try to support the pitch. I'm used to hearing that too, although it's a flaw. But what really struck me was the note in the middle of the picture, the Bb coming down, which starts really small then grows big. When I first listened to the recording, I thought this note sounded fine, but it doesn't look fine on the waveform. I clearly must have backed off at the beginning, and then brought the sound back to full. And now that I've seen the problem, I can't listen to the recording without hearing it too. I wonder how often I do that: yet another technical error to watch out for. No doubt I just got some tiny minuscule amount better, but I also worry that I'll drive myself crazy if I get too picky.

2 octave f scale 2010-12-17 2nd try by TFox17

Mozart

Had a lesson last night. Here's the first few licks of the Mozart concerto. I was pretty happy with it at the time, so it's probably a reasonable indicator of where I am at the moment, when I'm playing at my best.

Mozart opening 2010-12-17 by TFox17

Inspired by Betsy's post on playing high F, I dug out a recording I'd made about year ago when, suddenly, for about one day, my reed and the stars were aligned and I could play a high F. At the time (Nov 2009) I realized how out of tune the high notes were, with the high F being about a full semitone flat. What I didn't realize then, but makes me cringe now, is how terrible the intonation is on the rest of the scale. It's awful. Maybe I have improved in the past year.

3 octave F scale by TFox17

Update:

I had to record a basic F scale the way it is now, just for comparison. Recorded on the iPod, with a touch of reverb (12% Large Chamber) added in Ableton. That's a little less painful to listen to, I think.
bassoon 2 octave F scale by TFox17

Christmas season is over

Last night we played at the Legislature, our final concert of the Christmas season. It was a very ringy space, a marble rotunda about 5 stories high, which gave about a full quarter note of sustain after every cutoff. I kind of liked it, even if the ring was mostly trumpet, I thought it worked well for Christmas music.

In playing with the orchestra, recently I've been mostly focusing on overtones. I often have a hard time hearing myself play, with the brass right behind me and another bassoonist next to me, so I push as hard as I can, go for a bright sound, and listen to the texture, trying to find my contribution to the wash of harmonics. Even if my own sound is being lost as a unique voice in the mix (and it's hard for me to know how true that is) I'm still a part of the color of the sound, and I can place my overtones in among the overtones of every other player. Not everything is like this, obviously, but a lot of the Christmas music is pretty thickly scored. I focusing on overtones after I got back from Thanksgiving, where I'd been playing for a couple weeks entirely on my own, no ensemble at all. My first notes with the group were kind of a shock, in terms of not being able to hear myself in the way I was used to. So I started just listening to sound and color, at least in the loud parts.

And this morning, I practiced alone, the first in a few weeks of focused woodshedding before my first rehearsal on Mozart, which could be as soon as Jan 11. I'll post some recordings soon, as a check on where I'm at. Really nervous about the whole thing. I'm worried that it'll suck, or that it'll get cancelled to avoid sucking. Either way would be terrible, though of course everyone will be very nice regardless. The only solution is to do the best I can.

Louchez 8

A read-through of Louchez 8, no practice, recorded on the 4G iPod touch, positioned a few feet in front and left, face of iPod towards me (so the mic hole is away). I added Small Chamber reverb in Ableton, set to 26% wet.

Louchez 8 by TFox17