A Challenge: Pure Deception in Music (Attempt #2)
I presented attempt #1 under the assumption that readers were, after reading my post, totally anticipating pure deception in music. Under those circumstances, I think that’s the closest one could come to pure deception. I hope you were disappointed!
Though it’s possible to deceive listeners using only sounds, ingenious deception in music will consider all circumstances surrounding music making.
This becomes clear when you consider music as a verb, not as a noun (as in Christopher Small’s book Musicking). The meaning of music and musicking then, is in complex connections and relationships between performers, listeners, sounds and circumstances (among other things).
For example, suppose you’re attending a performance of choral music in a traditional concert hall. The stage is empty. At the beginning of the concert, only the conductor walks on stage. She raises her hands and begins the first piece. Unbeknownst to you, the choir is actually assembled behind the audience, which is where they sing for the rest of the concert.
This is deception in music too, but has nothing to do with the organization of pitch and rhythm. It takes advantage of the expectations that performers sing on the stage, and sounds come from the front of the concert hall. It’s all in the context of musical performance.
When you consider all the circumstances surrounding music making, it’s actually quite easy for performers to deceive their audience. It becomes much more difficult to deceive if your focus is strictly concerning the organization of sound.
Nevertheless, I’ve taken up the challenge! In the following excerpt, I’ve done my best to position the deception in the sounds, and only the sounds. I hope listeners feel deceived no matter the context in which they’re listening. Please have a listen. What do you think?
Download the Mp3 here: Deception in Music #2
Listen to it here:
Related posts:
Hrm. Well, “deception” is one way of putting it. “Provocation” would be another.
Main point taken, though– music is found not merely the pure sounds, but in the relationships between all parties who are experiencing that sound.
The kind of deception you’ve made in “DiM#2″ would work in most contexts, of course, but not in all. For instance, if it were in the middle of a series of songs relying on the same trick, it would no longer give that jolt of the unexpected. In other words, this kind of deception relies on breaking established patterns– which I guess you kind of already said in “Deception in Music #1″.
Whether this deception is always pleasing (at least according to one’s own taste, whether as listener or creator) is another story, of course.
There’s another kind of deception you haven’t explored yet, which isn’t necessarily based on breaking an established pattern; but rather, in exploiting the brain’s desire to perceive a pattern even beyond the point where one actually exists. A simple example are Shephard Tones, which were brought to the popular gaming world in Mario 64.
I don’t know, maybe I would put metric modulation in the same category, in that it “deceives” the listener that the whole band has just seamless shifted to an entirely new tempo, when in fact the new tempo is directly tied to the previous tempo.
By the way, Chris, I’m very happy to discover your excellent blog. If I ever feel the urge to comment on past posts, do you feel it’s worth doing, or should I just stick to the current ones?
Thanks for the comments Quin!
Please feel free to comment on past posts, I generally respond to all comments.
Re: “Whether this deception is always pleasing (at least according to one’s own taste, whether as listener or creator) is another story, of course.”
By definition, the best, purest deception (in music or otherwise) would be most unpleasant, no?
I’ll drop a note every now and then in your past work, then. It looks like you’ve been writing about a lot of things that I’m very interested in. Jazz, education, practice techniques, connecting with people through music, the whole lot. You’re a good writer and clearly you’ve got a sharp mind, so I plan to come by often.
Music or otherwise, there are many different purposes for deception, not all of them unpleasant. While it’s true that deception is what helps a venus flytrap snare a fly, or that con artist scam me for $300 in Pakistan that one time (true story), there is sometimes a real joy to be gained, once you’ve been deceived, in trying to puzzle out exactly how. This is why professional magicians can still stay in business after all these years, even though nobody really believes that they have “real” magic powers! The audience is still tricked and intrigued, even though they know it’s not “real”. Is it not the same with music? If the trickery is too obvious, the audience is left unsatisfied; the musical equivalent of a mugging. (Give me a con over a mugging any day!) In fact, I wonder if that’s an origin of the word “mugging” when used in a theater/comedy context– making faces to get cheap laughs, at the expense of any deeper pleasures the scene might have had to offer.
Interesting that we can’t even pigeonhole the actual word “deception.” It should be no surprise that we have the same difficulty in music. Our relationships with these ideas are complex indeed.
Fun, isn’t it?