Whim
It began when I was twenty-two and working as a nurse at a hospital in Chicago. One of my patients was James Friedrich Apllo, a.k.a. Jim Truenote, founder and former chief executive of Dreamer Records, who voluntarily spent four months of the year in a hospital bed. He suffered one unlikely disease after another and was paranoid about how he'd go down in music history. Journalists were never admitted during visiting hours. Those who spoke with any degree of intelligence were enemies out to warp his accomplisments, broadcast gross inaccuracies, and cheat him of immortality. I was assumed incompetent after I made some trivial error (I called him "John" once), and he made me his sole confidant. Keeping life a secret is impossible for those on the brink of passing; he would pour out his histories to me every chance he got, and I could never tell embellishments apart from astounding truths.
There was the Cinderella story of Dreamer, how he turned a tiny home studio into an international empire with seventeen subsidiaries. That one was already in the books but I got the dirty details, which I won't mention now.
There was also The Idea. Fifteen years in the making, The Idea was to create the perfect song, one that would survive changing tastes, bridge genres, and cater to groundlings and snobs alike. Focus groups were held, surveys administered across countries, statistical research compiled. Dreamer consulted concertmasters and music theorists, hiring David Cope, the inventor of Emi (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), as an executive producer. Another year or two, Apllo claimed, and The Idea would be ready to become The Song. Apllo had handpicked the artist himself. A relatively unknown composer from Marseilles, Adrien Ganjou called himself DJ Autonom and had five albums and an EP under his belt, all experimental recordings with hints of jazz and West African drum patterns. Senior research analysts at Dreamer coached him, purchasing supercomputers and recording equipment straight from laboratories.
There were no press releases. Autonom lived in the penthouse of Dreamer Studios under a code of silence.
I went off to finish med school and never found out exactly when or why Apllo started refuting the Idea. Biographers write that he tried to shelf the project several times, claiming he'd conceived it during a period of insanity. Pulling the plug at that point was impossible, of course; Dreamer had far too much invested. The board of directors humored Apllo, assured him of his genius, insisted he would go down in history not only as an entrepreneur but a creative icon, a veritable Amadeus of the twenty-first century.
Apllo died of thyroid cancer and pneumonia. In his memoir (Man of Measure, Simon & Schuster, 438pp.), he wrote: "I've murdered my Muse many times over. And my punishment is still to come."
Six years after his death, Dreamer Records released a single called "Hz," which, by then, had become the most anticipated release in decades. The piece was 3 minutes and 9 seconds long, the average of popular song lengths favored across the world according to survey, and consisted of a single audible note (later measured at 318.12hz) divided into thirty-two 5.34-second intonations. This note was sandwiched between hundreds of thousands of others, all at frequencies inaudible to the human ear, precisely callibrated and staggered. While several thousand of these notes have been documented through outside studies, the exact formula for "Hz" remains unknown. There is no sheet music (to score just one measure of the song, one magazine reported, you would need a page the length of a basketball court); the disk is kept in a vault at an undisclosed offsite location.
The song was met with incredulity at first. People immediately dismissed it as subversive, heady, inaccessible, and heartless. Radio personalities panned the work, pundits discussed the death of popular music. "Hz" was played only as a subject of ridicule, introduced as "the Emperor's new song," and rarely played in its entirety. Listeners laughed.
Two months passed before the reports came in, sporadically, from different countries. After downloading and listening to "Hz," the seven-year-old son of a Chinese shoe merchant in Chengdu collapsed after singing a strange tune (a doctor recognized it as Mahler's Symphony No. 9, 2nd Movement) for five straight hours. Some claimed to hear bits of Hammerstein and Kern's "All the Things You Are" peppered throughout it. A 74-year old woman heard the piano sample in Tupac's "I Ain't Mad at Cha" (from DeBarge's "A Dream"). Couples heard songs from their first kisses, teenagers hummed Eric Dolphy tunes, I heard my mother's lullabies. Certain deaf individuals took in Brahms and Dylan for the first time, tears streaming, radios held inches from their ears.
The effects were not just musical. A set of fraternal twins (one living in Seattle, the other in Jerusalem) claimed the song triggered telepathy. Mourners heard the voices of the dead. Synesthesia became common; thousands of listeners saw shifting colors and kaleidoscopic patterns when they closed their eyes.
The single broke every sales record in the business.
Studios at once expanded their R&D departments and began producing their own versions of "Hz." Dreamer released Autonom's first major-label album, Om, which influential critic Julia Simon called "a seamless collusion (collision?) of candor and crypt, of pizzicati and oil pumps, of PBR and pinot noir." It was discovered that certain combinations of frequencies could generate desired emotions, and tracks were custom-blended like perfumes to fit "baffled joy," "ironic self-flagellation," and "horny." A song called "PRV18-9" (Track 172 on Autonom's sophomore album, Gregorian Pants, Dreamer Records) was a workplace favorite for its "motivational" sound. Civic funds were routed to installing speakers in public spaces; music was played everywhere, in subway cars, rare-book libraries, post offices, monuments to dead heroes. Everywhere you went, you could hear the algorithmic mingling of perfect fifths and minor seconds. You could never be sure if the phantom tones you were hearing came from a nearby speaker or the residue of a song you'd heard the day before. You often saw passersby stooped over on the sidewalk, eyes closed, separating timbres and leaning into their own sudden soundtracks.
There was the Cinderella story of Dreamer, how he turned a tiny home studio into an international empire with seventeen subsidiaries. That one was already in the books but I got the dirty details, which I won't mention now.
There was also The Idea. Fifteen years in the making, The Idea was to create the perfect song, one that would survive changing tastes, bridge genres, and cater to groundlings and snobs alike. Focus groups were held, surveys administered across countries, statistical research compiled. Dreamer consulted concertmasters and music theorists, hiring David Cope, the inventor of Emi (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), as an executive producer. Another year or two, Apllo claimed, and The Idea would be ready to become The Song. Apllo had handpicked the artist himself. A relatively unknown composer from Marseilles, Adrien Ganjou called himself DJ Autonom and had five albums and an EP under his belt, all experimental recordings with hints of jazz and West African drum patterns. Senior research analysts at Dreamer coached him, purchasing supercomputers and recording equipment straight from laboratories.
There were no press releases. Autonom lived in the penthouse of Dreamer Studios under a code of silence.
I went off to finish med school and never found out exactly when or why Apllo started refuting the Idea. Biographers write that he tried to shelf the project several times, claiming he'd conceived it during a period of insanity. Pulling the plug at that point was impossible, of course; Dreamer had far too much invested. The board of directors humored Apllo, assured him of his genius, insisted he would go down in history not only as an entrepreneur but a creative icon, a veritable Amadeus of the twenty-first century.
Apllo died of thyroid cancer and pneumonia. In his memoir (Man of Measure, Simon & Schuster, 438pp.), he wrote: "I've murdered my Muse many times over. And my punishment is still to come."
Six years after his death, Dreamer Records released a single called "Hz," which, by then, had become the most anticipated release in decades. The piece was 3 minutes and 9 seconds long, the average of popular song lengths favored across the world according to survey, and consisted of a single audible note (later measured at 318.12hz) divided into thirty-two 5.34-second intonations. This note was sandwiched between hundreds of thousands of others, all at frequencies inaudible to the human ear, precisely callibrated and staggered. While several thousand of these notes have been documented through outside studies, the exact formula for "Hz" remains unknown. There is no sheet music (to score just one measure of the song, one magazine reported, you would need a page the length of a basketball court); the disk is kept in a vault at an undisclosed offsite location.
The song was met with incredulity at first. People immediately dismissed it as subversive, heady, inaccessible, and heartless. Radio personalities panned the work, pundits discussed the death of popular music. "Hz" was played only as a subject of ridicule, introduced as "the Emperor's new song," and rarely played in its entirety. Listeners laughed.
Two months passed before the reports came in, sporadically, from different countries. After downloading and listening to "Hz," the seven-year-old son of a Chinese shoe merchant in Chengdu collapsed after singing a strange tune (a doctor recognized it as Mahler's Symphony No. 9, 2nd Movement) for five straight hours. Some claimed to hear bits of Hammerstein and Kern's "All the Things You Are" peppered throughout it. A 74-year old woman heard the piano sample in Tupac's "I Ain't Mad at Cha" (from DeBarge's "A Dream"). Couples heard songs from their first kisses, teenagers hummed Eric Dolphy tunes, I heard my mother's lullabies. Certain deaf individuals took in Brahms and Dylan for the first time, tears streaming, radios held inches from their ears.
The effects were not just musical. A set of fraternal twins (one living in Seattle, the other in Jerusalem) claimed the song triggered telepathy. Mourners heard the voices of the dead. Synesthesia became common; thousands of listeners saw shifting colors and kaleidoscopic patterns when they closed their eyes.
The single broke every sales record in the business.
Studios at once expanded their R&D departments and began producing their own versions of "Hz." Dreamer released Autonom's first major-label album, Om, which influential critic Julia Simon called "a seamless collusion (collision?) of candor and crypt, of pizzicati and oil pumps, of PBR and pinot noir." It was discovered that certain combinations of frequencies could generate desired emotions, and tracks were custom-blended like perfumes to fit "baffled joy," "ironic self-flagellation," and "horny." A song called "PRV18-9" (Track 172 on Autonom's sophomore album, Gregorian Pants, Dreamer Records) was a workplace favorite for its "motivational" sound. Civic funds were routed to installing speakers in public spaces; music was played everywhere, in subway cars, rare-book libraries, post offices, monuments to dead heroes. Everywhere you went, you could hear the algorithmic mingling of perfect fifths and minor seconds. You could never be sure if the phantom tones you were hearing came from a nearby speaker or the residue of a song you'd heard the day before. You often saw passersby stooped over on the sidewalk, eyes closed, separating timbres and leaning into their own sudden soundtracks.
posted by dave at 6:57 PM
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