The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

SONG: Rising Like the Sun

SONG: “Rising Like the Sun”. _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “Antidepressants in water cause shrimps to ‘swim towards the light’”, BBC News, 7 July 2010, as used in the post “Prozac Pollution and Shrimp Suicide”.

ABSTRACT: First off, it’s no use denying that the melody for this was pretty much cribbed from “Dead Queen” by Espers (because I couldn’t get it out of my head any other way), but I’m 85% sure they cribbed it from Fairport Convention, who cribbed it from Pentangle, who cribbed it from Jean Redpath, who cribbed it from some schmo in the 1400s, and once you go that far back it’s not cribbing, it’s tradition. So, three chords, some scratchy violins (actually erhu), some boomy organs/accordions (actually synths & fake mellotrons), a tambourine and a crunchy electric guitar. Oh, and the monks of the Delay Lama VSTi. Tradition.

The subject matter sort of dictated the form. This is a dirge. I based the song structure on “Lyke Wake Dirge” (I know the Pentangle version), only it’s not about stages of Purgatory but about a fluoxetine-addled shrimp who went to the light, along with every other member of his school. I very nearly included some gasping breaths for percussion, but enough was enough. All the gloom was lifted. Everything is shining. Instead of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, it’s couplet-first refrain-couplet-second refrain. It’s supposed to be otherworldly. Enjoy the trip.

Entered on 23 August 2010 at 6:51 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: nobody else can hear

SONG: “nobody else can hear”. _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Super squid sex organ discovered”, BBC News, 7 July 2010, as used in the post Super squid penis.

ABSTRACT: This is sort of filling a request. It could be a song from one marine biologist to another, or a song from one squid to another. I tried to make it feel like it must feel for abyssal squid species to get intimate – a little bit cold and distant while still, you know, penetrating each other’s deepest mysteries. Ahem.

Recording was fairly simple: ukulele and vox, with lots of MIDI drums and SoundFont strings added after the fact. I was kind of aiming for something between Joanna Newsom and Portished, from a composition standpoint, only, you know, lo-fi. Since that’s how I roll. Plus, you know, I’m not a girl, so I can’t do that breathy vocal thing without sounding pretty creepy. Which is only right for a priapic squid, I suppose. I hope you enjoy it, Liesbeth. If I had more time, I’d probably simplify the cello and bass parts, then build them up again with lots of counterpoint. And maybe get a real drummer rather than programming this machine. But you get the idea.

Entered on 23 July 2010 at 6:21 in the Songs file | 1 Observation |  Print

SONG: Crocodile Surf

SONG: “Crocodile Surf”. _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Crocodiles go with the flow”, Nature, 7 June 2010, as used in the post Crocodile surf.

ABSTRACT: I mean, c’mon. Surfing crocodiles?

Backing vocals by Sophia and Sebastian Balfour, ages 5 and 7.

Entered on 23 June 2010 at 7:36 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Golden Record

SONG: “Golden Record”. _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Partially based on “Have aliens hijacked Voyager 2 spacecraft”, Daily Telegraph, 12 May 10, as used in the post I**AM**V-GER***, and partially based on “Barnard’s Star” by Kate Horowitz.

ABSTRACT: I felt a sort of relief writing this one, because I wasn’t trying to *do* anything – no experiments with delay, no pastiches of Steve Miller, no cleverness, just a melody that came to me over a simple chord progression. OK, so the percussion is kinda experimental, and there are some lyrics where I was trying to be a little clever, maybe. But still.

It’s hard to read about the Voyager probe – and Ann Druyan’s brainwaves-in-love donation to the golden record – and not want there to be a song about it. If aliens did take over Voyager and beam a message back to Earth, I think it’d probably be something like this song – it’s so nice you didn’t want us to feel alone.

Entered on 23 May 2010 at 6:01 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Mexican Coke.

SONG: “Mexican Coke” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain,” Princeton University, 22 Mar 2010, as used in the post Corn syrup not so sweet.

ABSTRACT: I confess. Our household was recently overrun with Mountain Dew Throwback, and the family all went mad. Sugar in soda – who’d have thunk it? It tasted like I remembered… like I forgot I’d ever known. So now there’s a flat of Mexican cokes taking up a corner of the kitchen. I grew up in sugar country, more or less, so I feel like in some way drinking this is doing my patriotic duty as a South Floridian. I don’t know *what* them Nebraskans is trying to do to us with all that huskin’ and squeezin’.

Anyway, Mexican coke is a nostalgic flavor, and summer is the most nostalgic of seasons, and so I figured if you’re going to sing about the whole to-do with high-fructose corn syrup, you might as well aim for summer music, which kinda has to be classic rock. My apologies to Steve Miller (as well as Texas boogiers ZZ Top and Roky Erickson).

The main problem with classic rock is that it’s really hard to record in a home studio that’s really just a room with glass doors right next to the bedroom where one’s spouse is sleeping. But one does what one can in the time allotted. Try to imagine it’s really, like, Fountains of Wayne or something. And maybe listen while driving through nowhere with the windows open.

ANNOTATED LYRICS: MEXICAN COKE

Entered on 23 April 2010 at 4:17 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Aquarium (penitential Robyn Hitchcock cover)

SONG: “Aquarium” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant. Originally by Robyn Hitchcock.

SOURCE: This is a penitential cover. There’s no specific scientific source. It’s from this album. I never really thought of it as a rarity, but it seems to be impossible to find an mp3 or YouTube video of it. It is on Lala, though.

ABSTRACT: Is this a song about science? I’m not sure, really, but it is a song about mystery that has a lot of sciencey set dressing – aquariums, planetariums, things that stand in for that sense of wonder and alienation that Mr. Hitchcock captures so very well.

Has a banjo, a rather nice mellotron synth called Nanotron, an electric guitar and the Padawan VSTi from tweakbench. And a bloopy noise I ganked off my old copy of Acid. That’s it. Part of what I wanted to do was get away from click tracks and percussion to make it as spacey as possible. Maybe a metronome would have helped in some ways, but the effect worked, I think.

Entered on 12 April 2010 at 3:32 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: The Stick That Never Strikes the Snare

SONG: “The Stick That Never Strikes the Snare” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Scientists supersize quantum mechanics,” Nature , 17 March 2010, as used in the post “Quantum drum beats without beating.”

ABSTRACT: So, they made a thing you can see with your naked eye that moves and doesn’t move at the same time. And it’s a drum – so not only can you see it, but with the right amplification, you could hear it, too. What would it sound like? A buzz? A whisper? A white-noise-like absence of sound? How would our senses react to quantum reality? Or would it be different at all? It’s just… reality, after all. How things work.

I knew before I picked a subject that I wanted to record a song in A minor on the banjo, because that’s what I’ve been playing when I sit down and start fidgeting with my fingers. The idea of the quantum drum and the beat itself (kind of borrowed from “And I Love Her”) both happened at once. And I knew the vocals would have that delay on key words for a kind of there/not there feeling. Figuring out what kinds of things to say, though, took a while, and I’ve had a lot of living in the past month (con: bad bronchial cold, pro: become a grandfather, prematurely). But this is it. A song about the beat that’s always there and never audible.

Now, onto a penitential cover to make up for my tardiness.

Entered on 27 March 2010 at 6:39 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Staring

SONG: “Staring” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Body of Sea Urchin is One Big Eye,” LiveScience , 28 Dec 2009, as used in the post “Spiny eyes. With legs and mouths.”

ABSTRACT: Floating down. How strange it must be to see always all around you, to be able to move slowly, but never speak or wave or pick up anything – only to watch, only ever to watch.

I remember going snorkeling with my mother as she showed us how the Greeks eat raw sea urchins fresh from the sea. I have eaten uni myself at sushi bars – hopefully they didn’t see me coming.

This should sound more like the Residents. My body keeps staring at you.

Entered on 23 February 2010 at 6:43 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: My Girlfriend’s a Robot (penitential cover)

SONG: “My Girlfriend’s a Robot” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant. Originally done like this.

SOURCE: This is a penitential cover with no specific scientific source. It’s by The Hanson Brothers, who are not these savage hockey players nor this bubblegum pop band, but some kind of combination of the two.

ABSTRACT: This cover involves no hockey, no Ramones and no unnecessary roughness (the only roughness is entirely necessary). It does, however, involve the excesses of love and the passion for the mechanical implied by the original song. I’m not sure how it wound up as a torch song, really – it’s not exactly what I set out to do, really. I just wanted to follow the emotional lead of the lyrics.
Please enjoy it… like you were programmed to.

Entered on 13 February 2010 at 23:01 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: A Tiny Golden Mean

SONG: “A Tiny Golden Mean” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Golden Ratio Discovered in Quantum World: Hidden Symmetry Observed for the First Time in Solid State Matter,” ScienceDaily, 7 Jan 2010, as used in the post “A tiny golden mean”.

ABSTRACT: Since the golden mean is the ratio that supposedly underlies our sense of beauty – the thing that describes the relationships that look or sound “right” to our brains – it was hard to resist this one. I already knew one song (written by this guy) called “Golden Mean,” so it was kind of interesting coming at the thing from a different angle. It seems strange to me that elementary school kids are taught 3.14… but not 1.618…, but I guess that’s human beings all over. Wheels are more important than portraits.

Obviously, this is not the day when this song should have been done (happy Imbolc, by the way). I’m in a new house, on the one hand, but also have a new Christmas condenser microphone, on the other, so all the flaws can shine through with crystal clarity. Yikes! There’s a borrowed banjo in there, and a couple synthy basses, but for the most part it’s the magic microphone sitting there with me playing guitar and singing the decimal places live in the room. I’ve never been mathematically minded, so numbers have a kind of mystique for me, I guess, which is where that chorus came from. The chords for the verses are *sort of* in the golden ratio (I-IV-V, that standard blues progression), but the choruses are a little different. I kind of felt like there should have been more of a mention of frozen magnetic atoms of cobalt niobate, or a diagram of E8, or at least a use of the phrase “quantum critical,” but the words kept going back to the simple fact that there’s a phi inside the atomic world. That’s pretty cool. (Oh, and the bridge about how the golden mean determines where most pop songs’ bridges are located – that was partially inspired by Douglas Hofstadter, who I’ve been rereading lately.)

So, here’s a song about it. Next up, a penitential cover. Mea culpa.

Entered on 2 February 2010 at 6:42 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print