Xerox Gregorian Chant
I have a story to tell today. I intend to share it as it was shared with me. Through the tradition of the game of telephone, I will add all sorts of parts that didn’t exist before and omit key plot points and narratives that could make it comprehensible otherwise. By the end of it, you’ll have only the barest of understandings, so that when you relate it to the next person, it will have undoubtedly altered again to something even more foreign. None of it is verifiable, and like any good story, is just plausible enough to be taken as fact. It’s just a story, and it sounds true to me, so now I pass it on to you. How the most influential modern-day contact device got associated with distorting intended communication, I’ll never know, but we have all seen how it works.
Back in the middle-ages, they didn’t have phones. In Europe, they weren’t even talking to each other that much. They were obsessed with their “one-God” concept, and that’s what most of the reading and writing involved. That’s also what they were singing about. Gregorian chant consisted of a modal cadence that was sung in unison, only changing pitch to indicate the end of phrases, or phrasing markers. Priest and congregations recited passages of religious texts to these modes to communicate the unified, singular faith. It was monophonic, because there was one God, so they all sang in one tone. It was blasphemous to do otherwise.
As worshipers went on singing to their one God, in their one voice, they began building larger and larger structures to honor their one God. As the structures grew, something remarkably interesting began to happen. Their voices kept ringing, louder and louder in larger and larger halls, and they began to hear what they assumed was the voice of God singing along with them. The tall ceilings and stone structures were immense echo chambers and acoustical wonders. The voices that filled them seemed to come from the heavens.
What they were hearing was the overtone series, (more commonly known as the harmonic series) and it’s the reason they began to sing harmonies instead of sticking on a singular voice. The overtone series can (and does) take up its own textbooks, so to briefly describe it here, I’ll just say that every note, in fact, every sound possesses with it, because of the properties of physics, every other sound in series above it by way of ratios through which they can be divided. The practical application of this is to go find a guitar, or any stringed instrument really, and play a pitch, then match the pitch with your voice. Stop the string from vibrating, release it while still singing the pitch yourself. You should see the string start to vibrate again. In fact, you should either hear, or see additional strings vibrating sympathetically with your pitch, provided you hold it steady enough. To put it more simply, the echo of other notes that are produced from the note that they were singing is why the Backstreet Boys sold so many albums. Priests singing in a church heard the overtone series, thought it was the voice of God, and polyphonic church music was born in Europe.
Again, none of this is likely true, and there are gross exaggerations throughout the narrative. I think it makes perfect sense, and its plausibility to those who aren’t picky about silly things like ‘the truth’ make it a great tale.
Incidentally, the telephone started off with a singular ring tone. Shortly after its invention, companies began including different frequencies for singular rings so that multiple phones could be differentiated from each other. It wasn’t until a Japanese manufacturer in 1995 developed multi-tonal sounds for cellphones that we began using polyphony for telephones. Nick Fernandez writes a fascinating article about the birth and death of the custom ring tone where he gives accounts of its impact on the music industry during the rise of streaming. While custom ring tones have gone long out of fashion, and often get the maximum eye-roll when we hear them in public, its almost jarring to hear the old monophonic sound of the traditional phone call.
In short, I will leave you with this: In the beginning, there was one ring tone, because there was only one phone, and we worshipped the one phone. As we began to build bigger and more amazing technology for the phone, we began to hear the voice of God, and ye, we worshipped the almighty Justin Timberlake of NSYNC so that we could spread the word of Nokia, and all its glory.
Now here is a song made entirely of Xerox printer noises. Go now, and Apple be with you.
Enjoy today’s listening and viewing example from Mistabishi - "Printer Jam" (Barbarix Remix) and the great CHIBI (Bryan Gaynor) and his amazing dance moves. Thanks for reading!