Though its name sounds deroga­to­ry, falset­to is not some kind of trick­ery but a tech­nique used by humans for as long as they have been singing. It has its his­to­ries in indige­nous, folk, and clas­si­cal music. Yet mod­ern ears prob­a­bly asso­ciate it most with pop music of all kinds—from the har­mo­nious vocal blends of Doo Wop to the oper­at­ic har­monies of Queen (espe­cial­ly Roger Tay­lor, below) to… well, vir­tu­al­ly every song from a male singer today.

Falset­to is dif­fer­ent from what’s called “head voice,” as many a vocal coach will point out. “Usu­al­ly found in the upper reg­is­ters of male and female singers,” writes one such coach, “the breathy qual­i­ty of falset­to” is often “used for effect to sound oth­er­world­ly and beau­ti­ful or young.” Need a fuller explo­ration of why falset­to has such pur­chase in pop­u­lar music? See the above Vox Ear­worm explain­er by Estelle Caswell, tack­ling “pop music’s falset­to obses­sion.”

Falset­to has had phas­es when women adopt­ed it to major­ly promi­nent effect (see the age of Julee Cruise and Mazzy Star). It has of late become a very clear trend among male pop stars, Caswell the­o­rizes: “Justin Bieber, The Week­nd, Bruno Mars, Drake, Char­lie Puth, Shawn Mendes, Adam Levine, Sam Smith… the list goes on and on and on.” What’s all this about?

Caswell decid­ed to “crunch the num­bers and quan­ti­fy” the use of falset­to in pop to see if her per­cep­tion of its cur­rent ubiq­ui­ty could be sub­stan­ti­at­ed. Enlist­ing the help of data sci­ence and detailed ana­lyt­ics from Pan­do­ra, she traced falset­to singing in pop­u­lar music from a yodel­er in 1911 to “the icon­ic voice of Thom Yorke.” The Bill­board Hot 100 is fed into the dataset, “fan­cy pro­grams” do their thing and humans try to cor­rect errors.

Opera singer Antho­ny Roth Costan­zo shows up to explain the dif­fer­ence between falset­to and vocal reg­is­ter, and we learn much more about what falset­to is, and isn’t, and how, and maybe why, it’s so pop­u­lar a style for male pop vocal­ists. Caswell also put togeth­er a Spo­ti­fy playlist of falset­to pop and rock, fea­tur­ing every­thing from the afore­men­tioned Queen and Radio­head to Cur­tis May­field, Frankie Val­li, the Bee Gees, and Child­ish Gam­bi­no.

What does the data say? Caswell is hon­est to a fault about the prob­lems with a sta­tis­ti­cal approach—there are too many hit songs miss­ing from the Pan­do­ra dataset, and the AI’s falset­to scor­ing sys­tem (yes, such a thing exists) has seri­ous flaws. Turns out it may take a human ear to rec­og­nize the tech­nique, and even then, there’s room for dis­agree­ment.

But to sum up: mil­len­ni­als might feel like they live in a gold­en age of falset­to male pop singers because it’s all they’ve ever known. But ask any­one who grew up hear­ing Queen, the Bee Gees, or Mar­vin Gaye, or The Four Tops, even the Stones’ “Emo­tion­al Res­cue,” or the yodel­er who had that hit in 1911….

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Mar­vin Gaye Sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” A Capel­la: The Haunt­ing Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track

How to Sing Two Notes At Once (aka Poly­phon­ic Over­tone Singing): Lessons from Singer Anna-Maria Hefele

Hear Fred­die Mer­cury & Queen’s Iso­lat­ed Vocals on Their Endur­ing Clas­sic Song, “We Are The Cham­pi­ons”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

It’s one of the ironies of the mid-sev­en­ties that Pink Floyd became iden­ti­fied with the worst excess­es of pop­u­lar rock and roll. They were dis­missed by punk and New Wave bands as too slick and bom­bas­tic, but while they may have turned into a sta­di­um act after Dark Side of the Moon, they also deserved cred­it for pio­neer­ing the kind of avant-art-rock the­ater punk even­tu­al­ly nor­mal­ized. One ear­ly per­for­mance, for exam­ple, involved “saw­ing wood and boil­ing ket­tles on stage,” writes Mark Blake, of the album that was meant to be the fol­low-up to Dark Side of the Moon—an album called House­hold Objects, con­sist­ing entire­ly of sounds made on… house­hold objects.

The band was total­ly engrossed in this rad­i­cal­ly anti-com­mer­cial DIY project until 1974, “mak­ing chords up from the tap­ping of beer bot­tles,” remem­bers pro­duc­er John Leck­ie, then a tape oper­a­tor at Abbey Road, “tear­ing news­pa­pers for rhythm, and let­ting off aerosol cans to get a hi-hat sound.” Giv­en the incred­i­ble expense of spend­ing hours a day—over a peri­od of years—recording rub­ber bands and pen­cils at Abbey Road stu­dios, one can see the mer­it in charges of mean­ing­less excess.

But as we’ve seen from Jimi Hen­drix, Bri­an Wil­son, The Bea­t­les, and the mad­den­ing record­ing process of Steely Dan, when tal­ent­ed musi­cians have the lux­u­ry to use the stu­dio as an instru­ment, the results can very well jus­ti­fy the cost­ly means. What did House­hold Objects yield? The haunt­ing crys­talline sound of the wine glass harp in “Shine One You Crazy Dia­mond Part 1.” Maybe not much else. Was it worth it? I think so. But how can any­one mea­sure such things?

Bet­ter to “go with the flow,” as David Gilmour’s wife Pol­ly Sam­son tells him in the video at the top—do what­ev­er seems like the intu­itive next thing and see what hap­pens. This is not a triv­ial state­ment. It was the guid­ing cre­ative prin­ci­ple of Pink Floyd’s most inspired work. Gilmour takes her advice, and invites wine glass play­er Igor Skl­yarov, whom he met that day on the streets of Venice, to per­form on “Shine on You Crazy Dia­mond” in St. Mark’s Square that very night. (You’ll see some footage of the show in the short clip.)

Of course, the wine glass­es have made it into many live per­for­mances of the song—see a trio of play­ers rehearse the part above, and play it live below. Sklyarov’s turn on the glass­es is just one notable demon­stra­tion of Floy­di­an spon­tane­ity. Gilmour’s ver­sion of “go with the flow” might always be more rar­i­fied than ours, but the les­son he and his erst­while Pink Floyd band­mates impart­ed remains rel­e­vant and acces­si­ble to every artist.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Pink Floyd Tried to Make an Album with House­hold Objects: Hear Two Sur­viv­ing Tracks Made with Wine Glass­es & Rub­ber Bands

Watch Pink Floyd Play Live Amidst the Ruins of Pom­peii in 1971 … and David Gilmour Does It Again in 2016

An Hour-Long Col­lec­tion of Live Footage Doc­u­ments the Ear­ly Days of Pink Floyd (1967–1972)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

You’ll hard­ly ever run into a descrip­tion of Ger­man New Wave wun­derkind Klaus Nomi that doesn’t con­tain a ref­er­ence to Weimar Ger­many. It would seem like a seri­ous over­sight not to men­tion Nomi’s embod­i­ment of Weimar cabaret man­ner­isms, fit­ted for a space-age late-20th cen­tu­ry. But the influ­ence was far more than a styl­is­tic bor­row­ing. Nomi wasn’t just “the most Ger­man act ever,” as blog­ger Debris Slide writes; “Weimar Repub­lic comes to Dance­te­ria, except with space­ships” may also have been the most his­tor­i­cal­ly gay act in mod­ern pop.

The Weimar Repub­lic is well known as “a peri­od of remark­able artis­tic ener­gy,” writes Andrew Dick­son at the British Library, “a roar­ing surge of mod­ernist art, the­atre, design, dance and film.” It was also a time when “the con­straints of 19th-cen­tu­ry man­ners and mores were torn down.” Hid­den sex­u­al­i­ties could emerge in pub­lic in Berlin, thanks a relaxed polic­ing pol­i­cy, as his­to­ri­an Robert Beachy shows in his book Gay Berlin. The fine arts and cul­ture of Weimar flour­ished along­side the cabaret scene, whose camp showed up in every­thing from Ger­man Expres­sion­ist film to avant-garde opera.

“I think there prob­a­bly had nev­er been any­thing like this before,” Beachy tells NPR, “and there was no cul­ture as open again until the 1970s.” Klaus Nomi arrived in the 70s with his cabaret space alien act to announce that the cre­ative and per­son­al free­doms of Weimar had returned, and he was their avatar, freely mix­ing opera and pop with aston­ish­ing facil­i­ty, incor­po­rat­ing mime and vaude­ville. “The influ­ence of play­wright and the­atri­cal icon Bertolt Brecht would come to serve as a defin­i­tive touch­stone” for Nomi’s career, writes Evan Zwisler at Fly­pa­per.

“One of the ideas that Nomi incor­po­rat­ed into his own act was Ver­frem­dungsef­fekt (or, ‘the dis­tanc­ing effect’)”—drawing height­ened atten­tion to the per­for­mance as per­for­mance, a sig­nif­i­cant fea­ture of near­ly all avant-garde the­ater in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry. Klaus Nomi was also the most Mod­ernist act ever, at least in pop music. He would have fit in with a Dada cabaret revue of six­ty years ear­li­er. I’m not sure what it says about Berlin in the 70s that Nomi only tru­ly found him­self while onstage in New York. He moved to the city in 1972 after work­ing as an ush­er in Berlin opera hous­es, where his aston­ish­ing sopra­no went unap­pre­ci­at­ed.

Nomi became “a qui­et­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary part of the New York City art scene,” notes Zwisler, inspir­ing Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kei­th Har­ing. He appeared on Sat­ur­day Night Live with David Bowie in 1979 and in the 1981 doc­u­men­tary Urgh! A Music War. Had AIDS not claimed his life in 1983, Nomi’s fame may have spread even far­ther and wider. As it stood, how­ev­er, the year before his death, it had at least spread to his home coun­try, where he was wel­comed by TV host Thomas Gottschalk on the Ger­man pro­gram No Sowas!, per­form­ing with Kraftwerk, the biggest Ger­man pop cul­tur­al export to date.

See Nomi sing the aria from Camille Saint-Saens’ “Sam­son and Delilah.” Then, we have a rare treat: the very Cali­gari-like cabaret of Kraftwerk, at the height of their aus­tere synth pop fame. Nomi returns to sing “Total Eclipse” from his first album. You can read an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Nomi’s between-song inter­view with Gottschalk here. The host wraps up this seg­ment by say­ing, “he is already a big name in Amer­i­ca, and now we present him here in Ger­many.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Enchant­i­ng Opera Per­for­mances of Klaus Nomi

Klaus Nomi: Watch the Final, Bril­liant Per­for­mance of a Dying Man

David Bowie and Klaus Nomi’s Hyp­not­ic Per­for­mance on SNL (1979)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

In terms of brand recog­ni­tion, one has to admit it is remark­able that the name Zildjian—stamped on mil­lions of cym­bals worldwide—has such wide cul­tur­al cur­ren­cy. The prod­uct this com­pa­ny makes is not one most peo­ple get very close to out­side of a drum kit in a grade school music room. You nev­er see Zild­jian adver­tise­ments, unless you are a musi­cian, and you won’t encounter a Zild­jian cym­bal at your local all-in-one big box store. Yet Zild­jian cym­bals might even be more famous than icon­ic brands of elec­tric gui­tars like Fend­er and Gib­son or amps like Mar­shall and Vox.

Why is that? It’s easy, the com­pa­ny was found­ed 400 years ago in Con­stan­tino­ple and has remained in the Zild­jian fam­i­ly since an alchemist named Avedis was giv­en the sur­name by Sul­tan Osman II in the ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry. In all that time, Mozart praised Zild­jians (then just called “Turk­ish cym­bals”), they appeared at London’s Great Exhi­bi­tion, and they have been essen­tial to the kits of jazz and rock drum­mers for as long as both gen­res have exist­ed. It will nev­er be pos­si­ble to buy this kind of pub­lic­i­ty.

How has Zild­jian, who incor­po­rat­ed in the U.S. in 1929, stayed in busi­ness so long and con­tin­ued to main­tain such a rep­u­ta­tion for qual­i­ty? It’s all down, they say, to a secret recipe, passed down from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion, descend­ed from Avedis him­self, whose name graces the Avedis Vartere­sian Melt­ing Room, where Zild­jian cast­ings are made. You can watch what hap­pens to those cast­ings in the fas­ci­nat­ing 10-minute video above. “Only 4 fac­to­ry employ­ees and the own­ers of the com­pa­ny are allowed inside” the Melt­ing Room, notes the video’s YouTube page, “due to their knowl­edge of the ‘Zild­jian Secret.’”

We do not learn the secret recipe, nor do we learn how a trade secret can be kept for 400 years, but we do see Zild­jians heat­ed, rolled out, shaped, cut, ham­mered, lath­ed, fin­ished, and, final­ly, “stamped with the Zild­jian Logo as well as the model/size of the cym­bal.” It’s gen­er­al­ly pret­ty cool to watch unre­mark­able, every­day prod­ucts go through the many stages of a fac­to­ry pro­duc­tion process. Watch­ing the Zild­jian process adds a lay­er of his­tor­i­cal leg­end and intrigue, and the allure of see­ing raw mate­ri­als trans­formed into objects of visu­al and aur­al beau­ty.

See Zildjian’s YouTube page for a time­stamped com­men­tary on each step in the pro­duc­tion.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Zild­jian Cym­bals Were Cre­at­ed by an Alchemist in the Ottoman Empire, Cir­ca 1618

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

As Josh Jones observed yes­ter­day, Miles Davis’ leg­endary jazz album Kind of Blue turns 60 this week. Today, we want to keep the par­ty going a lit­tle longer and fea­ture this video essay from Sweet­wa­ter. They write:

In 1959, Miles Davis went to Colum­bia Records in Man­hat­tan to forge a new style of music impro­vi­sa­tion. With the com­pa­ny of oth­er leg­endary musi­cians, like John Coltrane and Bill Evans, Kind of Blue was record­ed; the great­est sell­ing jazz album of all time. Miles chose to take an inter­pre­tive dance approach to impro­vi­sa­tion, devel­op­ing ideas and using space to cre­ate his unique style. This new style of modal jazz pushed musi­cians to express them­selves through melod­ic cre­ativ­i­ty. Take a look into the his­to­ry and music the­o­ry of Kind of Blue with Sweet­wa­ter’s Jacob Dupre (piano/trumpet), accom­pa­nied by Michael Pat­ter­son (bass) and Sean Parr (drums). Karl Stab­nau (alto sax) per­forms the solo on “Blues For Alice,” as played by Char­lie Park­er.

For a more in-depth study of the time­less album, read Ash­ley Kah­n’s well-reviewed book, Kind of Blue: The Mak­ing of the Miles Davis Mas­ter­piece.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Miles Davis Icon­ic 1959 Album Kind of Blue Turns 60: Revis­it the Album That Changed Amer­i­can Music

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

Kind of Blue: How Miles Davis Changed Jazz

Her­bie Han­cock Explains the Big Les­son He Learned From Miles Davis: Every Mis­take in Music, as in Life, Is an Oppor­tu­ni­ty

The Influ­ence of Miles Davis Revealed with Data Visu­al­iza­tion: For His 90th Birth­day Today

In a very short span of time, the descrip­tor “elec­tron­ic music” has come to sound as over­ly broad as “clas­si­cal.” But where what we (often incor­rect­ly) call clas­si­cal devel­oped over hun­dreds of years, elec­tron­ic music pro­lif­er­at­ed into hun­dreds of frac­tal forms in only decades. A far steep­er qual­i­ty curve may have to do with the ease of its cre­ation, but it’s also a fac­tor of this accel­er­at­ed evo­lu­tion.

Music made by machines has trans­formed since its ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry begin­nings from obscure avant-garde exper­i­ments to mas­sive­ly pop­u­lar gen­res of glob­al dance and pop. This pro­lif­er­a­tion, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Elec­tron­ic Music—has­n’t always been to the good. Take what he calls “trend­whor­ing,” a phe­nom­e­non that spawns dozens of new works and sub­gen­era in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist.

Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his eru­dite, sar­don­ic “Fre­quent­ly Unasked Ques­tions”:

If fart nois­es were sud­den­ly pop­u­lar, each scene would trend­whore it with fart­step, fart­core, tech­fart, far­t­house, fart trance, etc. It is espe­cial­ly notice­able in clas­sic tracks that are remixed into mod­ern gen­res, which some might con­sid­er sacre­li­gious. A good exam­ple is the Dream Trance hit Robert Miles — Chil­dren, in which there is now a Hard­style ver­sion, a Dutch House ver­sion, a McProg ver­sion, a Euro­trance ver­sion, a Goa Trance ver­sion, and even a Snap ver­sion and a shit­ty Brostep ver­sion. None of these gen­res exist­ed when the orig­i­nal song came out in 1995.

Vicious­ly irrev­er­ent tone and com­pletist atten­tion to detail are typ­i­cal through­out this ency­clo­pe­dia, an inter­ac­tive Flash flow­chart that chron­i­cles the devel­op­ment of 100s of gen­res, sub­gen­res, micro­gen­res, etc., with stream­ing musi­cal exam­ples of every one. It’s a deeply researched, and con­tin­u­al­ly expand­ing project first cre­at­ed by Ishkur, aka Ken­neth John Tay­lor, in 1999. In 2003, Tay­lor updat­ed and expand­ed the project and moved it to its cur­rent loca­tion. He has con­tin­u­ous­ly updat­ed it since then.

The record­ed exam­ples on Taylor’s time­line cur­rent­ly span around 80 years, from 1937 to 2019—a tiny drop in the great ocean of musi­cal his­to­ry. Nonethe­less, the music shows how rich and com­plex elec­tron­ic music his­to­ry tru­ly is, despite its potential—as its devel­op­men­tal speed (and tem­pos) increased—to pro­duce dis­pos­able, deriv­a­tive com­po­si­tions as much as chart-burn­ing clas­sics and inno­v­a­tive, mind-expand­ing cre­ative work.

As you zoom into the chart and click on the dots next to each genre, you’ll have the option to pull up Taylor’s wit­ty guides, as infor­ma­tive as they are unspar­ing­ly crit­i­cal. He explains “Chill Out,” for exam­ple, as a grab-bag term for elec­tron­ic easy lis­ten­ing that “goes down easy like a fresh glass of cool lemon­ade or light­ly sprin­kled vanil­la sun­dae…. Not only did it appeal to post-come­down par­ty kids but their moms too, as heard in movie sound­tracks, adver­tise­ment jin­gles, or played over the radio while shop­ping at the mar­ket.”

Does he approve of any forms of elec­tron­ic music? Obvi­ous­ly. No one would spend this much time and effort and amass “30 years of back issues of Elec­tron­ic Music and Key­board mag­a­zine” and “an ungod­ly num­ber of books” on a sub­ject they despised. It’s just that he’s… well, a purist, you might say. Any media, for exam­ple, of any kind, that “uses the acronym ‘EDM,’” he writes “is com­plete don­key balls and should not be relied on as a source for any­thing.” He’s also ambi­tious­ly com­pre­hen­sive, includ­ing Hip Hop and all of its vari­ants in the mix, a move most his­to­ri­ans of elec­tron­ic music do not make, for fear of get­ting it wrong, per­haps, or because of cul­tur­al bias­es and nar­row ideas about what elec­tron­ic music is.

The data visu­al­iza­tion crossed with exten­sive pop musi­col­o­gy crossed with an almost quaint kind of ultra-nerdy online snark has some­thing for every­one. But don’t call it art, as one inter­view­er did. “I feel uneasy about this,” Ishkur answered. “It’s a joke more than any­thing. Very fun­ny. Very sil­ly. I poke fun at a lot of gen­res. It’s meant to be enter­tain­ment.” This is the stan­dard inter­net dis­claimer, but if you fol­low the guide’s branch­ing streams through hun­dreds of expand­ing gen­res and scenes, you might just find you’ve become a seri­ous stu­dent of elec­tron­ic music your­self, while learn­ing not to take any of it too seri­ous­ly.

Ishkur’s guide has recent­ly been updat­ed for 2019. He’s also released a “15 hour DJ set of elec­tron­ic music,” he announced on Twit­ter, “span­ning sev­er­al eras and a wide range of gen­res, all mixed in that inim­itable Ishkur style.” Get the mix here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938–2014)

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness