Illusion Chords

[Queila Neubecker]

Interms of chords and melody, Illusion is significantly more complex than the typical song, having above average scores in Chord Complexity, Melodic Complexity, Chord-Melody Tension, Chord Progression Novelty and Chord-Bass Melody.

The sustain pedal is pivotal to the whole undertaking, because it can hold down elements of chords that would otherwise be missing or lost in the prioritizing of melodic movement in the uppermost voice. However, the pedal cannot replace a well thought out finger-connecting strategy that shores up the legato, albeit with some missing ingredients in lower voices, that will be filled in by well-conceived pedaling.

The arpeggios that are played in chiptune tracks are incredibly fast, almost audio rate. This gives them their distinctive sound and also helps create the illusion that more than one note is being played at a time.

In my darkest hour just before the dawn

There's no sound from the empty street

But sleep won't seem to come to me

All your words in my head

Linger on and on

They've come to steal my time away

Till the night is gone

I must be losing my shine

Like an old dusty Burgundy wine

In a cellar cool and damp

Dull beneath a yellow lamp

No one turning the key

To come and get me today

The more I think about you now

The more I'm feeling that way

I see you there, everywhere

Optical illusions

Telephone, let it ring

I don't want intrusions in my life

I know tomorrow I'll find

There's nothing here at all

Just some trick your mind will play

With shadows on the wall

I see you here, feel you near

Optical illusions

Nothing real that I feel

Just some confusion of my time

In my darkest hour, when all the blinds were drawn

You're just some mirage I saw

Just before the dawn

A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet which ultimately gets no higher or lower.[1]

Each square in Figure 1 indicates a tone, with any set of squares in vertical alignment together making one Shepard tone. The color of each square indicates the loudness of the note, with purple being the quietest and green the loudest. Overlapping notes that play at the same time are exactly one octave apart, and each scale fades in and fades out so that hearing the beginning or end of any given scale is impossible.

The scale as described, with discrete steps between each tone, is known as the discrete Shepard scale. The illusion is more convincing if there is a short time between successive notes (staccato or marcato rather than legato or portamento).[citation needed]

A sequentially played pair of Shepard tones separated by an interval of a tritone (half an octave) produces the tritone paradox. Shepard had predicted that the two tones would constitute a bistable figure, the auditory equivalent of the Necker cube, that could be heard ascending or descending, but never both at the same time.[1]

In 1986, Diana Deutsch discovered that the perception of which tone was higher depended on the absolute frequencies involved and that an individual would usually hear the same pitch as the highest (this is determined by the absolute pitch of the notes).[5] Interestingly, different listeners may perceive the same pattern as being either ascending or descending, depending on the language or dialect of the listener (Deutsch, Henthorn, and Dolson found that native speakers of Vietnamese, a tonal language, heard the tritone paradox differently from Californians who were native speakers of English).[6][7]

Pedro Patricio observed in 2012 that, by using a Shepard tone as a sound source and applying it to a melody, he could reproduce the illusion of a continuously ascending or descending movement characteristic of the Shepard Scale. Regardless of the tempo and the envelope of the notes, the auditory illusion is effectively maintained. The uncertainty of the scale the Shepard tones pertain allows composers to experiment with deceiving and disconcerting melodies.[8]

I'd suppose that next to George Van Eps,Joe Pass, Jim Hall, and Lenny Breau, youare my all-time favorite player of chordvoicings. Like Hall and Breau, you seem tobe able to alternate between more advancedvoicings (fourths, - 7ths w/a natural 9 inthem,etc.) with more "traditional" voicings (first inversion elevens or major 9s) in a very BALANCED way. How do you achieve a balance between advanced and stock voicings? Is there such a thing as being too harmonically complex too often?

hi steve,thanks for the compliments. the area that you are talking about is one that isn't really discussed much, it is a fairly esoteric and subtle issue, and in fact one that i am pretty obsessed with, that being one that addresses the whole issue of touch in general - particularly when applied to the kinds of harmonic choices that one makes when playing chords. i have to admit that i am largely influenced by my five favorite piano players in this regard; glenn gould, bill evans, keith jarrett, paul bley and herbie hancock. there is a certain way that all five of them have of blending notes together to create a sonic event that is singular in effect, even while achieving some kind of specific melodic or harmonic function. of course, it is much easier to do on the piano than it is on guitar :) - even for me - i can sit at the piano and balance chords with a kind of precision that i can't quite do on the guitar - it is a challenge to get the quality that i am looking for to happen on this instrument, particularly the electric guitar. but i think that all of the players you named have made serious arguments in favor of the idea that it CAN be done on the guitar. specifically, regarding voicings - i would say that for me, i try to always keep at least the illusion of the kind of traditional voice leading that i would easily be able to do on a keyboard instrument in effect on the guitar, even if i have to "cheat" in order to accomodate the natural fingering limitations inherent in the axe. as far as note choices go, i would say that the particular qualities of which voicings i use are detirmined mostly by the context - for instance, if i am playing in a trio, i could use fuller voicings than i might if i were blending in with a piano player in a larger setting. on the other hand, in a duo setting like with charlie h. -- i might use just a single note or two to define an entire chord and then follow that later with more full kinds of voicings to create the sense of orchestration. in fact, that word - orchestration - may be the key word here - i always try to imagine each string as being almost a separate entity in this little 6 piece ensemble that is sitting there, each one with its own strenghths and sound. as far as there being such a thing as being too harmonically complex too often - i would say, generally speaking, no. however, i do think that at a certain point "complexity" becomes a relative thing. in other words, i can think of instances where i have heard music that hangs in a certain vocabulary to a point where it no longer seems complex - it just seems the same as what i have just been hearing, and it gets boring -- there is not enough contrast. on the other hand, this could be the desired effect, and could even be a viable one if executed well. again, the issue of balance becomes a dominant term in the success of most of the music that really holds my interest.thanks for writing in from pat

Iowa State history will be written Friday morning, when Steven Leath is installed as the university's 15th president. The 90-minute ceremony in Stephens Auditorium will include a colorful procession, Leath's vision for Iowa State and beautiful music that strikes a few Cyclone-pleasing chords.

Eight months after the caucuses, candidates still are lavishing attention on Iowa. In this rerun of an article that ran in Inside Iowa State a number of months ago, university counsel Paul Tanaka answers questions on campus political activities.

There are various theories about why the concept of the real was so important to the period. Some critics have identified it as a primarily twentieth-century phenomenon; Miles Orvell argues that while "the tension between imitation and authenticity is a primary category in American civilization, pervading layers of our culture that are usually thought to be separate...a major shift occurred...from the late nineteenth century to the twentieth century, a shift from a culture in which the arts of imitation and illusion were valorized to a culture in which the notion of authenticity became of primary value" (xv).

In this same spirit Michael Kammen proposes that in the 1930s "truth" was a stable concept, in contrast to destabilizing modernist interests in the irrational, the subconscious, and the impulsive (Mystic Chords of Memory299).

William Stott has suggested that during a time of collective crisis there is a deep psychology of mistrust that leads to speculation about what is authentic. Thus the loss of control that the Depression signified for most Americans, he argues, made them anxious about what information was reliable (67-73).

With the staircase built and the electronics working properly, I merged the two together. I housed the electronics within the four staircase sections. Each Raspberry Pi was responsible for 2-3 steps, translating to 3-7 total notes/chords per Pi. I drilled holes into the thin planks between the steps so that the ultrasonic sensors could rest snugly into them. Placed above each step, the sensors detect the hand/foot that touches the step below and trigger the note/chord to play. The steps themselves were removable so that the electronics inside could be easily reached and adjusted. I also ran power through the whole structure by snaking extension chords into the scaffolding. The staircase was made stable by bolting the sections together. I had a time-consuming troubleshooting process with the sensors detecting phantom objects due to interference from the physical structure itself. Also, I successfully created the infinite staircase illusion by suspending a camcorder at the exact vantage point and connecting it to a projector.

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