Re: Re: Re: double pedal C


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Posted by Christopher on October 06, 2000 at 14:36:24:

In Reply to: Re: Re: double pedal C posted by Steve Bloom on October 06, 2000 at 12:48:12:

You nailed it, except if you are playing staccato quarter notes at a perceivable pitch, then you are just playing staccato quarter notes. With the tounge between the lips to create a percussive sound with no defined pitch (more or less impossible, as any resonance usually sounds like a C on a CC tuba with no valves down), you're right. The creepy thing is just how slowly you can go and still fool the ear if you do it in context. I have noticed in improvising that if I am playing in a very low register and work my way down (by scale or gliss or whatever pattern I have set up) that you can at least imagine what note I might be playing down to 2 or 3 Hz.

When I was a kid, I had this little electronic toy called the "Sound Gizmo" (better named "the Parent Annoyer" in retrospect...) that, among other things, produced a square wave with a frequency you could control from 0Hz to about c above middle c or so. It's a nice tool to think about this stuff with -- at what point did that box stop sounding like a steady hum and start to sound like a series of clicks as I turned the frequency down? There's some acknowledged frequency that I can't remember as an average lower limit for human perception, but I think it's much more dependent on context than might occur to us at first thought.




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