MODES OF THOUGHT IN ANTERRAN LITERATURE
c667, 2nd year classics
file: 108
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RAQUEL
Woah. You okay down there? Need a hand?
DEV
(sounds like he’s under a desk)
Yeah, actually. Can you hand me that power strip?
RAQUEL
Here.
DEV
Thanks.
RAQUEL
She said she’d be back next week.
DEV
She didn’t mention anything to me.
RAQUEL
She just said it was family stuff.
PROFESSOR
Okay, well did she tell you how to run the laptop? Great.
RAQUEL
Do I need to do anything different becuase of the music?
DEV
It won’t be loud.
PROFESSOR
You mean you’re not going to do your DJ set?
DEV
Uh, no.
RAQUEL
Ok, I just - I’ve never recorded anything before so... This is a little above my paygrade.
Students shuffle in.
PROFESSOR
Okay everybody, let's all get settled down. Since this is the last meeting of our summer trimester, I just wanted to remind you that you need to get those thesis papers in. Yes. I'm looking at you, Chris. Um, also, I don't know if any of you saw it, but there's been a really fascinating discovery in Foshan, China.
Did anyone see that? They found a temple. And possibly more at the bottom of Foshan Lake, which is a huge, huge, very deep lake. Um, I'll put a link on the website, but you should take a look at it. It's really amazing stuff.
Okay. Uh, I'm very excited to introduce you to one of our colleagues from the music department, professor Dev Engström. Uh, one of Dev's students came across the picture of the carvings in the Idiot King's Palace and his interest was piqued. Professor Engström, do you want to explain it from there?
A medium sized college classroom, with about 12 students in the class. The Professor introduces Dev Engstrom, visiting from the music department. Dev has set up a playback system as part of their presentation.
DEV
Yes, thanks. I'm, uh, a little out of my usual fishbowl here. I'll have to explain some basic information about rhythm and melodic structures in order to show you all how we got here, but if you can follow, I think you'll find it extremely interesting, or at least I hope you will, because I certainly do. The short version is this.
DEV
In the characters carved on the western wall of this chamber, there are indications that certain glyphs have an emphasis. It wasn't discernible to the naked eye, but when the archaeology department rendered a 3D image of the wall. became more obvious that certain characters are carved about five millimeters deeper than the others. So if we simplify the image, and look at the grid of characters in the carving, you see this. And if we look at that same image with only the emphasized characters, and those blank lines represent the characters that weren't carved as deep, right? So we have emphasized spots on the grid, and non emphasized spots.
Not exactly fascinating, yet. But here's where it gets a bit more technical. Um, has anyone heard of Euclidean rhythms? No? I didn't think so, but that's fine, that's normal. Okay, so, this was discovered not that long ago by Godfrey Toussaint. In 2004, he published a paper, and what he proposed is that by following a simple algorithm we can recreate almost every single basic rhythmic pattern that humans have been using across cultures and across history. A strange exception is in Indian classical music, but all the other traditional musical rhythms of the world, they all follow this basic structure. So, let's look at the basic computation of a Euclidean rhythm.
Well, this is easier to hear than describe, but let's outline the parameters. The three elements to the Euclidean pattern are steps, fill, and rotation. And you can think of steps as empty slots. In most contemporary Western music we're working in music with four steps. 1, 2, 3, 8, right? So for now, let's use that.
We'll double it, so it's two bars or eight steps. Now the fill parameter, that's how many of these empty steps we're going to put a beat on. Let's use four. And the key here is that these filled in beats need to be as equidistant from each other as possible. So if we have eight empty beats and put accents on four of them, we get…
He clicks a button.
Clapping on the 1 and 3:
DEV
Now, rotation. Let's use the same pattern, 8 beats, 4 accents, but we'll rotate the accents to start on the second beat, not the first:
Clapping on the 2 and 4:
DEV
So that's what they call the backbeat in most of the music we listen to now. Without that, no Beatles, no Elvis, no Beyonce. Very quickly, we'll take this a little bit further. Let's take a pattern with 8 steps and 5 filled in accents. Now, the accents can all be equidistant. Two of these beats will need to be next to each other.
Fiddling with his computer.
DEV
So, using these structures, we can create the bossa nova, the cumbia, nearly all the various traditional rhythms of African ethnomusicology. It seems this mathematical device has been intuitively present in our brains from the beginning of music. But where it got interesting with the carvings was when we looked at the emphasized characters.
Beat.
DEV
They seem to suggest a Euclidean pattern. At first this was a bit baffling, but after your professor explained to me the prevalence of the number 9 in Anteran society, a lightbulb clicked on. Nine steps. And rhythmically, what we got is this.
He clicks a key on his computer, and a rhythmic pattern based on 9/4 with 5 beats plays.
DEV
The next thing we looked for is some sort of melodic structure. And again, we were running into walls, no pun intended, until we thought of the number 9. Our typical way of dividing up frequencies is the 12 tone system. I'm assuming most of you have at least seen a piano before, right? So, between a root note and its octave, we have 12 tones.
And a scale is a selection of notes out of those 12. Usually 7 plus the octave. So again, we'll use the number 9 to create a scale of 9 tones. So that scale gets us this.
The euclidean pattern plays again, looping, with the rotation altered.
DEV
So, okay, that's how, that's how we got where we got. We have a rhythmic pattern, we have melodic structures, we apply them, and we get this. Of course, we don't know what instrument they used or what range, meaning what octave they played this in. Let's imagine that we have some flutes. You know, most ancient cultures used wind instruments. And also some drums. Skins tightened over some kind of resonator. Probably ceramic. Uh, the drums would sound like this.
The rhythmic pattern, now with low heavy drums.
And the melody would sound like this.
Adds in the melody in the higher octave.
All of this is cool. I mean, really cool as an exercise in trying to hear music that's almost 80,000 years old. But what we found that, well, it blew our minds, honestly, is this. If you lower the octave down to the barely audible range, you get a beating where the waves start to disrupt each other.
Again, this is super complicated mathematical stuff, but due to the phase relationships in the waves, they cancel each other out in parts and amplify each other in other parts. I know, I know, like I said, very mathematical. But, what you get is this.
A very low frequency shaking fills the room, sporadically moving through various moments of waves and troughs.
The sound is abrasive, and the students start to complain.
DEV
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's, uh, quite uncomfortable, isn't it? This is what we couldn't have expected. Those peaks and troughs, the pattern in the wave cancellations, they're spelling out pi. The ratio of a circumference of a circle to its radius, 3.141592 etcetera etcetera pi. Now, I'm a musician, not a historian, and definitely not a mathematician.
DEV
But I can tell you that a culture that knows pi is far more advanced than anything we would have predicted for an early civilization like this. Remember, Neanderthals were walking around at this time. So just knowing that a number called pi exists is one thing. Knowing what it is, that's a whole other level of knowledge.
And knowing how to reproduce it using sound waves? Honestly, if someone had brought that problem to us today, if someone said, hey, reproduce pi with sound, we would have been completely stumped. Just listen again.
He plays the dark beating drone one last time. The students complain.
DEV
So all of this is to say that there's a level of sophistication in Anterra that we did not know about and from here honestly Anything's possible. Anything.
PROFESSOR
Thank you, Dev. That is, uh, fascinating. Uh, really, I had no idea. Everyone, let's have a round of applause for Dev and his team for their work. This is world changing stuff, guys.
Weak applause.
INT. HAI RONG’S CAR
HAI RONG
Hey, babe. How are you? Did you deal with your family thing?
RAQUEL
Yeah, uh, yeah, I'm fine. Look, I didn't actually go home. I mean, I did, but, but, um. Not because of my family. Remember how I told you my parents are both academics?
HAI RONG
Yeah.
RAQUEL
Well, they work at the university where Dr. Yoli Chen worked before she went back to Beijing.
HAI RONG
The one who died last week.
RAQUEL
Yeah, and I broke into her office.
HAI RONG
No, Raquel.
RAQUEL
I thought if she was working on Anterra, then maybe she had some information. Maybe we could figure out if this whole thing is real or not.
HAI RONG
So, did you find anything?
RAQUEL
I did, and it's pretty fucking earth shattering.
HAI RONG
What?
RAQUEL
It's a video. Hai, I think it's from the submarine. The one that went down.
HAI RONG
No, no way. You have to send it to me. Right now.
RAQUEL
Okay, uh, okay, yeah, I'm driving right now.
HAI RONG
Just pull over and send it to me, okay?
RAQUEL
Okay, but, I'm like, I'm freakin shaking right now. I don't think this is for me. I'm not cut out to be a spy.
HAI RONG
Hey, hey, hey, hey. Babe. Babe. Deep breaths. It's okay. You're okay.
RAQUEL
Okay. Okay, wait. Okay, it just sent. Just watch it right now and give me a call back.
HAI RONG
Okay, I've got it. Listen, I'll call you back in two secs.
Hai Rong plays the video.
RAQUEL
Hi, this is Raquel. Leave a message.
HAI RONG
Why aren't you answering? Call me back.
Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature. This podcast is made possible by Harbridge University, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Peeler Prize in Archaeological Literature, and the Harbridge Family Trust. With an in-kind donation and production assistance from Wolf at the Door Studios. For more information and a reading list, please visit wlfdr.com.