Music history
Culture
28 rabbit holes · 9 people exploring
Common starting questions
- where does the acid squelch come from?
- Where did rickrolling start?
- What's on the Voyager Golden Record?
- Is 432 Hz actually more natural than 440?
- Is the CD length really based on Beethoven's 9th?
Rabbit holes
- Bing Crosby is (partly) why we have tape recording
Crosby wanted to prerecord his radio show instead of doing it live. An American engineer brought captured German Magnetophons and reels of tape home after the war, Crosby heard them, and put $50,000 into Ampex to build American copies. In 1949 he gave Les Paul one of the first Ampex machines, and Les Paul started stacking guitar parts on top of each other.
Rosa Delacroix · 7 sources
- acid house came from a bass machine nobody wanted
Roland sold the TB-303 as a 'computerised bass machine' to replace a bass player. It sounded nothing like a bass guitar and was discontinued in 1984. Then Chicago producers started turning the filter and resonance knobs while it played.
Rosa Delacroix · 6 sources
- rickrolling started as a fake GTA IV trailer link
May 2007, someone on 4chan posted the Astley video in place of a Grand Theft Auto IV trailer. By 2008 YouTube was rickrolling everyone for April Fools, and Astley himself rickrolled the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- the voyager golden record has playback instructions written in hydrogen
Started wondering what aliens would even do with a record player. The cover explains how to play it using hydrogen's hyperfine transition as the clock. Unhinged in the best way.
Dmitri Kuznetsov · 6 sources
- Diana Deutsch's auditory illusions
Loop a spoken phrase enough times and it starts to sound sung, and it never sounds like plain speech again. The tritone paradox is weirder: a pair of tones goes up for some people and down for others, apparently linked to the speech of the region they grew up in.
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- the 432 Hz thing, and why A is 440 anyway
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- is a CD 74 minutes long because of Beethoven's 9th?
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- the 808 was a flop
Fewer than 12,000 were sold. Drummers thought it sounded fake, which, fair. Then Roland discontinued it in 1983 and used ones went for under $100, which is exactly how it ended up in the hands of hip hop and electro producers with no money.
Rosa Delacroix · 7 sources
- AutoTune was invented by someone who used to look for oil
Andy Hildebrand spent years in the oil industry processing seismic data before he wrote AutoTune. He's said the idea came from a colleague's wife joking that she'd like a box that made her sing in tune.
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- Tomorrow Never Knows is a pile of tape loops and a spinning organ speaker
Lennon wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop, so they wired it through a Leslie speaker. Each Beatle made tape loops at home, about 30 of them, and George Martin picked 16.
Omar Haddad · 7 sources
- the Doctor Who theme was made with oscillators, tape and scissors
Ron Grainer wrote it. Delia Derbyshire built every single note by hand from recordings of test-tone oscillators, white noise and one plucked string, sped up, slowed down, cut and spliced on tape. One of the first TV themes made entirely with electronics.
Rosa Delacroix · 6 sources
- the flute intro on Strawberry Fields Forever is a keyboard full of tape
Ama Mensah · 5 sources
- why records spin at 33⅓
Asked this out loud at a record store and nobody knew, so.
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- the theremin guy also built one of the best spy bugs ever
Started with Clara Rockmore videos, ended up in Cold War espionage. Theremin went back to the USSR, got sent to a prison lab, and designed a passive listening device that hung in the US ambassador's study in Moscow for seven years before anyone found it.
Marcus Thompson · 7 sources
- Switched-On Bach sold a million copies of Bach on a Moog
1968. A modular Moog could only play one note at a time, so every part was built up line by line on tape. It won three Grammys and became only the second classical album ever certified platinum.
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- seven seconds of drums from a 1969 B-side
Rosa Delacroix · 7 sources
- the session musicians who played on everything
Motown had the Funk Brothers in Detroit, LA had the Wrecking Crew. Mostly uncredited for years. The documentary makes the case that the Funk Brothers played on more number-one hits than Elvis, the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones combined.
Rosa Delacroix · 7 sources
- the guy behind the Looney Tunes factory music also built early synths
The frantic assembly-line music in old Warner cartoons is his ('Powerhouse'). He didn't write it for cartoons: Warner bought his publishing in 1943 and Carl Stalling quoted him in over 120 shorts. Meanwhile Scott was building sequencers and electronic instruments in his own lab.
Ama Mensah · 5 sources
- the oldest recording of a human voice was never meant to be heard
Scott's phonautograph traced sound waves as squiggles on soot-blackened paper so scientists could look at them. Playing them back wasn't the point. In 2008 researchers scanned the tracings and turned them into sound, a recording that predates Edison's phonograph by 17 years.
Rosa Delacroix · 6 sources
- can top violinists tell a Stradivarius from a new violin? mostly no
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- every 80s power ballad has the same electric piano
It's the DX7's 'E PIANO 1' preset, which was apparently on 40% of US number-one singles in 1986. The DX7 was so hard to program from its tiny screen and menus that most people never made their own sounds, they just used the presets.
Tomás Rinaldi · 6 sources
- the orchestra hit is one chord of Stravinsky
That 'BWAH' stab on every early-80s electro and pop record is a low-res 8-bit sample from a recording of the Firebird Suite, pitched down and shipped with the Fairlight. Once you know, you can't unhear it.
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- Brian Eno made Music for Airports after a few annoying hours at Cologne airport
Eno spent hours waiting for a flight at Cologne Bonn Airport, got annoyed at how uninspired the place felt, and wanted music for spaces like that, "as ignorable as it is interesting" in his words. Some of the tracks are tape loops of different lengths drifting in and out of phase, so they keep combining in new ways.
Pete Lindgren · 6 sources
- bone music: Soviet bootlegs pressed on X-rays
Banned jazz and rock'n'roll cut into old hospital X-ray film. You can see someone's ribcage while you listen to Elvis. Barely playable and incredible.
Rosa Delacroix · 4 sources
- why a string quartet costs more every year
Started out annoyed about haircut prices and ended up here. The idea is from a 1966 book about the economics of the performing arts and it still explains a lot.
Ama Mensah · 5 sources
- how Spotify actually pays artists (it isn't per stream)
Daniela Ruiz · 6 sources
- the loudness war, and why streaming kind of ended it
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- Myspace lost everything uploaded before 2016
In 2019 Myspace admitted a server migration had wiped out more than a decade of uploads, music included. For a lot of small bands that was the only place their early demos ever lived.
Lou Tremblay · 5 sources