Creating a theremin sample set

I have symphonies of music in my head most of the day ~ like this morning I woke up at 4am with a passage in my head that sounded so beautiful... I got up to try to sing it to my memo program in my ipad and when I as ready to press record, I have forgotten most of it... Ugh.

So let's take this one step further. While you don't "touch" them, yes of course the vocal cords are connected to your body. And I might add, I can think of no instrument that is more directly connected to the brain, no instrument where the feedback system is as fast and well integrated into your brain/ear processing pathway. 

So then let's ask, what instrument is next on the top say five brain-to-instrument feeback list? Well, what would that be? Some instuments have very fast attacks like the piano. But your brain has to also deal with controlling ten fingers in a myriad of patterns, moving hands and arms in different directions, applying different forces with the fingers, controlling foot pedals. Moving your torso as well. No the piano takes a really heavy toll on brain processing power. Can't be on the top five list - but one of the most played instruments.

String instruments? Same problem. Fingers, multiple strings, bowing, vibrato. Forget it. 

Wind/Brass instruments? Gotta worry about embrochure, blowing, vibrato, tounging (through brass instruments only need one hand and in the trombone's case, no fingering, just sliding). Trombone has to be on the list, though the trombone is one of the slower responding instruments in terms of getting sound out of the thing.

Drums? Hey that's pretty much instantaneous feedback, though you have to use two hands and sometimes feet. Have to apply constantly changing forces. The rhythmic complexities can be much more than any other instrument and you sometimes have to play really, really fast (some people's brains just don't have the horsepower to keep up - go watch videos of Buddy Rich!). But the feedback path of a drum is pretty tight. Drums I think have to be on the top five list.

Now we come to our lovely theremin. Assuming nearly instantaneous response, you move you hand - you get a sound. Yes a bit of fingering or hand motion and vibrato but you are never playing really fast. Little body motion. The brain has a lot of free cycles - and from my experience they are mostly used to stay on pitch assuming you are playing the instrument in the classical sense. Left hand brings in some complication (but some theremins don't have one). So consider a pitch only theremin.

Here's my thought provoking statement of the day. Likely going to get myself in trouble again. While the theremin is the least physically connected instrument to play, next to the voice it may well be the most well connected to the brain in terms of feedback path and control (via your ears like any other instrument - though some instruments are played so fast, the brain is really telling the ears "don't worry, it's going to be ok").

So from this perspective, the theremin should be one of the easier instruments to play. Nuts!

Rich

"While the theremin is the least physically connected instrument to play, next to the voice it may well be the most well connected to the brain in terms of feedback path and control..."  - rkram53

But, even as a just a lay singer, I can sense that my vocal chords are within ~1/2 note or so before I push air through them and make them vibrate.  Whereas with the Theremin I'm lucky to be within an octave before hearing the pitch.

Dewster said: But, even as a just a lay singer, I can sense that my vocal chords are within ~1/2 note or so before I push air through them and make them vibrate.  Whereas with the Theremin I'm lucky to be within an octave before hearing the pitch.

Well, that of course is the "complexity factor" of the theremin. Those vocal chords are directly connected to your brain so I'd hope you'd be close in a split second. On other instruments, you are trusting fingering to play what you expect so you pretty much eliminate that from the brain's task list in favor of fingering technique, multiplexing finger motion and dynamics and other things (less so for strings, trombone, where exact placement is crucial - like the theremin).

Finding pitch is near I'd say 95% of the reason people say the theremin is so hard. Playing vibrato and controlling volume is no more difficult on the theremin than a slew of other instruments. In fact, I'd say getting a good vibrato on a string instrument is much harder. Theremin is all about grabbing pitch. But doing all the things you need to to play expressively on the theremin once you have pitch? Again, I can't say that is harder than what you have to do on many other instruments.

This is why I think people with perfect pitch have a decided advantage to zero in on notes, but I don't see perfect pitch really being anything that will make you play the theremin better than someone without it. In fact, someone without it may well play a lot more musically as they are not concerned about being perfect on pitch whereas someone with perfect pitch may be taking up too much brain power trying to stay perfectly on pitch. I'll take flac for this one too.

And as for trying to find initial pitch. If your theremin is rather linear and you have tuned it, there should be no reason you are off by an octave just using "relative linear thinking" for a majority of the range you play in. I think that issue is just related to practice. 

Rich

Many thanks for your lovely and useful analogy, Peter!

"Think of the raw sound of a theremin the way you might think of the color of the paint on the walls of a room. Now think of the thereminist as a qualified lighting technician.

A lighting technician cannot change the color of the walls but he can give the impression, within certain limitations, that the color is different from what it really is. He does this with the play of light and shadow, which could be compared to the way a skilled thereminist "sculpts" the sound of his or her instrument. 

He can also change the apparent color of the room by adding a certain color of light of his own, just the way a thereminist can "flavor" a certain musical passage by playing in a joyful or melancholy style. "

and in the context of the above, it is possibly more important to get the "color of the paint on the walls of a room" "right" for someone who isnt a "qualified lighting technician".

This gives me the answers I need to "tune" my efforts.. 1.) Forget searching for some "mystical" or "authentic" color, - this cannot be 'captured' - it can only be created by someone good with lights "in the moment".  2.) Provide a good palette of color for the wall, so that the "qualified lighting technician" can use these, but more importantly, so that those who dont have access to a lighting rig can at least change the color of the wall.

Many thanks - you have actually confirmed my feelings on this subject, and I have hope that my present direction is a good one!

Fred.

"To have music in your soul means that music is with you every waking second of every day, and that is not necessarily an enviable thing."

I experienced a "not necessarily an enviable thing" event some months ago - I had listened to (and been deeply affected emotionally by)  Liszt piano sonata in B Minor.. Had heard it before, but it had never got to me the way it did that day - I was completely overwhelmed and actually debilitated by it.

I played it many times, and had it playing in my head for the whole day.. That night I woke with a start - The sonata was playing full volume- not "head music" this was in my ears, LOUD! - I jumped out of bed thinking (in a highly confused state of mind) that somehow  my Hi-Fi had turned itself on and started playing the music downstairs.. It was 2am and I panicked about the trouble I would get into from the neighbors / landlord.. But as I got up, the music dropped to "in head" level.

The whole night I was "playing" with this newly discovered state - I found that I could drift myself in and out of "head" to "ear" music, and could actually add my own improvisations and variations even in the "ear" state.. By the morning I was even more wrecked... The next couple of days some lucid "events" occurred (which I posted here on TW at the time, but deleted quickly-they were loony enough that I worried about possible consequences of disclosing them), and the music was often playing loud while I was trying to do other things..

The interesting (and a bit frightening) thing is that when the mental music was playing in "ear mode" I was as deaf as a coot - Couldn't hear the phone  or postman knocking at the door.

It passed after a few days (and some really weird other stuff) and until this moment I haven't dared to play Liszt - even in my head.. But I have just put my headphones on and started listening to the same sonata.. And wondering how I have resisted it for these months.. Its brought tears into my eyes already.

Bye..

Fred.

There is a STAR TREK, THE NEXT GENERATION episode called "The Survivors" in which (and here I will quote Wikipedia):

"Aboard the Enterprise, Counselor Troi, hears the music from the music box in her mind on a never-ending loop, which begins to slowly drive her insane. Eventually she is reduced to hysterics, resulting in being medically forced into a coma."

I recall seeing this episode. Counselor Troi, the ships Betazoid resident empath/telepath, was the victim of an alien attempt to block her psychic abilities. The aliens in question just kept playing LOUD music in her mind but as Troi herself told the ship's doctor, "It's not in my mind. IT'S REAL!" The music continued whether Troi was awake, asleep, or even in a coma. 

Fred,

When you were "Lisztening" to all that music, was it loud with headphones? I've had some strange effects with music recall when using headphones.

But the worst effect was the day I was writing a lot of music at night with headphones and when I took them off the music was still there. This soon turned into a high pitched tone of I'd say 8-10KHz. To this day that tone has never gone away. I gave myself a nasty case of tinitus from those lousy headphones. Down to about 6KHz max tone I can hear now.

Let this be a lesson to all the kids today that have earbuds constantly in their ears. Many will have severe hearing loss in 20 years. This is also a reason I can't use pitch preview. Can't have that extra buzzing in my ear (and when I do use it that pitch is decidedly not the exact same thing as the actual pitch I'm trying to play). That could be a psycoacoustic issue or maybe just something you have to deal with with a pitch preview earbud. Either way, I have to learn to play this thing without it.

Rich

Hi Rich,

Yes - I played the music loud on a really good pair of cans.

There is a family history of tinnitus - but no history of "recall" - Tinnitus my mum suffers from takes the form of explosions and noises.. another family member suffers the same, severely, accompanied by nausea and other real nasty effects, both are on medication.. Neither listened to loud music or had ear infections or  auditory trauma, and there is a history in my mums family.

I did wonder whether there was a tinnitus connection, particularly because I was deaf when the music was playing.. But this doesn't fit with notions of neurology AFAICS.. It would probably be somatic tinnitus (which is the most likely in my case, as its often appears in connection with stress and depression) which results (they think) from "crosstalk" in the brain... But for this to be the explanation, it would mean that my normal "head music" would actually need to exist in some 'composite' form that was carried, as a composite, through nerves in close proximity to my auditory nerves, or be of some form that they could over-ride input from this nerve.... As in, it would be nothing to do with my ears..

As I have no ringing or hearing anomalies,even after this "might be a form of tinnitus" event, it must be neurological..

I had done a posting which I decided not to post.. But I will now - Your "the worst effect was the day I was writing a lot of music at night with headphones and when I took them off the music was still there. This soon turned into a high pitched tone of I'd say 8-10KHz." is the closest account to my experiencing that I have found.. That you actually heard music "in your ears" which wasn't actually there..

Extremely OT and quite personal .. Sort of think perhaps I shouldn't click "Post"

----------------------- (In Reply to Coalports post ) -----------

Im ok;-)

Played it, and having a second pass.. I now think I understand... That particular piece just tuned absolutely perfectly into my turbulent emotional state at the time.. It actually gave me a coping mechanism - and some part of me or something / someone knew this... I needed to be saturated in it to learn its "lessons".

Now, listening to it, I am still moved - but moved in a way somewhat like one is moved by a memory, rather than how one is moved by the things which created the memory.

I was (and am) undergoing CBT/NLP at the time, to deal with the damage done over years of (non-physical) abuse from a psychopath.. CBT/NLP isn't as effective with people like me as with those who dont analyze and rationalize everything the way I do... False hope and esteem-boosting "scripts" dont have any noticeable effect.. and as for the "relaxation" CD's, LOL- My head music simply mutes them! ;-)

Those few days of being "possessed" by Liszt actually moved me forward hugely - And some of the incomprehensible (impossible) other events which happened at that time gave me grounds to "believe" some of the "scripts" which seemed like utter BS before..

So I am being "reprogrammed" - Thats ok... Particularly if I really can do what I did over those few days - I can hardly play a note of that sonata - but (if it really happened and wasn't a daytime hallucination / dream) I was bashing chords and running parts of riffs and hitting the right notes every time - oh, physically absolutely unable to play even 1/5 of the piece, but I felt completely under the control of "someone else" who was bashing out whatever my body was capable of.. My playing skills would normally allow me to hit perhaps one note in every 10, and never the right chord unless I had rehearsed it.

Oh- No drugs were involved, no substances of any kind other than my usual heart and diabetes meds I have taken for years.

And I seem to have managed to create something like the "plank of wood you can occasionally stand on when the psycho stabs you with a high voltage probe" - as my doctor put it.

And whoever / whatever was responsible for this, I owe them my deepest gratitude and possibly my life.

Fred.

rkram53 wrote:  "While the theremin is the least physically connected instrument to play, next to the voice it may well be the most well connected to the brain in terms of feedback path and control (via your ears.......").

The crucial difference here is that although there is an auditory connection to the theremin, that is the only connection there is. There is no visual connection like the one we find with keyboards, there is no tactile connection like the kind of thing violinists have, there is only hearing.

And what is the problem with THAT, you ask.

You only know when you've screwed up AFTER you've screwed up.

Frankly I think visual connection is irrelevant (look at how many great blind musicians are there). Most great musicians are not looking at their instruments and most beginners are fixed on the score for their lives. What good violinist is looking at their fingers?

I think if you play any instrument really fast you will have times you screw up before you know it. But with a theremin you can be playing really slow and have it happen. That to me is the big difference there.

Rich