[MUSIC] Whoo, in segment one we had a lot of technical information, almost like a science class. And that's about as close to a science class as we're going to come in our course. In fact, I need a break. So let's listen to some music, some music that exemplifies some of the points that we have just made. Let's turn to a piece by the Russian composer, the 19th century Russian composer, Modest Mussorgsky. It's called pictures at an exhibition. He originally wrote it for piano alone. But later another composer, the Frenchman Maurice Ravel came along and arranged it for full orchestra. Here Mussorgsky tries to give us, the listener, a feeling of walking through an art gallery and stopping at various pictures along the way. Well how do you do this? How do you use music to create a visual scene? And how might you use music to suggest motion, that an object might actually move before you, almost run over you? Mussorgsky does just that in a piece entitled Bydlo, or Polish Ox Cart. The point here is to show how volume, tone color, and the pitch of the instruments, whether they be high or low instruments, can make an object seem to move before our eyes. Remember that low sounds are created by long sound waves, and that these long sound waves are more indestructible. They last longer, they go farther. High sounds comes from short sound waves, and they are more easily absorbed by the molecules of the air. Let's start here at the keyboard. You'll hear a bass repeating, suggesting the rocking of the cart or the wagon, and then a solo instrument will come in. Okay, so here's the bass beginning. [MUSIC] And so on. Now let's turn to the audio on the clip here. [MUSIC] So what is the solo instrument? [MUSIC] Well as you can see on the screen, it's a tuba. But it's a small one that sounds high in the tuba register. You may not recognize it as being a tuba, but it is a tuba playing in a high register. [MUSIC] We're gonna hear now the strings come in. And if the tuba melody generally went up and then down, the string melody has mostly a descending trajectory. [MUSIC] Okay, so now let's continue with a string melody, and we'll hear a little bit of a crescendo. Okay, here are the strings coming in. [MUSIC] Okay, gradually getting louder. [MUSIC] Gradual crescendo, okay, now here we're going to pause it again. In a moment let's hear the full strings play. But now they are going to play the tuba melody. They are going to play the tuba melody, and they are going to play it altogether in what's called unison. They are playing all the pitches together. [MUSIC] And so on. And it's played at the loudest, the highest of volume intensity. So let's just recommence where we left off. [MUSIC] Snare drum has been added. [MUSIC] You can hear the bass drum underneath. [MUSIC] Begins to get quieter. [MUSIC] The cart has passed us. Tuba melody comes back in, but it's getting fainter. [MUSIC] Melody's disappeared. It's been fragmented. [MUSIC] There's a fragment. All we're left with, low thumping with the low instruments in the bass. [MUSIC] Very interesting. I hope you'll agree that Mussorgsky has created a motion picture here through music. But how did he do that? Well, let's see how some students in the classroom thought Mussorgsky did that, made the ox cart move through sound. Again, how did he do that? That young lady out here, please. >> Crescendo. >> Okay, crescendo, from beginning to end? >> Beginning to middle and end. >> Yeah so like a giant wedge, so that's why the cart seems to be in front of you. So we are talking about musical volume here. It started very quietly. It built up to this huge center, in which we had the bass drum pounding away there, and the snare drum coming in to give the effect that the entire earth is rattling at that particular point. And then, as it passed by you, the thunder passed by you and off you went into the distance, quietly into the distance. And we'll come back to that. But how did that happen? We'll listen to the end of that in just one moment. It's kind of a disintegration of the sound at the end. So that's one big way this happens. That's probably the big ticket item here. There's another way, a more subtle way. So there's a kind of wedge shape with regards to the instruments too. He starts with the lowest instruments, and then goes to the high instruments and then back to low instruments at the end. But what I was thinking about here is this idea that the lowest sounds create, or the longest sound waves, and they last the longest. The lowest sounds create the largest sound waves, and they last the longest. The lowest sounds last the longest. Why might this be the case? We're not having too much confidence in our slides this morning. I went ahead up and put this one up on the board here. Here is one pitch. Here is a pitch of a string an octave higher. So you can see it this way. As you probably know, if you take a long string and pluck it, it's gonna take that long string a long time to pass that sort of cycle, if you will, just one pass through that cycle. The string half a length will pass through that cycle two times. So that you can kind of graph these up here as one long low sound, or one faster vibrating sound an octave higher. So again, low sounds, or low frequencies travel farther. Now you've experienced this in your own life. You're standing on a street corner here in New Haven. In the distance, what do you hear? An automobile approaching with a souped up audio system in it. And what sound do you hear at the very first? [SOUND] That kind of thing. Then maybe [SOUND]. And then maybe some kind of melody will come in. And then it'll all come together right in front of you, and it'll kind of disappear in the distance. You're at a football game. You've probably experienced this too. The band is marching on the field. Suddenly they do the Doppler effect where they turn their backs to you in a way. And they're playing away from you, and you hear very little sound. What instrumental sound do you hear? Boom, boom, boom, the bass drum and the tuba. Or in the marching band it would be a sousaphone they would call it, the bass drum and tuba. So Mussorgsky knew this kind of thing because he was a professional musician and was playing off of it to create this rather unusual and remarkable musical soundscape here. Okay, let's see if you were paying attention, and that guy in the classroom didn't put you to sleep. Let's do a recap quiz.
