Music Monday :“There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”(Pythagoras)

With regard to humming...from time to time I've come across articles about "The Hum", a mysterious sound heard by many people in different parts of the world, intermittently over many years. One example:

From Humdingers a 2004 article in The Guardian, by Mark Pilkington

It's described as a low, modulated drone that sounds like an idling diesel engine or a distant aircraft. It starts and stops abruptly and is sometimes accompanied by headaches, nausea or other physical discomfort.

It has been heard in Bristol, Birmingham, Hertfordshire and Strathclyde; in Taos, New Mexico and Kokomo, Indiana; as well as in Canada, Germany, Sweden and Denmark. Typically, fewer than 5% of people can hear it; older women seem most likely to be affected. As well as innumerable sleepless nights, hums have been linked to at least three suicides in the UK.

The most frequently blamed sources are the extremely low frequency (ELF) signals used to communicate with submarines, typically at about 76Hz. There are ELF transmitters in Michigan and Wisconsin in the US, and on Russia's Kola Peninsula. The first hum reports, however, predate ELF technology: in the 1940s, residents in Belgravia, London, blamed a hum on a radio transmitter in the Russian embassy basement.

Other hums have been attributed to gas pipes, seismic activity, mating fish and underground military bases. Only one has been conclusively identified: in 2003, a low hum in Kokomo, Indiana was traced to industrial fans in a factory..............

As this post is headed "Music Monday" one might ask what does the mysterious and rather unmusical Hum have to do with music? Answer: not a lot, but I thought it interesting, and though unconnected to the rest of this post, the air of mystery continues....

In searching for information on The Hum I stumbled on something else, more or less musical:
The Devil's Chord or Devil's Interval. It's a musical phenomenon thought dangerous enough to have been supressed by the Church in the Middle Ages. It consists of a musical interval spanning three whole tones, like the diminished fifth or augmented fourth. This interval, the gap between two notes played in succession or simultaneously, was branded Diabolus in Musica or the Devil's Interval by medieval musicians.
From BBC website

On the surface there might appear to be no link between Black Sabbath, Wagner's Gotterdammerung, West Side Story and the theme tune to the Simpsons. But all of them rely heavily on tritones, a musical interval that spans three whole tones, like the diminished fifth or augmented fourth. This interval, the gap between two notes played in succession or simultaneously, was branded Diabolus in Musica or the Devil's Interval by medieval musicians. A rich mythology has grown up around it. Many believe that the Church wanted to eradicate the sounds from its music because it invoked sexual feelings, or that it was genuinely the work of the Devil.

Rock producer Bob Ezrin: "It apparently was the sound used to call up the beast. There is something very sexual about the tritone. In the Middle Ages when people were ignorant and scared, when they heard something like that and felt that reaction in their body they thought 'uh oh, here come the Devil'."

It all sounds a little like the plot of a far-fetched Da Vinci Code sequel. But Professor John Deathridge, King Edward professor of music at King's College London, says the tritone had been consistently linked to evil. "In medieval theology you have to have some way of presenting the devil. Or if someone in the Roman Catholic Church wanted to portray the crucifixion, it is sometimes used there."

A 10 minute video explanation is embedded below. Being a music theory numbskull I found this confusing at times. Interest was sparked mainly because the guys explain that tones opposite one another when the 12 tones are placed in a circle are the most dissonant - as in astrological oppositions? Almost, but in astrology oppositions can be balancing too. The explanation, generally, kept reminding me of astrological aspects.....music of the spheres and all that?



For more interesting detail on this astrological link see Don Robertson's website DoveSong.com, and in particular his piece: "The Duochord", where diagrams help explain the astrological link I've clumsily described. I'm wary of copyright, so will not risk borrowing the images.
Mr Robertson writes:

One day I was reading a book by Corinne Heline about music and its spiritual effects when I noticed that there was a diagram in the book that explained how the twelve notes of the musical chromatic scale corresponded with the twelve signs of the astrological zodiac. At that time I was interested in astrology and I thought this was an interesting concept. The way she explained it, the notes were placed counter-clockwise on the circle of the zodiac as follows: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C#, D#, F#, G#, A#. I don’t know where she learned this, but it was very interesting. It was the 7-note major scale (the white keys of the keyboard), followed by the 5-note pentatonic scale (the black keys of the keyboard): the two most powerful scales in the music.

He goes on to describe how he drew trines and squares and discovered that their harmonious or dissonant relationship in music and in astrology are very similar.


More examples of how the Devil's Chord sounds, on guitar:




“Maria”, the song in West Side Story contains the tritone interval in the syllables “Ma-ri” at the beginning of the song.