Back To Ampersand Index PAGE 15 - The Park  (Track 9) - This was written after I finished watching the French film, Irreversible (which I do not recommend for any younger readers). Behind the acoustic guitar composition, I decided to construct an arrangement made entirely with reversed recordings of the acoustic guitar itself, and then mess it up real bad. I have asthma, and one night, in 5 degree Fahrenheit weather with a foot of snow on the ground, I tried racing my brother from my house to the park where the album cover photo was taken, and I soon found myself in a familiar suffocating state. I had an MP3 recorder with me, so I recorded the wheezing sounds my lungs were making. Later, I slowed them down, and they enter the track as the various howling sounds at 0:07. The track title is actually not a reference to that park, but rather a not well known reference to an area of paranormal psychology. This composition is structured in a symetrical A B C B A form, giving it interesting properties that relate to its source of inspiration. In the C section of the middle, a "secret Minimoog melody" enters, similar to the one from &hearts that was used in the intro to this tune: thepark_melody1.mp3 For the epilogue, I chose to do something to utilize the full extent of the "organized sound" definition of music. I decided to put the highest individual sine wave frequency I could hear at a quiet volume, 17 kHz, in the track at 2:26, and then 16 kHz (assuming my hearing will get worse as I get older) at 2:28. 17 kHz again at 2:29, 16 kHz at 2:32, and at 2:33, a 17 kHz tone affected by a 12 hz (cycles per second) modulation between 18 kHz and 16 kHz. From 2:34 to 2:36, the pitch does a nose dive down to 440 Hz. At 2:41, a similar thing happens with a second pitch, but it drops down to 350 Hz. The combined tones of 440 Hz and 350 Hz create the DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency) United States standard dialtone. From 2:51 to 2:56, the 350 Hz tone raises to 480 Hz, creating the DTMF US Ringback Tone. NEXT PAGE Back To Index