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  • Interview by Bob Marshall, October 22, 1988

    Frank Zappa Interview by Bob Marshall, October 22, 1988 From part 8: "Bob Marshall: Where I get the idea part is, I remember you did an interview in the L.A. Free Press in the summer of '69 and you mentioned Pauline Oliveri's work with sound, above the audible and below,... more

    Reviewed by Jerome Dec 29 2008, 06:57am ( 1 review ) • uva.nl

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  • Rated by Jerome on Dec 29 2008, 6:57am

    Frank Zappa Interview by Bob Marshall, October 22, 1988 From part 8: "Bob Marshall: Where I get the idea part is, I remember you did an interview in the L.A. Free Press in the summer of '69 and you mentioned Pauline Oliveri's work with sound, above the audible and below, creating a mass, and you liked that idea. Frank Zappa: Not that it created a mass. It created something audible. It produced a sum indifference tone which happened to be located within the audible frequency range. By combining something so high you couldn't hear it and something so low you couldn't hear it, it yielded something in the middle that you could hear. Whether or not you like what you hear in the middle is another question. The concept is brilliant. Bob Marshall: Yeah, because it showed you how physical reality is, or the way it is, right? Frank Zappa: It's one aspect of it. Bob Marshall: Are there other aspects you could talk about? Frank Zappa: If you buy the idea that the vibrational rates translate into matter, and then if you understand the concept of vibrational rates above perception and below perception combining to create a reality, that opens up the door to some pretty science-fiction matter possibilities. If you can create an audible reality by a sine wave above the range of what your ear can hear and another one from below, and you put them together and suddenly it creates something that your ear can detect, is it not possible that solid matter of an unknown origin could manifest periodically because of frequencies of some unknown nature above and below which, for short durations, manifest solid objects? It could explain a lot of strange things that people see. Bob Marshall: UFO's come to mind immediately. Frank Zappa: Yeah. [...] Bob Marshall: I think it was during that interview where you were talking about the speech-song, "sprechstimme", you were saying you had solved some musical problems. Who had those musical questions? Did Varese have them? Frank Zappa: No, questions that I have to answer for myself. These are questions about how you get the point across. And oftentimes I've just appropriated the speech-song. When a person sings a word, the idea that is transmitted transcends the word because there's so much other data connected with the word at pitch. Understand? Bob Marshall: Are you talking about sound? Frank Zappa: No, the person hearing, receiving the data, is not only receiving the word. Bob Marshall: The "meaning"? Frank Zappa: That's right, the text of the word. He is also receiving the pitch data at which it is sung. In other words, that same word sung at a high pitch means something different than the word sung at a low pitch. He is receiving the data of the harmonic climate in which the word exists. He's also receiving the data of the relationship of the pitch of the word to the climate itself. In other words, if you have an A minor chord and the word is sung on a B, then that word is going to stick out because it's not part of the chord. There are three notes in an A minor chord - A, C, E. If you sing that word on any of the notes which are part of the chord, it recedes into the chord. It's part of the background. If the word is sung on a note which is not part of the chord, it steps out from the chord and draws attention to itself and becomes a matter of emphasis. These are the types of extra data that exist when you sing a word. An extra spin gets put on the word if you half say it, half sing it. It makes it even more 3D. It leaps out from the harmonic support and draws even more attention to itself if you've been singing along and you hear this melody and you get to this certain part and you half sing it, half say it. And it sticks out even further if you absolutely say it because it's incongruous in the setting."