THE FRACTAL FACTOR

Do you have a fractal friend? Are you fractal prone? If so, look out! You are likely to be bewitched in all sorts of confusing directions. You aren't merely exposed to fractals. You are dragged in by the hair and the toes if you get anywhere near.

Or you are taken in by persistent gentle persuasion, which is worse.

Yes, I have a good fractal friend, of my own generation more or less-I knew him a half century before fractals.

He is now retired and plasters everyone in sight in the most genial manner with his fractalia, given any tiny chance. But no, this is not going to be a dissertation on fractality. It's just that my friend's enthusiasm, embodied in an article he sent me on musical hearing, has deviously led me into the thoughts that will follow here, all in due time, further tying audio into its life partner, music.

Meet this Jim, as I'm calling him. A remarkable person. You should understand, first, that he is a total blank on the sacred subject of audio, though he is a scientist-engineer by training. Audio is for him like driving, another blank in his fertile mind, as it is for many old-timey engineers. His cars slide elegantly into the nearest ditch at the suggestion of a snowflake or a tornado.

When the wheels begin to spin, he steps on the gas and steers in the wrong direction. It's wonderful to observe the purely scientific mind in this phase of its superior comprehension! As for myself, being an artist type, I am all precision when it comes to cars, and even occasionally in audio. As Gilbert and Sullivan pointed out, things are seldom what they seem.

But it's not only audio. Worse, for me, is Jim, and music. By his own admission he is unmusical. I should call it another total blackout, at least from a musician's point of view. So there goes another of my own vital interests! How sad that two old friends should be so dismally separated.

And yet, Jim and I get along, each of us periodically tweaked by the other's lack of knowledge, each a bit the missionary. Jim respects my musical (and audio) knowledge; I respect his math and science and engineering, even unto fractals. (I think I get the basic idea of fractals, but let that pass.) Both of us have inquiring minds. That is, both tend to trespass into areas where we are all too unprofessional but yet have the need to know something. And so we try to connect. And try, try again.

This has been going on for ages. It's like Jack Sprat who could eat no fat and his wife who could eat no lean.

Together. Jim and I cover a remarkable range. We build bridges, just barely touching in the middle. A bit more cement, a cantilever or two, and we might conquer the world.

Fat chance. Imagine Jim as a great opera singer and me a distinguished fractal mathematician! It will not be.

But it's fun to think about. The fragile bridges between us are what matter.

Look further. There is even here an audio reference. Jim's life profession is one-track, minus the need for bridges.

Maybe culverts, no more. Soap.

On the other hand, audio is cram full of bridges and they are real and must be solid. We share the realm of sound with numerous other professions and areas, most noticeably music and speech but also, for instance, even religion. How can you design a church sound system if you don't understand what a church does? Jim comes from a marvelously unmusical family. I grew up with them, pa, ma, and six siblings. Indeed, I knew Jim several months before he was born, when he made his first public appearance in the shape of a certain bulge visible to all including small boys like me. For most of his long career he has been a professional chemist, a designer of soaps, detergents, and such for a large soap company.

The top-you've used his products (though he didn't write the advertising). The bridges to be built in soap, unlike audio, are taken care of by public relations, pollsters, and package designers, who make up the chemist's connections to the outside world. Pretty feeble bridging. If you are a good chemist who sticks to your rightful responsibility, lofty thoughts of art and philosophy and higher math must be put aside. Unless they are soapy.

When he was already near retirement age from soap, soap, and more soap (though he can still enthuse on that subject, quite properly), an extraordinary thing happened to Jim, or he happened to it. Have you wondered about all the chess wizards who were unlucky enough to be born before chess? Genius pianists before there were pianos? At this time in his life, the computer arrived. And Jim discovered that he was a computer man. Just a natural for it-at retirement age! In a flash he was leaning on his friends with his home PC and all their kids were doing drawings on the CRT under his enthusiastic direction. But this went a lot further. Simultaneously, his big soap company began to realize that it would need computer expertise if it were to continue selling soap.

And-this was an old family-type outfit-why risk one of those smart-aleck computer whiz kids when already inside the company was a veteran who knew all about soap from the faucet right down the drain and, surprisingly, knew computers too. Now this is all secondhand to me, but the way I get it, in very short order, Jim, about to retire, became chief computer man for one of the larger companies in our country.

Out of the soap dish into the frying pan? Nope. Currently, he's into fractals, strictly on the side. Jim is now retired and cram full of new ideas-not including soap.

So I sent a recent article on fractals in music to Jim, since I did not think he would see it, and he sent another right back on music, as per above. I couldn't make head or tail out of the fractals and all those fine equations.

Jim couldn't make head or tail out of the highly scientific music article (Science News) involving things like tritones and perceptions of high and low pitch (Jim probably has none). But still we exchanged.

The bridge building in this symbolic sense is mainly the setting up of foundations on either side, the building of outreach and good will. Does it matter whether the operation is strictly pro, or entirely extracurricular? The stronger the foundations, which means in our day, the more professional, the better the bridge. But the outreach, that impetus towards the other shore, is crucial. How numerous are the professionally trained musicians today who end up as professional recording directors! That bridging is now inside audio.

And conversely, how dismal is the unknowledge of the professional who has no interest in bridges! I have to look twice at a statement that might read “one of the great names in music;" it could be a Toscanini, or a Jagger.

No bridge. No other side at all, even inside music.

You have to understand that this is a normal background for such as Jim, where some things, like music, are not there, they do not exist. Jim and his siblings were such a talented bunch! The father and one of the sons both lawyers, the oldest son a country doctor of scurrilous wit, a blessing to his rural neighbors and a practical joker of terrifying ingenuity. We were all scared of him, never knowing What might come next. Music? Yes, it was often music-that is, rural ballads of a rakish sort. He had the words down cold but the tunes he ignored. What matters a tune? My memory says everyone loved his singing but me. I have a 1940 disc home recording, too, on which his oldest sister, goaded by me, tries her best to sing "Auld Lang Syne," to my energetic piano accompaniment. There was indeed a faint semblance of variable pitch, and all the right words. At the end-to this day-she says, "Edward, why did you throw me off the tune?" Well, in a way she was right, though I suggest she never got onto it in the first place. I also have vague memories of the other siblings, during our all too frequent song Pests at picnics and for "Happy Birthday," the same dismal off pitch slither. They all did it. So, indeed, did everybody else. " America the Beautiful!" Not in this department.

Indeed, for most of my early life I seem to have lived with genial souls of the tuneless sort. There was a man named Cake, an aircraft engineer from Virginia, who sang any number of courtly ballads of the South to his big guitar, both of them out of tune. Then there was "Prexy," president of a prestigious women's college (now co-ed), who had absolute memory. For words, that is. He could reel off a dozen verses of every rakish, bawdy, heroic, military, or ballroom song out of the entire 19th century and never miss a word. But his pitch-I will say no more.

Then, a whole generation later, there was Jeremy. He fell for the folk songs of the '60s and went a'collecting. He got every song around anywhere and some of them were real good. I liked "Freight Train," perhaps because a freight train is inherently tuneless. After 20 or so years he finally learned to tune his guitar right.

If Jeremy could pull out of the vast tuneless morass, could Jim? Jim is modest but careful, I do not ever remember hearing a musical note from his mouth, in or out of tune, even in "Happy Birthday," America's sacred rite of tunelessness. That shows the real inquiring mind! At least he knew he could not sing.

The excerpt from Science News that Jim sent to me is fascinating. Jim hit it on the nose, even if he didn't understand a word. It's about basic musical perceptions and, more significantly, differences in the way people hear or interpret given types of musical sound.

This Dr. Deutsch, Diana by name, is a rare bird, a strictly scientific researcher into strictly perceptional, i.e. mind bound, music. Inside the head. Re search into any aspect of our inside brains is hideously difficult, as every psychologist knows. You can't really measure, you can only sort out. And compare. Moreover, your results depend deeply on statistical methods if they are to be of any use. Head re search, as we might call it, must be far more sophisticated than the smoothly adequate methods of the pollster. Especially if you are dealing with music, which is not a matter of words. There is, too, the personal side-the researcher's own attributes. If Deutsch couldn't sing in tune, and didn't know it, could she judge other people's pitch-oriented thoughts? Well, I expect she has a serviceable ear and probably sings beautifully.

There are two extremes of approach in this head research, both useful.

Deutsch represents one extreme, offering meticulous, world-class, professional university-type lab work plus scholarly publication. The other is embodied in my own head-just stop, look, and listen, as they used to say at railroad crossings. The inquiring mind again. Always open to impressions, observing along the way. At both extremes, the doctor's and mine, the essence is to notice. Like tripping over bumps. You trip, and then you look down to see what tripped you. It might be important, or just a pebble.

Deutsch obviously notices, and thinks, and follows up, scholarly methods or no. So do I. Thus some of her discoveries in music are startling to me, quite astonishing. Could she be right? On the other hand, others are of a sort already entirely familiar to me. I just noticed them, long ago. Are there people who do not understand what is meant by "up" in musical pitch, who when you tell them to sing higher, think you mean LOUDER? Or who can't hear which way a tune goes, up or down? There are millions such! These people entirely miss the musical imagery, as well as notation we have so carefully invented to guide us in pitch. They are, of course, quite right. Up is but a figment of the mind, what with harmonics, which are always mixed in. And tone color.

Deutsch will run me off the bottom of this column, so more later, but how about this: People from Southern California hear a pure tone (minus overtones) go UP to another tone, whereas people from Southern England hear the same tone go DOWN. It's apparently the English language, the dialect, says Deutsch. Now there's a remarkable thought. More bridges to build.

Right, fractal friend Jim?

(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Apr. 1991)

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