moving forward with music.

Unless you have been frozen in some sort of cryogenic chamber since July of 2010, you’ve heard Katy Perry’s song, “Teenage Dream.” Whether you wanted to or not… it’s been blasted into your ears dozens of times.

Like you, I have not escaped its grasp. Personally, I think it’s a fun song, full of energy and a very catchy, beltable hook (and that “second chorus” for lack of a better term is really fun, too!). If history is any indication, somebody will want to take this opportunity to talk to comment on the appropriateness of the song for impressionable youth (it happened during my defense of “Glee”, you know… before it was “bad awful,” rather than the “fun awful” it had been before). This post is about the recording of the song and the deliberate decisions the producers made.

While I was listening to my Spotify “Party Mix”, I noticed something I had not heard before. Considering the number of times I’ve heard the song, I was surprised when I discovered something completely new.

Listen to the first two measures (headphones definitely help):

Did you notice it? That opening guitar part isn’t perfectly in time! Listen to the first couple of 8th notes and the couple of beats starting on beat two of the second measure. In case you are having a hard time hearing it, I’ve looped the first two measures a couple of times:

If you prefer visuals, here ya go. The line indicates the attack from the guitar in the left ear. Notice the placement of the attacks in the right ear. (Click to enlarge)

Why do I find this interesting?

(Read below the break for the exciting conclusion!)

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This is just a quick note to recommend that my fellow music teachers take 15 minutes and watch the video above -in fact, I’d watch it directly on YouTube where you can watch in HD. It’s a video made by Matthew Thibeault concerning the ways in which visualizations can be VERY useful in the classroom (and in our own musicianship). This video is a condensed version of a longer lecture he gives, but I think it’s fantastic. I used it today with my undergrads and they loved it (I did stop if more than a few times to ask them questions before the video answered them). 

The video covers a wide range of visualizations - spectrograms, MIDI displays, amplitude displays and traditional staff notation - and how they are useful in the classroom. He even includes some wonderful drawings from some of his former second graders (the Adagio for Strings illustration is beautiful).

If this video interests you, Matt’s got a video that explains how to access the spectrum in Audacity and another video on “Exploring Audacity’s Spectrogram View”.

Also, his most recent column for General Music Today discusses the various ways in which you can use the spectrogram. If you’re a NAfME member (that’s MENC’s new name) or on a college campus, it’s available here. 

For more on what Matt is up to, visit his site: www.matthewthibeault.com.

(This pic below is for my Facebook and Google+ postings. it’s also beautiful!)