Pink Floyd, Sergeant Pepper and Dr. Brian May: on the dark side of technology

Technology and art are closely related

Technology, and art. On the face of it, it seems that these two concepts are as far from each other as Harima and Gefilte Fish. Art is seen as abstract and emotional, while technology is intellectual and rational. Technology is limited by our scientific knowledge, while in art there is no such thing as no such thing.

But if you peel away the top layer of color from this image, you find that technology and art are closely related. Sculptors, for example, must know the materials they use intimately in order to produce the desired shapes from them. Photography, to give another clear example, is really 'art for engineers': a conversation between two professional photographers is a mixture of perspectives and shutter speeds, golden ratios and formats with an optimal compression ratio.

Sometimes, this combination between technology and art may appear in the same person - Leonardo da Vinci, for example. Da Vinci famously designed flying machines and catapults, then used the same metaphorical brush to paint the Mona Lisa.

This duality also exists in the world of music. In my opinion, it is no coincidence that if you look at the list of the five hundred greatest albums in the history of Rolling Stone magazine, the two albums that star in honorable places on this list - Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" and Sergeant Pepper's "Lonely Hearts Club Orchestra" of the Beatles - they are albums that were innovative from a technological point of view, no less than from a musical point of view.

Later we will touch on these two albums in more detail, but first I want to raise the question that may be troubling a large number of young geeks, 'tech geeks' in the positive sense of the phrase, who also love music. The question is: Is it possible to follow these two paths at the same time? I mean, can you be a theoretical physicist in a laboratory for anomalous materials, they say, and at the same time sawing with the guitar on stage.

"Well, it's obvious," some of the listeners might say, "Leonardo da Vinci already did something similar, didn't he?" But da Vinci did it five hundred years ago, and things have changed a bit since then. Is it even today possible to reconcile these two worlds?

I guess if we ask this question to the members of the band 'Queen', their answer will be clear, and this is because Queen consisted of a biologist, an electrical engineer and a doctor of astrophysics. The only friend of Kevin who was not an engineer or scientist was Freddie Mercury, the lead singer.
The band's guitarist, Brian May, had completed his bachelor's degree in astrophysics and was working on his doctoral thesis when the band formed in the early XNUMXs. May didn't have time to publish two scientific papers, but when the big success came and Queen became one of the hottest bands of that time, May was faced with a cruel choice: to continue counting grains of interstellar dust and spending white nights in the observatory, or to appear in front of millions of people, make mountains of dollars and in general Fulfilling the dream of everyone who has ever held a guitar in their hand. Well, maybe it wasn't such a cruel choice. In any case, May was forced to abandon the academic track and concentrate on music.

But he didn't completely cut himself off from the technical side of his life. His guitar, for example, was designed and built by May himself together with his father. May's guitar is, to this day, an engineering masterpiece that only has few competitors and it even earned its own name - Red Special. The materials from which May built the Red Special are simple and everyday: the body of the guitar, for example, was taken from the wood of an old fireplace, and the tremolo (it's the small stick that is next to the strings, with which you can change the sound of the guitar) is made from a bicycle carrier, knitting sticks and motorcycle springs . Brian May managed to assemble this pile of junk into an instrument that has a cool and unique sound that no conventional guitar can imitate! Guitar builders have tried to create the Red Special sound for years, without success. Several years ago, May agreed to have the guitar photographed using X-rays, to try to understand if the internal spaces in the body of the guitar contribute to its special sound. Red Special is already over thirty years old and despite the massive renovations it has undergone, May also understands that her lifespan is limited. The company he owns markets guitars that are almost perfect replicas of the Red Special. Brian May's special sound is also contributed by the fact that he is not strung on the strings with normal plastic specifications, but with the help of a normal metal coin.

About two years ago May decided to return to his first love, the love that according to his testimony he never completely abandoned - astrophysics. He returned to his doctoral thesis - the analysis of light reflections from interstellar dust - and after defending his work before a committee of experts from Imperial College London, he won the coveted title. Currently, Dr. Brian May is a research fellow at Imperial College London, has published a successful book on the history of the universe (along with two other researchers), and is a regular contributor to the BBC's astronomy program.

Brian May's friend in the band, bassist John Deacon, also spent a short time at the academy and qualified as a full-fledged electrical engineer.
Deacon is considered the 'quiet' and introverted member of the Queen band, and some say this is the reason why he was chosen for the role in the first place, so as not to steal the show for the lead singer. On the other hand, an active volcano can also be considered an introvert next to the glittery Freddie Mercury. Anyway, the hide-and-seek Deacon is responsible for some of Queen's biggest hits, such as Another One Bites the Dust and I Want to Break Free.

Like Brian May, Deacon also abandoned electrical engineering for the rock 'n' roll life but didn't completely disconnect from his right brain. He was known in the band as 'the instrument man', and loved tinkering with the recording and amplification equipment. One of his most important contributions to the band in general and to Brian May the guitarist in particular, is a guitar amplifier that Deacon built with his own hands for May, a device that received the nickname Deacy Amp after him, of course. Like the Red Special, the Deacy Amp began its career as an electronic board that Deacon happened to discover in a trash can on the street. He repaired and modified it to suit electric guitar work, and in this case, too, the result was a unique-sounding amp that blended well with May's playing style, and accompanied Kevin on all of their studio recordings.

Queen's drummer, Roger Taylor, also has a degree in biology. Unlike Deacon and May, his knowledge of the animal world was not reflected in the band's work, except that Roger was known to be a serious stage animal.

When the members of the Beatles, the Beatles, sat down in 1967 to record the album 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Orchestra' - Sgt. Pepper's lonely hearts club band, they were already very famous people.

This fact gave them the opportunity to employ the best sound technicians and production staff that Britain could offer, and also the ability to take risks and try musical directions that other bands might have hesitated to follow. Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club gained its fame mainly due to its musical innovation, such as the fusion of Eastern styles and Indian sitar with Western rock and roll and R&B. It will always be remembered as one of their finest works, and perhaps as the most important and influential album of the last fifty years.

An interesting aspect of this album, apart from the musical innovation, is the use the Beatles made of the advanced technology of the time to create music that was different from anything that preceded it. To get the floating and hallucinatory atmosphere of Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds for example, the Beatles used the new technique of changing the pitch: they would record the instruments and voices while the tape was spinning faster or slower than usual. Then, when the film was run at its normal speed, the sounds and voices would take on a different and fascinating tone.

Most of the techniques that The Beatles and their producer, George Martin, used on the album were not invented by them at the time of recording. Flanging, for example, is the name of a technique that was already known in the past, but most artists did not use it - perhaps because they did not understand its musical value. In Flanging, you take a single recording, duplicate it and then combine the two copies again into one recording - but this time when they don't exactly overlap each other. That is, there is a slight delay of a few microseconds between them. This difference causes, on the one hand, the sound waves to mix with each other, cancel each other out, or actually amplify certain parts, and on the other hand, leaves the music and voices clear and easy to understand. This technique is also called 'phase shift', for those who are interested in such things, and it creates fascinating, unusual and interesting music.

One technological innovation that can indeed be credited to the album's production team is 'automatic doubling'. Those who are involved in the field of studio recording know that if you record the singer singing the same song twice, and then combine the two recordings together (that is, doubling the vocals) the resulting voice is richer and fuller. There are singers for whom the doubling of their voice really helps them and gives their singing a volume and power that do not exist in the vocal cords that were provided to them at birth - as in the case of John Lennon, who was helped by doubling in many cases.

The problem was that until then, the doubling was done manually, that is, the singer had to sing the same song twice for the recording, and in exactly the same way, literally note for note and word for word: if the singer missed the beat here and there, the result was that when they combined the two recordings, he would get Some obscure musical gibberish. Therefore, Lennon had to sing the same part over and over again, until the resulting recording would achieve the desired doubling effect.

Lennon could not stand the tedious process of doubling, and begged Ken Thousand, their sound engineer, to come up with something that would relieve him of this punishment. Thousand activated the gray cells, and succeeded in inventing a method of connecting two recording devices that enabled automatic doubling of the voice. The result was that Nonon could only sing once, and the instruments would produce an excellent doubling of the voice, without mistakes or omissions.

There was also some innovation in the way the record itself was printed, although it can be said that it contributed very little musically and mainly added to the folklore and myths surrounding the band.

Old vinyl records, in the era before the compact disc, worked as follows: the record had a thin rail that the needle of the turntable moved inside. The information on the record was stored in the form of tiny grooves inside the track, and the needle of the turntable would convert the mechanical shocks resulting from the faults in these grooves into electrical signals. The thin rail wound around the circumference of the record in a spiral path that got smaller and smaller, until it reached the center of the record. Normally, that's where the music would end and the needle would rise and go back to the beginning of the record - but on 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Orchestra' record, the track reached the end - and then turned into a closed circle. Meaning, the needle would not return to the beginning of the record and there was no defined end point. The record actually ends with an endless loop of voices and sounds repeated every two seconds.

This short loop contained a cacophonous jumble of musically worthless voices and sounds. She began with a monotonous sound at a frequency of fifteen kilohertz, a frequency that only young people and dogs can hear. This sound had no practical purpose other than to annoy your dog, as John Lennon explained. On a side note, here's a free tip for our young listeners: get yourself a fifteen kHz ringtone (there are quite a few computer audio programs that can do this). When the phone rings in class during class, chances are your teacher won't hear anything.

We will return to the loop at the end of the record. In the short segment you can hear a voice saying something like - Never Could be any other way, or another meaningless sentence. But when you play this section backwards, you get another completely meaningless section. In a sort of musical variation of the Rorschach test, some have interpreted the reverse version of the infinite loop as Will Paul be back as Superman?. The idea that the closing loop of the record hides a secret message was one of the cornerstones of the theory that accompanied The Beatles over the years, according to which Paul McCartney actually died and a double replaced him so as not to damage the band's popularity. This theory is fascinating and I would have considered making an entire program dedicated only to it, if it weren't for Yoav Kutner of Gali IDF who was several years ahead of me and made an excellent program about this matter, and it is worth listening to if you manage to get your hands on this broadcast.

To close the technological motif of 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Orchestra', I will only mention that the famous cover of the record features the figures of several famous scientists such as Albert Einstein and Dr. David Livingstone who explored central Africa, as well as the science fiction writer The famous H.G. Wells.

Among those who like more progressive rock, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album has been considered a real classic since it was released in 1972. This album topped the record sales charts for seven hundred and fifty consecutive weeks, it was a breakthrough In countless ways and forms and the music critics praised him throughout the years. One of the album's achievements that Pink Floyd members like to mention on many occasions, is that Australian listeners chose it in 1990 as the most successful record to fall in love with, although I suspect this fact says more about the Australian audience and less about the album itself.

The members of Pink Floyd have always loved to push the boundaries of their music and try new directions, and on this album they had the good fortune to team up with one of the best recording engineers of all time, Alan Parsons. Parsons, a talented and successful musician in his own right, helped the band members create the special atmosphere of the album using every studio and technological trick he could think of. They built a special drum that simulated human heartbeats, had Parsons' assistant walk inside a closed cell and recorded his steps, and when they wanted to record the many clocks at the beginning of the song Time, all the band members together stood by the devices and pressed the right buttons at the right timing.

Parsons and Pink Floyd used the most innovative techniques they knew, such as flanging, phase changes and sound doubling. The production people said that you could tell that Pink Floyd was recording in the studio by the cables that were always sticking out of the studio, as the band members used to use more or less every device and device that was in the room. David Gilmour, the guitarist and one of the musical tone setters in the band, was particularly enthusiastic about an electronic instrument that at that time was really entering studio use: the synthesizer.

The synthesizer, the electric organ as we mistakenly sometimes call it, is a device capable of producing musical sounds by electronic means. The synthesizer sometimes also includes a piano-like keyboard, but this is not required and many synthesizers include buttons and other controls that do the same job.

The synthesizer was invented in principle already at the end of the nineteenth century, but significant technological progress was required before musicians could actually use it. The synthesizers of the XNUMXs, like the first computers of that era, were huge. To change the tune they produced, it was necessary to literally disassemble and reassemble the vacuum tubes that made up the device. Not ideal for improvisation, I'd say.

Towards the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, synthesizers began to appear that allowed musicians to create new melodies in real time, while recording in the studio. Operating such a tool was not particularly simple or intuitive, but those who had the patience and curiosity to delve into the synthesizer taps - like David Gilmour, in this case - were given the opportunity to create very unique music. Gilmore encountered the synthesizer for the first time when it was still in the final design stages, and said cables and wires dangled from every hole in the device and climbed up to the ceiling. Some musicians might have panicked and abandoned the whole idea at this point, but Gilmour insisted on bringing the final product into the studio with him. The result was genius instrumental pieces like On The Run and Any Color You Like.

'The Dark Side of the Moon', as in the case of Sergeant Pepper of the Beatles, was strange and original enough to arouse in the listeners the feeling that it hides some mysterious secret, some hidden message from the band. In the case of Pink Floyd, the common knowledge was that the album was built to actually be the soundtrack of the movie 'The Wizard of Oz' from 1933. The general idea is that if you play the movie and the album at the same time, then at many points images and ideas from the movie merge with words or tunes from the album.

All the band members denied it at one point or another, Alan Parsons defined the whole idea as ridiculous, and psychologists even have a name for this phenomenon: 'synchronicity', the brain's natural tendency to find patterns and order in information that is completely random. But we will not let the facts confuse us, and we will say that in the song Breathe, when Gilmore sings And Balanced on the biggest wave, at that exact moment Dorothy balances herself carefully as she walks on a thin fence. The famous heartbeats that accompany the end of the album are heard just as Dorothy is trying to listen to the Tin Man's heartbeat. And besides, when Pink Floyd sing Which is which in the song Us and Them, do they perhaps mean the Witch, that is, a witch...the good witch from the north perhaps?

Okay, so Oz's influence on Pink Floyd is a bit vague, but it's pretty clear that the production people and crew that accompanied the band had a huge impact on the record. The name of the song Any Color you like, 'in any color you like', comes from a fixed phrase of one of the technicians, which is itself a quote from a famous sentence of Henry Ford regarding the availability of colors for his famous Model T car: 'Any color you want, as long as it's black.'

The whole length of the record includes sentences and sentence fragments that Roger Waters recorded in interviews with the team members. He had an interesting method of getting interesting sentences out of them: he would show them cards with particularly provocative questions one after the other, such as, for example, 'When were you last violent?' And then 'were you the fair party?' The fascinating answers of these unusual interviewees are an integral part of the special and dark atmosphere of the entire work.

And a final sentence about the name of the album, 'The Dark Side of the Moon'. The moon does not, in fact, have a dark side. Both halves of the Moon are equally illuminated by the Sun along its orbit around the Earth. The fact that the Moon is "locked", in quotation marks, by the long-term effect of Earth's gravity is responsible for the fact that we can only see a certain side of it at all times.
But perhaps it was actually the guard at the entrance to the studio who defined the matter in the most precise way, in response to Roger Waters' questions. The moon is indeed illuminated by the sun, but it does not shine by itself - it only reflects the light that hits it. Hence there really is no such thing as the 'dark side of the moon': in fact, it is all dark.

* This article is taken from the show's script.Making history!', a bi-weekly podcast about the history of science and technology.