Mysterious "Floating" Sound

[Kendall]

Has anyone had this happen or have you heard of it?...

When playing reasonably constant and full patterns, a high pitched sound "magically" happens which sounds like a bird and it "floats" around and there is no control over it. It disappears when I concentrate on it but it happens rarely and unexpectedly.

I've asked listeners if they heard the same when it happened and they confirmed.

Maybe it could be tapping, touching or giving the next hit at a harmonic point on the skin but I cannot re-produce it.

Any ideas?

[e2c]

Sounds like overtones/harmonics to me. I hear this a lot myself, even with my kenkeni.

But I don't know how to create the sound you're talking about. (It's a lot easier on a guitar!)

[michi]

You sometimes get that for particularly patterns, where the notes cause a higher-order harmonic to be sustained. Enjoy it while it lasts I don't think it's possible to do this at will--it depends too much on the skin, which changes harmonics as it ages. In addition, every time you tighten the skin, the harmonics move somewhere else in the spectrum.

You can also sometimes pick up such harmonics when several drums play together. Those notes are not played by any particular drum. Instead, the arise when the different frequencies produced by several drums create interference and you end up with harmonics that are caused by the different frequencies beating against each other.

Cheers,

Michi.

[gar05189]

definitely,
it is very special and it kinda melts the sense of time... i dont know how to explain it really, but it is definitely one of the coolest things in playing djembe.

[James]

I was playing a big Mali Djembe, that was really low tuned the other day.

I was playing an accompaniment that had a slap followed by a base and I could clearly hear the slap in the bowl of the djembe.... There's a lot of vibrations going on, some are likely to resonate with others though the wood, the skin, your feet the walls etc...

[the kid]

I've heard this mysterious sound...I can't quite explain it

I think you'll get strange noises playing indoors sometimes and especially from lowly tuned djembes/(drums).

I have a small funny djembe which is dimba and shaped unevenly. Once years ago i was playing it at the beach and there was some crazy reverb coming from the clouds after each hit. It was fun for a while. Nice to see people scratchin there heads lookin at the sky any ways. Every one should do more of that IMO...

[Nodrog]

Sounds like a sonic version of a rainbow. A natural phenomena that appears when certain conditions come together at exactly the right point in both space and time. Yeaaahhh...

Gordon.

[bops]

This may have been mentioned already, but it could be the room. Every room has frequencies that reside within it, inaudible in silence, but activated by sound waves.

This is why recording studios are frequently designed to have angled walls and sound-proofing materials - to refract the sound and reduce the latent frequencies that are detected by the microphone in the recording.

An fairly well-known experiment (some call it a musical composition) on this phenomenon was done by a guy named Alvin Lucier. It's called I am sitting in a room. Check it out, you might find it interesting. You can listen to it here: http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html.

[michi]

This is fascinating work! Thanks for posting the link, I was really captivated by that!

I have noticed in the past that, depending what room I'm in, my djembe sounds vastly different. There are rooms that make it sound dull and dead; there are rooms that make it sound shrill and harsh, and there are rooms that make it just sing. I'm sure that has to do with the reflections and the natural harmonics of the room that amplified and attenuated.

Cheers,

Michi.

[e2c]

An fairly well-known experiment (some call it a musical composition) on this phenomenon was done by a guy named Alvin Lucier. It's called I am sitting in a room. Check it out, you might find it interesting. You can listen to it here: http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html.

I'd read about this before, but never heard it. Fascinating!

*
I once had a very startling experience while rehearsing with a pickup band. the bass player (electric) had inadvertently tuned his instrument to the frequency of the building - we could all feel/hear it but him, and it took longer than it ideally should have to get him to cut his amp and retune. (The building was vibrating.)

[Djembe-nerd]

Wow, interesting stuff. Thanks for posting this.

[Kendall]

Speaking of resonances...

I have an Audio Oscillator which I set/tuned to the Bass Frequency of the Djembe in use. This Tone was sent through a Mixer and on to the (High Powered) Studio Monitors thus filling the room with this tone.

Now when playing... the tones from the djembe itself pulled, pushed and wiggled the "standing waves" and gave some very interesting sounds.

[Marc_M]

I had a Yoruban drum teacher who said it was the sound of our ancestors speaking to us.

[rachelnguyen]

Marc,

That is exactly what it sounds like to me.

When I first started taking classes, I sometimes would hear what sounded like dozens of voices murmuring along with the drums. It was a little eerie at first. But cool, too.

I have come to discover that my drum has many voices.

Rachel

[e2c]

maybe it can be more than one thing at the same time?

not to belittle anyone's beliefs about these sounds, but I've heard equally eerie stuff coming from (of all things) my refrigerator/freezer (the ice maker part, I'm guessing), as well as overtone series from things like metal pipes... even trees and telephone wires in the wind. I'm surrounded by large trees, and the sound of high, gusty winds in them can be really terrifying at times - far more so than the windstorms themselves.

Back to sounds made my things that are played for musical purposes: I have a filedunun (calabash water drum) and the sound those things create is like nothing I've ever heard before. I really *can* see why many people believe those particular sounds are the voices of the ancestors. They're quite unearthly, even eerie in some ways, though certainly beautiful!