Everything in its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead by Brad Ph.D. Osborn

Author:Brad Ph.D. Osborn [Osborn, Brad Ph.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-10-03T05:00:00+00:00

Source-deformation (Instrumental and Vocal)

From time to time Radiohead imports non-rock instruments into otherwise standard rock instrumentation. Minimal processing ensures that these instruments are instantly recognized. This includes the sweeping harp glissandi beginning in the second verse of “Motion Picture Soundtrack” (2000–10, 1:39); the glockenspiel heard in “No Surprises” (1997–10, e.g., 0:13), “Sit Down” (2003–2, e.g., 0:14), and “All I Need” (2007–5, e.g., 1:42); and an array of keyboard instruments including the harmonium in “Motion Picture” (2000–10) and the Fender Rhodes in “Morning Bell” (2000–9). More often though, they do something like the opposite. Through electronic processing, a standard instrumental source—especially the voice or lead guitar—is deformed (perhaps re-formed?) in such a way as to obscure its material origins. But in terms of source-deformation, how far is too far? How much electronic processing, and of what sort, is enough to obscure the material source of the electric guitar such that a listener will have trouble perceiving it as such? The answer to this question depends on a listener’s familiarity with the style and the sorts of timbral modifications that are most common. No listener even remotely conversant with modern rock music will fail to recognize the electric guitar through a veil of distortion, but a listener unfamiliar with the genre whose only experience with a guitar involves the clear and highly percussive timbre of the acoustic guitar might. Addressing source-deformation from the perspective of a listener stylistically competent in modern rock’s signal processing methods—the kind of exposure a listener gleans from nothing more than listening to rock radio—allows us to reconstruct the expectations held by a majority of Radiohead’s listeners.23

Rock music admits a great many variations on the sounds created by guitars, drums, and even voices. Distortion, an effect that started as an engineering defect in amplification technology, is a ubiquitous color added regularly to electric guitars and basses, and occasionally to other material sources (in which case the lack of convention results in the stimulus becoming a bit more perceptually marked). Distortion is measured by degrees, meaning that a sound can be more or less distorted, rather than an either/or situation. This can be neatly represented by the clipping of a sine wave.24 Distortion produced by amplifiers utilizing vacuum tubes occurs when the input signal, a sine wave, exceeds the voltage capacities of the tube. At this point, the tube begins to “flatten” the wave, a process known as clipping. As more voltage is added, the wave becomes flatter at the top and bottom, resulting in a progressively more distorted sound that gradually approaches a fully distorted square wave. Guitarists have an impressively large vocabulary for naming discrete amounts of distortion (after all, there are an infinite number of points between perfectly clean and fully distorted); the three most common stages are known as “overdrive,” “crunch,” and “distortion.” Understanding an effect as simple as distortion can serve as a perceptual model for understanding source-deformation more generally. Under enough distortion, the original input signal (generated by a material source) becomes noise, indistinguishable from noise generated by any other material source.

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