Melencolia I

Press apri il microfono and allow the browser to use it. Say whether you are on cuffie (headphones) orcasse (speakers). Then sing, speak or hum: your voice's shape moves through the choir. With no microphone, switch onsenza voce to hear the chords on their own.

Feedback. With speakers, the room carries the output back into the microphone, and a vocoder will happily sing along with itself. Five things stop it. The browser's echo canceller is switched on in speaker mode. When the microphone opens, a soft hiss measures how much of each band the room returns, and if you said headphones but the mic can hear the speakers, the page switches to speaker mode itself. In speaker mode a band only opens when your voice is louder there than the share of our own output the room gives back. A singer has to breathe: if the input never goes quiet for ten seconds, the output drops out for a third of a second, and if the microphone falls silent with it, it was listening to the speakers. A howl on a single frequency ducks the output and notches that band. Headphones are still the best way.

Recording. registra keeps the dry voice, the vocoder, or both, in step. Every take can be heard, saved as a WAV file (16 or 24 bit), and a dry take (or any audio file you load) can go through the vocoder again: applica il vocoder renders it offline with the current settings, suona nel vocoder plays it through live while you turn the knobs.

Why these chords. Listeners hear music as sad when it is slow, minor, low, soft, legato and dark in timbre, the same cues sad speech carries. Sad melodies move by small intervals, and the minor third turns up in the pitch contour of sad speech; the minor second dominates infants' cries. Passages with appoggiaturas are the ones people report crying to. A bass that falls by step from the tonic to the dominant was the seventeenth century's emblem of lament. Thesaddest path weighs every move between chords by these findings and finds the best four-chord phrase by dynamic programming, the reason for the stamp: P. Dürer ranks sixteen chords from least to most sad and walks the lines of the magic square from the engraving Melencolia I: every line sums to 34, so every phrase carries the same total sadness.

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