Transforming the meaning of stability and change in the Shepard-Risset glissando
A trilogy of playlists experimenting with the form
Composer Hans Zimmer uses this powerful avant-garde musical form a bunch of times in Christopher Nolan movies; that was my first conscious exposure to it. It’s called a Shepard-Risset glissando. Take three notes spread apart by regular octave intervals (so each note’s sound wave frequency is half the note’s below it), and glide them together up a scale. As the top note reaches a certain pitch, its volume begins to fade and continues until it vanishes from hearing — and simultaneous with that fade out of existence, a new note begins to fade into existence at the bottom of the scale, again an octave below the previous lowest note. Now what had been the middle note ascends to become the high note, what had been the lowest note ascends to become the middle note, and a new note below replaces what had been the high note above. The ascent continues indefinitely. The octaves you’re hearing are constantly ascending (or descending; it can be played in reverse), but the pitch range is monotonously the same, like a droning sound. The octave is never heard higher than a certain pitch or lower than a certain pitch.
Zimmer uses the Shepard-Risset glissando to unnerving effect in Nolan movies.1 It’s anxiety-inducing. The notes are constantly striving to exceed their preset limits, but due to volume control they go nowhere; they attain nothing. It’s the aural equivalent of a barber shop pole. The spiral lines are ever twisting upwards, but never exceeding the length of the pole. Symbolically this form is a combination of change and stability. That combination can be very natural and satisfying. We all wish both to maintain our identity and to become something that we’re not. Musically, the Shepard-Risset glissando sounds like that which is otherwise expressed as “gnashing of teeth,” but it has occurred to me to use the form in a different context, with different content — to use this symbolic combination of stability and change in a way that is psychologically remedial rather than unnerving. I think that’s the key: we don’t want change and stability, in that order, which is how the Shepard-Risset glissando is experienced, inducing frustration, but stability and change, in that order, such that we can fear not the loss of identity even as we grow into something greater than ourselves.
When I first became fascinated with this pattern, I had an idea of how it could be used. As was my wont in this period of my life, I experimented with the idea firstly in the form of music playlists, to test its viability. My experiments were highly successful, but they remain all I’ve done with the form so far. My initial idea was to use songs from female vocal artists and to arrange them in the shape of a Shepard-Risset glissando, conceived thematically rather than musically. The thematic context would be sisterhood. I’d pick eleven female voices, three songs from each artist. The three songs would be chosen and arranged according to the pattern of purification-illumination-perfection, a threefold ascent. Then, however, I would braid the sisters together, such that the playlist would still be eleven ascending triads, but each triad would feature three different sisters. An artist’s purification song would be used for one triad, her illumination song would be used for the very next triad, and her perfection song would be used for the triad after that. In this way the eleven artists are all braided together. In each triad, you’re hearing one sister for the first time; then you’re hearing a sister you’ve heard before and will hear again; and then you’re hearing a sister for the third and final time. It can be sad to know you’re saying goodbye to a sister you’ll miss, but the sadness is immediately replaced with excitement as a brand new sister appears to start the very next triad.
So it’s simple enough to see how the pattern works within the body of the playlist, but what about the ends? How in the playlist’s very first triad can you be hearing a sister for the second time in the illumination slot, and another sister for the third time in the perfection slot? Then in the last triad at the end of the playlist: Is the sister in the purification slot not to receive illumination and perfection songs in succeeding triads? Is the sister in the final illumination slot, whom we heard from in the purification slot of the triad before, not to receive a perfection song? Well, these problems at the ends correspond with each other, and the solution is that the pattern wraps around. It’s a wreath. The voice you hear in the third song of the first triad, for example, you hear again in the first song of the penultimate triad, and then again once more in the second song of the last triad. Hearing her voice again, that’s how you know the long circuitous journey is nearing an end. Thus the playlist is a circular wreath, but it’s also a linear experience along that wreath. The story I’m telling with the songs I choose can reinforce that linear experience amidst the circular experience. The result is three-dimensional: a horizontal circular wreath on the x- and z-axes, lined with eleven vertical candles on the y-axis. For a threefold ascent like the ones all these sisters are undergoing is not circular in form. They are being led places they haven’t been before, into energetic identities they haven’t had before, while ever maintaining the same hypostatic identity they’ve had from the beginning.
It’s not a universally positive experience. Each sister has free will. Purification-illumination-perfection is a pattern to be underwent regardless of moral mode. If you prepare yourself for it, by familiarizing yourself with the patterns of love, it will be a positive experience. If your heart is corrupt, your purification will be corrupt, your illumination will be corrupt, and your perfection will be corrupt. You will experience the threefold ascent as a desecration. But opportunities for repentance abound at every step, and the modes of your triadic forms can be redeemed. The songs I’ve chosen are according to musical tastes forged in my youth, which was ruled by sin and darkness. There are notes of anti-perfection throughout the playlist. Yet, as with me and my own pitiful life, the kernel of redeemable human identity is never lost, even in my darkest hours. If your musical tastes aren’t as corrupt as mine — or if they’re even more corrupt, in a quantized, autotuned, transhumanist direction — enduring the musical content of this playlist may be rough going for you. It’s long, and its length is a purposeful aspect. It’s like a movie. But like with a movie, perhaps you’ll be able to endure music that you wouldn’t otherwise like because the narrative content holds your interest regardless. Maybe not, and you’ll have to content yourself with my artfully written description of the form.
[Note: Tricky’s “Overcome,” featuring Martina Topley-Bird, deserves an 🅴 for explicit lyrics but for whatever reason is lacking it on Spotify.]
I initially chose female voices because I thought the context of sisterhood was particularly suited to the form. I liked the results so much though, that I thought I’d go ahead and try a male version, if only to see what would happen. Brotherhood operates very differently from sisterhood. For example, it’s not hard to find women artists singing about their female friends, like Johnette Napolitano on “Caroline” or Stevie Nicks on “Sara.” Among rock musicians, however (I understand it’s different in hip-hop culture), it’s hard to find men lyricizing about their male friends. Whereas the female priesthood operates smoothly on a horizontal level, the male priesthood is inclined vertically. If women are aqueous and settle into planar compositions, men are the rising land caught between the waters below and the waters above. Speaking relatively between the two types, women possess their own desires while in want of control, but men are possessed of desires not their own even while driven to control. It’s an eros/mania dichotomy, the fractal of epithymia and thymos, observable within any given human, on a gendered social scale.
This same form, then, yields a psychological portrait that feels very distinct when you switch the sexes. You can see how complementary they are when you think about it intellectually, but when you experience it viscerally, it’s a different reality. In the male version, anger is a more dominant theme. But when one bids to control everything, one loses control of oneself and quickly become riddled with addictions. Addiction’s another dominant theme. Again amidst all the desecration of the human narrative, there remain sparks, precious glimpses of what human glory can be, this time manifest as vertical insights of the male priesthood — albeit sometimes those can be perverted too, and heresies arise. I’ve had to call this mix “The Possessed.” Men are created as passible beings; they are meant to be possessed. They are meant to be inspired. If only they can find the right Spirit to possess them. I have to believe redemption is possible in this narrative…
Having finished these two playlists, I couldn’t help but wonder if a third couldn’t arise organically out of them. Could this form be used to narrativize the union between male and female? How would that work? Firstly, I trust the listener by this point to have learned how I hear gender in music. I start with instrumental pieces the gender of which has to be inferred. Moon Hooch is masculine; Helium is feminine. This initiates a pattern that persists for a while once voices are added in: horns are masculine; keys are feminine. But immediately a math problem surfaces. The 3×11 format doesn’t allow for a straight binary. You could alternate male-female-male, then female-male-female, and fill in eleven triads that way, but if they’re to wrap around and form a wreath, that doesn’t work. The sexes must be mediated. Unity must be forged among the two.
Instead of finding one pivotal transition point, I decide to weave the mediation throughout the playlist at multiple points, in multiple modes. I use a Low song that blends the two voices together. I use a Moon Hooch song that puts a female vocal track on top of the saxophones that hitherto had coded the band as masculine. When Low returns in the end, I use two songs of theirs that start with one spouse’s voice and transition to the other spouse’s voice within the song. There is a startling last-minute disruption that I hesitate to describe, so temporarily horrifying do I find it. And finally, when the eleventh artist is introduced in the antepenultimate triad, not only is sexual differentiation transcended, but also the whole idea of authorial voice in music.
I am not holding back in this playlist. When I go from Nico to Leonard Cohen to Nina Simone, you know I’m not sparing anything for later. Two weeks ago when I first introduced my experimentation with formally structured playlists, I said one of them was among the greatest things I’ve ever made. This is it. I’ve neither written nor performed any of these songs, and yet their selection and arrangement alone I find immensely inspiring.
I have a dream of using this 3×11 structure as the basis of a screenplay. Choose, say, eleven female characters all milling about the basement, hall, and chapel of a multi-storied urban church during preparations for a festal celebration. Each character gets a fifteen-minute short film about her, divisible into three acts. The 33 acts are all braided together neatly in a wreath that ends where it begins, while continuously ascending to where it never was before. Temporal linearity can be discarded the way it is in iconographical depictions of many instances from one person’s life in a single panel icon. In one story the festal celebration being prepared for could be a wedding; in another story it could be the funeral of a woman who was featured earlier in the movie; in another story it could be Pascha, or a patronal feast day. Call the parish Holy Ascension. It is a lovely formal idea with which I am quite smitten. Now all I need is for eleven authors (preferably all female, for solidarity’s sake) to supply me with eleven different, complementary stories because I can’t think of a single one. I really do love editing, though!
See this three-minute Vox video on the topic, “The sound illusion that makes Dunkirk so intense,” YouTube, July 26, 2017.