What Happens after the Primal Burn? Dissonance in Sonic Youth’s Middle Period

Sonic Youth originated in No Wave, a movement from the late 1970s and early 1980s that reduced rock to minimal gestures and explored extremes of noise. In the mid-1980s, Sonic Youth’s style changed as they began to incorporate guitar parts that were reminiscent of 1970s hard rock. But their experimental tendencies persisted through this change, because they overlaid the parts in ways that created incongruity and tweaked hard-rock stylistic features in order to create dissonance or tonal conflict. Sonic Youth’s strategies for twisting hard-rock norms into clashing harmonies often follow one of two recurring types. The first, tonic divergence, occurs when separate lines have phase-mismatched tonic harmonies. The second, intervallic dissonance, occurs when instrumental lines are arranged in order to highlight harshly dissonant intervals or chromatic clusters. In many songs, their dissonant counterpoint works in tandem with their characteristic noisy guitar timbres by occurring in alternation, forcing listeners to continually re-evaluate how they perceive a song as a standard rock track. The analyses show how the band continued to experiment within popular style and created types of dissonance that influenced 1980s–1990s guitar-based indie rock.

Measuring a Measure

The prevailing approach to bar lengths in pop/rock music uses the standard rock drum beat as a model, whereby the kick is assigned to beats 1 and 3 and the snare to beats 2 and 4 in a bar of ".fn_meter(4,4).". In this paper, I show that a song’s drum pattern is not a reliable indicator of measure lengths, especially if we consider bar lengths to be an important benchmark for theories of form. I argue that our determinations of bar lengths and meter in popular music should also take absolute time into consideration. Specifically, I speculate that the two-second measure acts as an ideal for experiential or “real” measures, and so we may be best served—all other factors being equal—by partitioning a song into measure lengths that most closely approximate two seconds. My approach derives from recent research on tempo perception, statistical studies of pop/rock song corpora, and my own analyses of popular songs. An important concept is the notion of different drum “feels,” such as double-time and half-time, in which the drum pattern can be seen to exist on a metric level above or below the primary beat level as implied by the time signature. I show the value of my approach via a number of song comparisons, wherein structural similarities can be found despite differences in surface-level rhythmic patterns. I also discuss other factors—including harmonic rhythm and form—that may affect our perception of bar lengths, so as to concede that no single factor can fully simplify meter classification in this style.

Geant4 Simulation Study of Deep Underground Muons: Vertical Intensity and Angular Distribution

Underground muon intensities up to 10000 m.w.e. and angular distribution up to 6500 m.w.e. in standard rock have been investigated using Geant4 simulation package. Muons with energies above 100 GeV were distributed from the ground level taking into account the muon charge ratio of~1.3 at sea level. The simulated differential muon intensities are in good agreement with the intensities given in the literature. Furthermore, the simulation results for the integrated intensities are consistent with the experimental data, particularly at depths above 4000 m.w.e., where the simulation gives slightly smaller intensities than the experimental ones. In addition, the simulated exponentnat different underground depths agrees well with the experimental points, especially above~2000 m.w.e.

CHARGED LEPTON-NUCLEUS INELASTIC SCATTERING AT HIGH ENERGIES

The composite model is made to describe inelastic high-energy scattering of muons and taus in standard rock. It involves photonuclear interactions at low Q2 as well as moderate Q2 processes and the deep inelastic scattering (DIS). In the DIS region the neutral current contribution is taken into consideration. Approximation formulas both for the muons and tau energy loss in standard rock are presented for wide energy range.