Guitar Loop Is My Life 1, by Saito Koji
This song reminds me of divinity. For me it’s sort of hard to express, but, there’s oscillations that occur when the harmonic notes are ringing out, these distinct subtle oscillations, and the source of them, along with the light chorus effect, is actually very hard to describe if you’re not familiar with the nature of harmony and dissonance. I will try to explain for those who don’t understand the minutae of harmony and dissonance, or maybe just never noticed these things.
When two highly-correlated waveforms meet, they amplify each other, making them louder, and they also sustain longer, in reverberance of the room or, in the case of a stringed instrument like a guitar, or piano, in reverberance of the string. For instance, with any given major triad chord. On guitar, try an Emaj triad with the rest of the strings open on the 7th fret. When two highly-uncorrelated waveforms meet, they cancel each other out, resulting in a quieter and shorter resonance, in the room and in the strings themselves. For instance, with an ambiguous chord, maybe putting these notes together: D# G# C# F#.
Now, this is where things get interesting: with digital pianos and other digital instruments, they often have quite literally perfect intonation aimed at matching the frequencies and ratios that the instruments are called for as exactly as possible. I know that tuning these intervals “exactly” would result in aharmonic and slightly dissonant notes, but let’s just for argument say that for somesuch chord, the resonance is perfectly correlated between the notes, ignoring other chords/notes. What happens is the note is too “perfect,” and while I don’t have the functional math/physics explanations to describe why this is impossible to achieve with the whole instrument, digital or otherwise, I can say it has to do with the note intervals, and I also don’t have the math/physics explanations to describe why it’s harmonically displeasing, but I can describe it loosely.
To my ears, the reason why perfect resonance isn’t as good as slightly imperfect resonance is that there is an oscillation that occurs when notes are only slightly off in their intonation, and anyone who has tuned a guitar or instrument using harmonics or an instrument with a pitch fork has heard these oscillations. When a symphony plays, when a choir sings, or even when a band is playing, the players are not all in the same exact intonation, no matter how much they want to be or try to be, and that’s okay, because it’s better to hear it all together. Again, if all of them were in perfect intonation–impossible mind you, it would be uglier, and furthermore, when a piano is playing, guitar too, moreso piano, due to the note intervals/ratios the frequencies of each string have to be approximated to allow for the highest amount of harmony with the least amount of dissonance. What happens naturally since perfection in any case is impossible is the strings vibrate with these oscillations that lend to the instrument’s beauty, and piano tuners will tell you all about how some notes tend toward accepting that slight amount of dissonance more, and some like to harmonize more, and furthermore, a lot of blues guitarists enjoy tuning their G a bit sharp or flat, personally I like it a tiny bit sharp, around 1 to 2 cents or so.
To return to the song, the mode of listening to and appreciating it, in my opinion, is fundamentally based on these oscillations, which are very gorgeous and wonderful. Through the shifts of the notes, with the harmonic and dissonant notes layering with strong artificial sustain, the oscillations become quite heavy compared to a completely unaffected tone, along with a light chorus effect on it that adds even more to this effect, giving even more oscillations.
I have a very strong opinion that not only is perfection unattainable, it’s not even desirable or good. I think, naturally, humans aren’t supposed to be perfect, even if we strive for it, and at the same time, some “dissonance” is not only acceptable, but helps us see what really matters. In a way, this song is an accidental commentary on humanity, goodness, and divinity in my mind, but I won’t explain my thoughts on that any further.
Another nice thing about this song: as it plays, it goes from curiously positive with a melancholy undertone, and gradually as it reminisces and reminisces on those notes, the melancholy gets stronger, turning to an overtone, and around the 6.5m mark, it starts to become quite a bit sad for such a major song.