Speaker 1: Pushkin. Soon after I got home from Toyota City, I
Speaker 1: went to a dinner party at my brother's house in Canada.
Speaker 1: My brother and his friends are all seriously musical. There
Speaker 1: were three people there who had studied music theory in college.
Speaker 1: Three accomplished pianists, a violinist. I think almost everyone except
Speaker 1: me sings in a choir. At one point they started
Speaker 1: talking about a woman named Shirley, a music scholar who had,
Speaker 1: among other things, perfect pitch. Shirley used to have an
Speaker 1: old manual transmission car, and as she shifted up, she
Speaker 1: would call out the notes her car's engine was playing.
Speaker 1: If I was in a car with her, I could
Speaker 1: be like your cards, a scholaring what intervals this, and
Speaker 1: she could be like E flat B flat D flat.
Speaker 1: She could call her Yes, that's Annalie, the most serious
Speaker 1: of the serious music people at the table. She used
Speaker 1: to be a student of Shirley's. For the next ten minutes,
Speaker 1: all people did was swap Shirley stories. She's a bit
Speaker 1: of a legend. And then I chimed in. Since we
Speaker 1: were talking about the music that engines make, I began
Speaker 1: talking about what I had learned in Japan, about how
Speaker 1: Lexus fine tuned the engine sound of its cars, and
Speaker 1: as I was talking, I looked over it Annally and
Speaker 1: understand that Annalie is not a car person. She drives
Speaker 1: an ancient Honda Civic that looks like it survived at Tornado.
Speaker 1: I would venture to say she's never thought a moment
Speaker 1: about cars in her life, except to ask what does
Speaker 1: that warning light mean? And yet even as I was
Speaker 1: going on and on and on as I like to
Speaker 1: do about the nuances and particulars of the sound of
Speaker 1: the LC, I noticed, to my surprise that Annalie's face
Speaker 1: was like, oh my, that is genius. So I thought
Speaker 1: it would make sense with this episode to explain why
Speaker 1: a serious music person who's never thought a moment about
Speaker 1: cars in her life would hear about the engine note
Speaker 1: of the Lexus Elsie and go, oh my, that is genius.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about Annalie and Shirley and this
Speaker 1: from Pushkin Industries and Lexus. This is go and see
Speaker 1: our podcasts about the fantastically neurotic world of Lexus. I'm
Speaker 1: Malcolm Glabbo. The last episode was about the building blocks
Speaker 1: of a great sounding engine. Naturally Aspirated cross Plain V
Speaker 1: eight all in surround sound. In this episode, I want
Speaker 1: to widen things out. So you've got the building blocks
Speaker 1: of a great engine sound. You've got your world class orchestra,
Speaker 1: the Toyota City Philharmonic. What song do you want to play?
Speaker 1: After dinner, I got Annalie to give me a little tutorial.
Speaker 1: I gave her a handout I'd been given from the
Speaker 1: sound experts at Lexis, which was in technical speak that
Speaker 1: I only vaguely understood, because, as I've explained, I'm a
Speaker 1: car person, not a music person. And the first thing
Speaker 1: she noticed was a sentence in the section entitled sound factor.
Speaker 1: Under the category formats, the LC produces at least two
Speaker 1: of the three senses, including composure, solidness, and elation at
Speaker 1: resonant frequencies, with four hundred herts producing a sense of
Speaker 1: composure and eight hundred hurts producing a sense of elation.
Speaker 1: What does that mean? What is a resonant frequency? Anily
Speaker 1: started talking about the game you can play with half
Speaker 1: empty wineglasses. A wine glass is a good way to
Speaker 1: model it because you're hearing one out and then we
Speaker 1: hear a range other of others kind of coming up
Speaker 1: to do it. Let's see you can get to work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you try this as a kid. You wet
Speaker 1: your finger and run it around the rim of the glass.
Speaker 1: At first, nothing happens. Then when the vibrations caused by
Speaker 1: your finger hit just the right level, the glass begins
Speaker 1: to sing with this full pulsating note. That's the sound
Speaker 1: of you reaching the wine glasses resonant frequency, the point
Speaker 1: at which it vibrates most freely. You can make music
Speaker 1: from resonant frequency. That's what singing bowls are. You have
Speaker 1: big glass bowls of various sizes, and the musician strikes
Speaker 1: them softly with a candle to get them vibrating at
Speaker 1: their resonant frequency. Anily found a demonstration on YouTube and
Speaker 1: played it for me. So he has a bawl that's
Speaker 1: the size of like a cooking bawl. Yep, and it's
Speaker 1: made out of crystal. This one is. And here is
Speaker 1: a stick. Yeah, And he's just as we were doing
Speaker 1: with the wine glasses. What he's doing is he's tracing
Speaker 1: a stick around the lip of the ball. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: the does he created in the beginning, what does he does?
Speaker 1: He create a single note in the beginning and then
Speaker 1: span So the way of the bullets that I've him
Speaker 1: in similar to a wine glass. Depending on how full
Speaker 1: the wine glasses will create a different pitch. Same thing
Speaker 1: with how the ball is structure. Any think how the
Speaker 1: ball is built. So he said at the beginning of
Speaker 1: sons in G flat major, so there's nothing he can
Speaker 1: do to change what he works. It begins in G
Speaker 1: flat mane and then so let's let's go back to
Speaker 1: the beginning. Just played that moment again. Does I start playing?
Speaker 1: Then c I was doing a second bowl, So he
Speaker 1: the bowl has a particular note. The first one was
Speaker 1: what G flat? So he plays it and then as
Speaker 1: it as the sound resonates within the bowl, which you
Speaker 1: get is a range of G flats above it up. Now,
Speaker 1: contrast that resonance to the sound produced by an instrument
Speaker 1: like an oboe. The walls of an oboe are rigid.
Speaker 1: They don't vibrate nearly as much. When you stop playing
Speaker 1: a note on the oboe, the sound stops. Now why
Speaker 1: does this matter, Well, remember back to that line from
Speaker 1: the Lexus Sound Manual. They wanted to create feelings of
Speaker 1: composure and elation. That oboe does not produce feelings of
Speaker 1: composure and elation. Figure Oh, yeah, it's so narrow. You
Speaker 1: don't hear any other sounds, no shimmer, no resonance. If
Speaker 1: your car made that noise, that's yeah, exactly. When I
Speaker 1: was in Japan, I found out that Lexus spent five
Speaker 1: years of experimentation and iteration on the acoustics of the
Speaker 1: Elsie's engine. They played with the length and thickness of
Speaker 1: intake hoses, with exhaust pipes, with the calibration of the
Speaker 1: sound regulator, and on and on and on to hit
Speaker 1: particular frequencies. The idea is to tune the car with
Speaker 1: four hundred hurts producing a sense of composure, and eight
Speaker 1: hundred hurts producing a sense of elation. Four hundred hurts composure,
Speaker 1: eight hundred hurts elation, and now the whole thing together.
Speaker 1: Oh my, that is so genius. But once you get
Speaker 1: the right frequencies, you're still not done. The Lexus briefing
Speaker 1: document had another line that confused me. It was under
Speaker 1: the heading spectral harmony realizes perfect sound intervals eight degrees
Speaker 1: in five degrees with three or more orders of vibration.
Speaker 1: I asked Annalie once again to explain, so basically, in music,
Speaker 1: I'm at a piano right now, We've got eight notes
Speaker 1: in what we call a scale on the piano, We've
Speaker 1: got eight different white notes, and these are kind of
Speaker 1: the foundations of piano music or any music in general,
Speaker 1: these eight different notes. And so the distance between two
Speaker 1: notes is what we call an interval. So I'm at
Speaker 1: a piano, so this is where I'm starting. This is
Speaker 1: one note away, that's interval of a second. Three notes away,
Speaker 1: it's an interval a third, five, six, seven, eight. So
Speaker 1: those are our kind of basic different intervals. So what
Speaker 1: we refer to when we say perfect intervals, we're referring
Speaker 1: to afferent fifth and an eighth. So in that line
Speaker 1: from Lexus realizes perfect sound intervals eight degrees and five degrees,
Speaker 1: that's what they're talking about. And so the reason that
Speaker 1: those those are considered perfect intervals is because when we
Speaker 1: have two notes that've got different frequencies, and it actually
Speaker 1: has to do with the frequencies between the two pitches
Speaker 1: being and what the ratio is. And so when you've
Speaker 1: got perfect intervals, the ratio is really small, and they
Speaker 1: sound just more pleasing, more pure, what we say is
Speaker 1: more consonant. And so these fifth and that's this eighth,
Speaker 1: those are pure sounds. So I have an example of
Speaker 1: these this fifth and this eight, these perfect intervals, which
Speaker 1: I think are are very well known, and it's from
Speaker 1: the two THO one, a Space Odyssey theme. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: this is this is what it is. I'll play it
Speaker 1: for you. So we start with one note and then
Speaker 1: we're going to build an eight, a perfect octave on top.
Speaker 1: Then we're going to add a fifth, and then we're
Speaker 1: going to add another octave. So here we go. So
Speaker 1: this is our base note. Hm, that's an octave above. Ye,
Speaker 1: that's another fifth above. That's another octave above, and that's
Speaker 1: nothing too, a perfect yeah. Yeah, yeah, So that's a
Speaker 1: that's an example of a of a progression using perfect
Speaker 1: intervals exactly. And it's there's something incredibly stirring about perfect
Speaker 1: intervals are familiar, powerful, iconic. I mean, it's fascinating when
Speaker 1: you watch when you sports are an super interesting example
Speaker 1: of that. Um so like taking up to the ball game,
Speaker 1: take may out that take may is an octave, that's
Speaker 1: the perfect eight, and so people will sing that and
Speaker 1: they don't know anything about music, don't want anything about intervals,
Speaker 1: but that that's just like natural for them. They'll be
Speaker 1: able to wait and then what's the take me, what's
Speaker 1: the third note? That's a major sixth? Yeah, which is
Speaker 1: not a which is not you break the perfect You
Speaker 1: begin with the perfect interval, and then you break it
Speaker 1: come out of it, yeah yeah, which gives the song
Speaker 1: poslutely makes it interest right right, yeah right, I'd be boring.
Speaker 1: And all the music we listened to sam with like space.
Speaker 1: But at the heart of that, that iconic beginning is
Speaker 1: they are referencing this perfect interval. Yeah, same, the somewhere
Speaker 1: over a rainbow some what that's an octave and then
Speaker 1: it goes out for rainbow we go, we get out
Speaker 1: of it. But that that perfect octave is the base
Speaker 1: of lots of our music. But not all intervals are perfect.
Speaker 1: If you don't sweat the details, you can have a
Speaker 1: lousy interval. I want you to give me an example
Speaker 1: of something that doesn't work, like using the same the
Speaker 1: same uh space Odyssey do and you do something with
Speaker 1: simple space his work. Now I think you see the
Speaker 1: point of all of this. The sound of an engine
Speaker 1: under acceleration is an interval. Now does anyone care what
Speaker 1: their food processor sounds like when it speeds up from
Speaker 1: low to medium to high no, a food processor is
Speaker 1: an appliance, but to the car nuts at Lexus, a
Speaker 1: car is not an appliance. It's a living, breathing piece
Speaker 1: of mechanical art that exists to bring pleasure to the driver.
Speaker 1: You start with what the driver wants, and you work
Speaker 1: backwards and what does the driver want in his or
Speaker 1: her heart? From that glorious naturally aspirate cross plane V
Speaker 1: eight a perfect acceleration interval composure relation. That's why Annalie's
Speaker 1: face said that is so genius. When I brought up
Speaker 1: the sound of the LC at the dinner party, realizes
Speaker 1: perfect sound intervals eight degrees in five degrees with three
Speaker 1: or more orders of vibration Musica Universe salis, It's totally pleasurable.
Speaker 1: I can only imagine how satisfying it would be to
Speaker 1: be in a car that as it as it runs
Speaker 1: up and gets fat, you know faster, is making these
Speaker 1: perfectly pleasing intervals that everyone wants to listen to. It's amazing.
Speaker 1: It's totally wild. I mean, so many people wanted aware
Speaker 1: of it. But like I was mentioned in this piano teacher,
Speaker 1: I had that you know as a cars as her
Speaker 1: cars were being actually aware of what the intervals are like.
Speaker 1: Ninety nine point nine percent of the population doesn't care
Speaker 1: about For people who notice, it's fantastic all out the wait,
Speaker 1: what's the name of your teacher? Shirley? Surely so, Alexis says,
Speaker 1: please Shirley, she will love us. Lexus needs to get Shirley. Shirley,
Speaker 1: wherever you are, you need to get yourself, Alexis. Go
Speaker 1: and See is produced by Jacob Smith with Emily Rosteck
Speaker 1: and Carl Migliari, edited by Julia Barton. Evan Viola composed
Speaker 1: our theme music and mixed and mastered our episodes. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Head of Fame, Paul Williamson, the
Speaker 1: Mark Levinson engineers, and all the Lexus executives, engineers and
Speaker 1: designer who participated in our recordings. Go and See is
Speaker 1: a production of Lexus and Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Webb.