This continues the series of guest columns about how technology is reshaping people's hobbies and passions – fishing, basket weaving, community service – whatever.
This time it is Leonardo Kenji Shikida at Vetta Labs LTDA a Brazilian company that sells R&D in technologies such as industrial optimization, computer vision and artificial intelligence.
“My day job involves working with a number of Ph.Ds in Biology I am integrating biotech analytical tools into a NIH Toxicology web portal. No, my hobby has little to do with esoteric compounds or Java development I did earlier …but harmonicas which I have played since I was 14. And in the last two decades I have also played a role in keeping the art of playing the instrument alive in Brazil, a country with no shortage of musical genres and instruments.
As you will see technology has only made slight adjustments to the harmonica, yet there has been a huge amount of innovation in how musicians have used it in the last few decades.
My interest in the harmonica started accidentally. I remember I had the chicken pox and I had to stay at home. Bored, I found my father’s old harmonica. He used to play Japanese songs (our ancestry) on it – I think. Of course, I had just entered my teen years and all my friends were learning to play something to meet girls and this became my thing to show off - you know how it works:)
My serious interest began with blues - from a song called "The first time I met the blues", recorded by Buddy Guy in the Berlin Guitar Festival, when he was 19 or 20 years old.
A few years later, social networks were starting (but we did not call them that) with the help of Geocities and Yahoo Groups. Since I was a technology enthusiast, I started a harmonica mailing list in my city and soon that blossomed into a nation-wide list.
I had started as a coach to newbies but soon I was the list administrator, trying to bring some manners to the group, trying to balance freedom of speech and mutual respect. I was learning the basics of Relationship Marketing on the web, I guess.
That role led to travel and new friends along with my easy-to-pack harmonica friends…which reminds me, I better talk about them.
Harmonicas are musical instruments with a long history. The “mouth organ” shows in Chinese history going back several centuries. But it got really popular during the 1930s, the "Golden Age", with Borrah Minevitch and his Harmonica Rascals. He also popularized the Chromatic Harmonica. "Chromatic" as in it could easily reach both white and black keynotes of the piano. This kind of harmonica has a small switch or key and has a very distinctive and clear sound, as you can hear when Toots Thielemans or Larry Adler, two of the most famous chromatic players, play their beautiful tunes.
At the same time, country blues singers were reinventing the "harp", or the Diatonic Harmonica, playing a "Diatonic" instrument (that, when tuned in C, reaches only the white keynotes of the piano), "bending" notes, necessary to play the blues scale. This technique also has brought some unusual expression to the instrument, and its the real charm of the instrument.
Then, after WWII, cities such as Chicago started to absorb workers from nearby rural areas, and those blues players went to the city and started to electrify their sound, and so their harps. The instrument sound became more aggressive and harp players started to explore the distortions of amplifiers and bullet mics (mics shaped like a bullet).
In the 1970s, a guy called Howard Levy, started to push the instrument to new limits exploring a strange effect called "overblow". Strange as in it took years for people to know how it worked. Harps are basically a series of holes, where each hole has 2 reeds, one that vibrates when you blow and another when you draw. Well, the overblow effect is caused by the opposite reed due to an unusual interaction and confluence of small adjustments in the harp and in the musician technique, So "diatonic" harp which already had more notes through "bending", now had even more notes by "overblowing". The instrument again changed and people started to play even more complex songs on it.
To make things even worse (for new players), people like Levy started to play in the commas instead of the regular notes, to reach the right sounds in Oriental music. To me, it is a ninja technique, where, instead of reaching the right note (do, re, mi) you reach one of the 5 possible sub-notes between a regular do and its neighboring do flat (or do sharp), that only Arabian music or Kraftwerk could possibly reach in a song
Of course, Bob Dylan made it much more mainstream when he used his harp as a percussion instrument.
More recently, the world has seen John Popper (Blues Traveler band) pushing the limits of the instrument in terms of speed, Jason Ricci bringing overblows into modern blues and Carlos del Junco pushing overblows into distinctive jazz and blues themes. At the same time, Jean Jacques Milteau just keeps it simple and emotional, pleasing most audiences.
Meanwhile, Stevie Wonder has brought the Chromatic Diatonic back to pop music, playing it marvelously and composing memorable solos such as Eurythmics´ "There must be an angel" (see video below). And people continue to innovate the instrument, as Yuri Lane does with "Beatbox" - or in plain English, Harmonica meets Rap.
And that’s it. Harp is a charming, portable and inexpensive musical instrument, and if you study it well, you can even have some fun in the next blues jam in your city and get your 30 seconds of fame on stage.
And maybe get yourself on YouTube. There you go – that’s the technology angle for this column!”
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