“I Hear Music In the Air”

It’s well-known and testified that Jimi Hendrix was the first to truly master the art of harnessing amp feedback with single coil electric guitar pickups in the 60s. If you don’t know what that sounds/looks like, peep this footage and feast your ears on the Experience.

So far-out was this sound for the time, it was described as nothing short of “unleashing the Northern Lights” and “invoking extra-terrestrials” into the air by a generation of witnesses to Hendrix’s unbridled mastery. Even with a greatly enriched understanding of acoustics today, the magic is not lost on Hendrix’s radical contribution to rock and roll in the way of combining unintented electrical effects and musical expression.

Meanwhile, half a century later in the upper part of a duplex apartment in Riverwest, Milwaukee, a musician (me) searching for new ways of combining guitar technology and musical expression, stumbles on something quite strange…

The discovery slips in through a recently-acquired piece of gear: a Seymour Duncan Mag Mic active acoustic guitar pickup, installation courtesy of Wade’s Guitar Shop on N Oakland Ave.

It happens when I go to practice a new song, engage my Behringer Compressor/Sustainer pedal, and hear more than the usual feedback coming into my headphones from the PA; there is music, like, fully-produced HQ DJ beats coming out of my guitar…but I’m not playing it!

Ok either 1., I’m tripping (um, were those really Shiitake mushrooms in my omelet this morning?), or 2., Ant Man started a band in my guitar. I hit record on my PA system via USB thumbdrive, and also on my OBS webcam to document the Experience. The following upload is what took place (*cue creepy paranormal found-footage cut):

Is it aurora borealis? Aliens?? Drugs??? Paul Rudd???? Thankfully, none of the above. But then what is that infernal racket? Well, if you watch me sway to and fro, looking like I’ve completely lost any concept of what a guitar even is, and listen to the sound, you’ll notice what I’m talking about:

Incidentally, the tunes jumping out of the static like a car radio are…basically that! In fact, the battery-powered active guitar pickup is somehow catching FM radio waves bouncing in the air from “103.7 Kiss.fm,” a local station, and amplifying them like an antenna through the magnetic pickup/pedal boost. The video and audio here capture me moving around, calibrating the relative angle of the pickup as it governs the clarity of response to the FM signal. #Weird. #Science. #Paul Rudd.

While the technical science is beyond me at the moment, I consider my curiosity piqued and remain somewhat baffled by the physical reality of our environment. How long have I been in this room, not knowing the inaudible contact I’m making with airborne waves scattering about this musique? It makes sense, and in an urban setting, it’s likely they’re doing that everywhere.

Discovering this by accident has certainly amplified my awareness of the physical environment and how “dirty” the air really is. Granted, I’m only a baby step from sputtering tinfoil-hat conclusions about what else is invisible but happening all the time, like neutrinos, or the neighbor’s wailing cat. It makes me less doubtful that people with something like an electromagnetic hypersensitivity diagnosis, or people who hear “things that aren’t there,” are truly tuned into their environment more than other observers can perceive. Paranormal speculation aside, the message shouldn’t go unmentioned that it is almost always worth pursuing things that make you feel inane at first by others or by yourself, because oftentimes they only lead to more exciting and important discoveries.

As for the musician and his discovery—can we entertain the possibility of a revolution in what Hendrix ushered in when capitalizing on amp feedback? What would it take for a guitarist skilled in the art of finessing FM radio waves via guitar pickup to achieve musical brilliance? Don’t ask me, I’ve only just arrived.