The #9 Song of All-Time on Rolling Stone's List of the Top 500 Greatest: Nirvana, SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT, meanspeed=117.4 bpm, meanemotion=foreboding

speed graph © 2007 meanspeed.com





This song by the American band Nirvana called Smells Like Teen Spirit is the ultimate grunge rock foreboding song. What is foreboding, anyway? Courtesy of Mirriam Webster's Collegiate 11th edition: coined around 14 c.--an omen, prediction or presentiment esp. of coming evil: portend. Most useful: the descriptive word "foreboding"' is the presentimet or fortelling which indicates that the speaker/singer/musician feels an indescribable force--often, as noted, a bad omen. Then again, as anyone knows who has been in a situation where all hopes seemed dashed by a terrible sign of things to come, all matters about which you stress are resolved with a positive ending . In Kurt Cobain's case, the result was: suicide. was this song a presetiment of Kurt's blowing himself away? Only Hole knows for sure. With so much written about the apparent "meanig" of this song, as linked above on sites as established as Wikipedia.org and Songfacts.com that I have chosen a graph made with numerical coordinates that visually display the warning about dangerous things to come associated with this song: Kurt's suicide, an American empire so vast as to be almost uncontrollable, and society changing from Agrarian-->Industrial-->Technological-->Digital so fast and furious as to create an undefinable frustrated malaise amongst the young. We really started to see this portrayed perfectly in the classic film Heathers starring Christian Slater and Winona [Horowitz] Ryder: the frustration about the future of the Western world is keenly seen by the Valley people. The final scene of the masterpiece--Heathers--bear the most eerie liking to the music video for Smells Like Teen Spirit.

The meanspeed, or the speed of the song expressed as beats per minute on this live recording= 117.4 beats per minute.
The meanspace, or time between each beat on the recording= 511 milliseconds. The mean-beat on the recording = 1.96 beats per second.
The mean-frequency, or the speed of the song expressed as cycles per second on the studio recording = 1.96 Hertz.
The mean-tone= 500.91 Hertz in equal temperament, just slightly higher than B natural. This song features a frequency closest to that of the note B natural, while the song is played in the key of G major. In equal temperament, in closest in proximity with B4 where the B4=493.883 Hertz, which=29,633.0 beats per minute, divided in half 8 times (256)= 115.8 beats per minute. The next closest tone by frequency is and C5=523.251 Hertz, which=31,395.1 beats per minute, divided in half 8 times (256)= 122.6 beats per minute. For more on tone frequency, sound vibration and their correspondence to beats per minute, see Stephen Jay's The Theory of Harmonic Rhythm, linked with Stephen's kind permission on meanspeed.com.

The graph is based on a spreadsheet generated with this method: a) I calibrated groups of every single measure (four quarter-notes) ten times with Seiko 300-lap stopwatches; b) Ten trials were averaged, coordinated and synthesized. I the created the speed graph in Microsoft's Excel for MacIntosh 2004 on an Apple iBook G4 as hardware. The numerical coordinates are available upon request.

Coffee courtesy of Meredith and United States Army Bronze Star Army Captain Jeff Schneider of TexasRoast.com


Ian Schneider
meanspeed.com
May 9, 2007--Happy Birthday, Billy Joel.