Last week, I listened to all five hours of La Monte Young’s “Well Tuned Piano.” Two things that struck me most about the piece:

1. The simple act of detuning the instrument turns it into a completely different beast.

2. The overtones are as much a part of the piece as the fundamental frequencies. At times the overtones combine to create a wash of white noise so dense that it threatens to swallow up piano and performer.

This morning, as I was changing the strings on my acoustic guitar, I picked up the guitar to find that I had inadvertently tuned it to a beautiful, full minor chord several steps down from standard tuning (normally I put on all the strings before tuning any of them). As I noodled for a moment, I realized that just as in Young’s piece, my guitar no longer sounded like a guitar. I continued to play and improvise for several minutes, recording as I went.

The tuning was rich and low, with lots of buzzing metal on wood. But I wanted more of that white noise effect that buoys Young’s piano up into the heavens. So I twiddled some knobs and pressed some buttons on the laptop, letting loose a wave of sound that could be heard as either the logical extension of the overtone-as-white-noise aesthetic or a gauche bastardization of it, depending on your perspective. Listen below:

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