This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at U Maine chapter.
This is the twelfth installment of a weekly posting right here on Her Campus UMaine! I’m a local Music Producer and DJ in the Orono area looking to share the sounds and culture of EDM with others. Twice a week you can catch me spinning some of the latest and greatest electronic tracks of today, Thursdays at 11pm on UMaine’s very own WMEB 91.9 FM and Fridays at 11pm-4am on Radio207.com. Each week I will be bringing you one of my favorite EDM tracks, varying from electro house, trap, dubstep, trip-hop, and more.
A crunch is a sound we all know and love. Even the word crunch brings a smile to my face. There is a sheer presence of aurgasmic bliss as you bite into a crisp fall apple, a salty ruffled potato chip, or maybe even a bowl of cereal first thing in the morning. The sound of a crunch can fill your entire head, blocking out the entire world around in a pleasing cacophonous uproar. In my personal opinion, a crunch is the most pleasing sound to the human ear. It gives the ability to scratch an impossibly satisfying audible itch. In the music world, crunchy sounds are highly underrated. Electronic music, in particular, caters to mainly bass-heads, forcing the EDM enthusiasts to go out and buy bigger, badder, spleen rattling subwoofers. Here is a quick sound science lesson; Bass that you can feel is often found down below the 60 hertz range. Bass we hear is typically between 60hz and 200hz. The rest of the mix down is often between 200hz and 10khz. Blah blah blah boring. The point i’m trying to make is that the frequencies above 10khz are often disregarded or not exemplified/sought over. The sad thing is, this is the crunch zone or the range where you begin to “feel” sounds again. I can give you an example. Please do this now, take your thumb and pointer finger of your left hand and gently rub them together about an inch away from your ear. The sensation you get is produced by the frequencies higher than 10khz. That’s what gives a snare sound its snap and the hi-hat its ability to pierce through the other sounds of a drum kit. It excites me to know that there is so much room, an entire world for electronic music producers to explore in this frequency range. This leads me to this week’s Midweek Beat. This track by Joe Ford, “Frozen Sound” takes crunchy to a whole new level. The glitches, pops, and scratches, gently scratch your electronic music itch while maintaing a ground floor low enough to keep all you bass-heads happy. These concepts are something that every music producer should keep in his/her arsenal. I’ll let the crunch speak for itself. Enjoy!