Discord

Discord

A disagreement.

Not only is taking six half steps an inefficient way to get somewhere, it’s also sonically horrifying—in isolation. Sitting between the perfect fourth and the angelic perfect fifth, the tritone imposes a thoroughly tangled frequency ratio of 64:45, a relationship that would befuddle even the metronomic hands of Buddy Rich. These uniquely incompatibie vibrations, however specific and unpleasant, become less poisonous and more dye-like when dropped carefully into a score. Listen to this ecclectic flight of tritone users—“Mo Bamba”, “Black Sabbath”, and Westiside Story’s “Maria”. The inclusion of an atonal chord lends all three a darker hue without dooming them to a uniform, discordant blackness. Each song blends its own coloration with the murkiness of the diminished fifth into a rainbow of discrete, inky feels—thrilling aggression, haunting satanism, and misty listlesness.

Discord

Dissonance.

When comparing performances and statistics, it’s hard to discern the subject from the mirror. In a simple, elegant game like football, numbers seem a shallow evaluation of reality. Our eyes, however, are disposed to caricature, contorting evaluations to account for the intangible. So is Mohamed Salah worse than he was in 2017? The eye test would suggest that the Egyptian Messi(ah) has lost his spark. Unfortunately, his tallies disagree. Salah has only 1 fewer goal involvement in the Prem through 11 games (5 goals and 4 assists vs. 7 goals and 3 assists). What’s more—Liverpool have improved their points tally by a healthy 8, all while scoring just one fewer goal. This disconnect between numerics and aesthetics aptly brands football as ”the beautiful game”—a competition that values artistry as much as scoring.