Re: Dylan was right after all

On Sep 9, 1:22 pm, "Sean Carroll" <seanc...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Eric B." <bigb...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote





The legend goes that Dylan complemented the Beatles on saying "I get high"
on IWTHYH, and Lennon corrected him saying it was actually "I can't hide".

The problem is that new mixes have uncovered the vocals to the point that
you can clearly hear that the phonetic requirements that should be there
are not. Each sound we make as we speak has a distinct name such as
plosive, fricative, guttural etc. The word "hide" is easily distinguished
from "high" because to produce the distinctive "d" sound (technically
called a Alveolar plosive) we block the air for a moment using our tongue.
Not only is this sound completely missing, but if it were there it would
be louder than the "i" sound.

Secondly, the words "get" and "can't" are distinguished because the "g"
requires a guttural sound from the back of the throat while the "c"
doesn't.

In defense of the Beatles, Paul does sing "Can't" on the third repeat of
the phrase, but it is not enough to cover what Lennon is saying.

Listen for yourself. The first is the vocals mostly isolated, the second
file is with noise gate applied:

http://www.mediafire.com/?qokddkkuqal
http://www.mediafire.com/?64pew1xzxwj

Remember to listen for the lack of a "d" sound that would be quite evident
if they were singing "hide" instead of "high". Keep in mind by the time of
Pepper there was no shyness to say they "get high with a little help from
their friends". My guess is it was an in-joke between J&P.

You get some points for knowing that stuff about phonetics. (By the way, the
'd' sound is actually a *voiced* alveolar plosive -- and at the end of a
word or syllable, actually, it's sometimes not a plosive at all, but an
*im*plosive. Just plain 'alveolar plosive' could also refer to a 't' sound.)

But your entire analysis falls apart on the facts of dialectal, contextual,
and individual variation. Not everyone pronounces every phoneme
identically -- in fact, almost invariably, the precise phonetics realised
when one person says a particular word are noticeably different from those
of another person saying the same word -- and, in fact, even the *same*
person can pronounce a sound differently depending on the context. The
absence of a 'd' sound can easily be explained by any number of facts. For
starters: (1) The Beatles were British, and spoke with a Liverpudlian
accent. Oftentimes, dialects will be characterised by the elision of certain
phonemes, and terminal consonants are high on the list of the ones that are
often elided. (2) They were not talking, they were singing. Singing involves
fundamentally different sorts of tonal manipulations from normal
conversation, and it is extraordinarily common for it to produce variations
in the phonetic characteristics of words.

Any 'd' sound on the end of that word might have easily vanished for no
other reason than the fact that it came at the very end of a lyrical line,
immediately after a loud and prolonged harmony on the 'long i' diphthong,
and was immediately followed by a sudden change in tongue position for the
beginning of the next line. For that matter, it may have been simply
dropped, or converted into some sort of glottal stop, because they
unconsciously thought it sounded better that way, the same way singers (and
talkers, for that matter) will often unconsciously turn a voiced velar nasal
(an 'ng' sound) into a voiced alveolar nasal (an 'n') when present
participles ('-ing' words) occur in certain contexts.

Besides, they weren't regular pot smokers until after Dylan turned them onto
it. They weren't putting references to getting high in their songs yet
because they weren't part of the drug culture yet -- their experience with
intoxicants was essentially limited to alcohol and Preludin, except for a
few isolated times they'd seen or smoked small amounts of weed when already
drunk.

So nice try, but sorry. Close, but no blunt.

--
--Seanhttp://spclsd223.livejournal.com

House: Oh, I stuck that primo! How rad am I?- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Besides, it doesn't rhyme!

richforman
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Dylan was right after all
    ... Not only is this sound completely missing, but if it were there it would ... The first is the vocals mostly isolated, ... You get some points for knowing that stuff about phonetics. ... But your entire analysis falls apart on the facts of dialectal, contextual, ...
    (rec.music.beatles)
  • Re: Dylan was right after all
    ... The word "hide" is easily distinguished from "high" because to produce the distinctive "d" sound we block the air for a moment using our tongue. ... In defense of the Beatles, Paul does sing "Can't" on the third repeat of the phrase, but it is not enough to cover what Lennon is saying. ... Not everyone pronounces every phoneme identically -- in fact, almost invariably, the precise phonetics realised when one person says a particular word are noticeably different from those of another person saying the same word -- and, in fact, even the *same* person can pronounce a sound differently depending on the context. ...
    (rec.music.beatles)
  • Re: the disapproval click
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