Axehole

Every week, Axehole selects something from the music world that makes you ask “WTF?”

This week’s pick is the Tritone Keyboard, Axehole’s first “virtual WTF”.

The tritone keyboard is arranged in a circle, and playing any note also plays a second tone, exactly one half-octave away in pitch. Playing the keyboard clockwise or counterclockwise results in an effect of an infinitely rising or falling series of pitches.

This week’s WTF Friday item is also a great excuse to share another link that looks at the use of the tritone in metal music.

In you aren’t familiar with the term “tritone”, it refers to the musical interval of three whole-tones (six half-steps on a keyboard). The interval is considered the most dissonant in music, so much so that it was historically associated with the devil and was avoided.

All the more reason to rock with it, according to an article in BBC News,
The Devil’s Music.

On the surface there might appear to be no link between Black Sabbath, Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, West Side Story and the theme tune to the Simpsons.

But all of them rely heavily on tritones, a musical interval that spans three whole tones, like the diminished fifth or augmented fourth. This interval, the gap between two notes played in succession or simultaneously, was branded Diabolus in Musica or the Devil’s Interval by medieval musicians.

A rich mythology has grown up around it. Many believe that the Church wanted to eradicate the sounds from its music because it invoked sexual feelings, or that it was genuinely the work of the Devil.

It is a mythology much beloved of long-haired guitar wizards.

In the newly-released documentary Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, bassist Alex Webster of death metal act Cannibal Corpse pays tribute to the effect of the forbidden “Devil’s note” on heavy metal.

Cannibal Corpse? You know a band with a name like that would understand the tritone, in all its dissonant power!