A Beatles Song

We will examine the structure of an improvisational rendition of the George Harrison song, While my guitar gently weeps, by the guitar virtuoso, Laurence Juber.  (For a video of his performance, click here).

Here is the spectrogram for the first 1' 40" of the music:

Play video:  RAR   (Note:  all videos on this page are compressed RAR archives, these files can be decompressed with WinRAR or WinZIP-11.)

In addition to the beautifully rich timbral aspects of the guitar sounds, there is also considerable dialectical and hierarchical structure to this spectrogram.  For example, compare these three selections:

From 1' 15" to 1' 21"             From 1' 30 to 1' 35"                 From 1' 55" to 2' 05"

Play video:   RAR                        Play video:   RAR                         Play video:   RAR

The second selection is a repetition of the first, while the third is a repetition but over a two-times longer time- scale.  Notice also the triangularly shaped pitch excursions (shown in the yellow boxes), as we see in the first Chinese folk song.

Finally, we notice that there is two-times shortened time-scale rendition of an introductory passage:

From 4" to 37"                                                                                         From 1' 20" to 1' 37"   

Play video:   RAR                                                                                     Play video:   RAR 

There are dialectical oppositions between descending and ascending pitch contours here, as well as between the slow tempo of the descending pitch contour (which also exhibits, at least partially, an infinite descent pitch illusion of Shepard) versus the quicker tempo of the ascending pitch contours.