Notions

"What we need are notions, not notations."

— Karl Freidrich Gauss

The notion of a drone in music is varied; it may be a hum or a buzz or a note or maybe even a chord produced by a sustaining instrument. Or it may not be sustained. The drone need not use the same note always; it may generally stay on the starting note but sometimes switch to some other note, a 4th or a 5th away might be typical, especially just before the end of a phrase when the other voice or voices return to the starting note. All this can be notated in various ways, for example with English prose, or as an audio file.

The drone here usually stays on C, except where it changes to F before the start of the next section, and mostly but not always switches back to C at the start. Too much regularity may be a bad thing. The melodic voice above wanders around in C Dorian with not much care for harmony, and mostly does not overlap with itself.

    $ scalemogrifier --mode=dorian --flats
    c d ees f g a bes c'

Or it's not really a drone as the instrument—named "Wooble Dooble", if you must know, picked by clicking on random things—repeats the tone at some interval, though some do include "cluster of tones" in their definition of a drone, though at that point drawing a line to divide a drone from a drum part might be an arbitrary choice. Perhaps the important point is whether there is a drone, and if so what sonic events support that function. Complicated drums? Probably not a drone. The snare drum part in Bolero? Could be a drone. Others will object to a drone definition wide enough to run a rift valley through; this objection might be a definite "no" or could involve some amount of "well okay but I don't like it" grumbling, just as some have the notion that vi is not a general purpose text editor.

(An argument for vi not being a general purpose text editor was that nano is more popular. This perhaps flirts with the bandwagon fallacy. Would nano no longer be a general purpose text editor should its popularity decline? A more likely account is that definitions may at times be tangled up with emotions and other such baggage. (I was also not very impressed with the argument that vi is not a text editor because nano is easier to use.))

The audio above is based on something like glancing at a book cover for certain forms of Georgian (not Gregorian) music, forms rumored to use a bass drone that sometimes switches to other notes, and, being sung, does not always sustain the drone. For different takes on the drone see the pedal point in Western theory, or the drone as is sometimes heard in Indian classical music.

"To make a definition is to highlight and call attention to a feature or structural property."

— Paul Lockhart, "A Mathematician’s Lament"