This is accomplished by an accented beat or a surge in rhythmic fashion. It is an actual physical thud repeated.

It is to be remarked as an aside that the modern mixing engineer with his frail equipment uses what is called a limiter to keep from being blown off the board and he is actually killing the physiological impact. In other words on albums and so forth you don’t hear the surge to the degree that it is played and it is often not even played to that surge. Seldom being musicians, the sound engineers have not really worked out a way to handle this. It is actually quite simple: You just carry the level of the program 2 or 3 dB down from 0 on your VU meter or as low as even -7 dB and let the physiological impact of the drums, etc., shoot it up to 0. The rest of the program would fall below -4 or -7 or whatever and for the usual playback machines, could go as low as -15. In this way physiological impact would be preserved.

Most rock songs are composed just of chords such as you find in a guitar book. They take a chord progression and work with it. The probable reason they do this is that it is actually harder to put beat or impact into a melody. One can take chords and bang the guitars and drums at the same time and produce a surge. It requires a lot more expertise to do this with band instruments in melody. Their singers too, in most cases are not following any melody because they are introducing shouts and it is easiest to do this by just going up and down some chord progression. It would take a much more expert singer to throw real impact into melody. (The singing you hear on rock is really not part and parcel of rock at all -- there is no reason for somebody to sound like he is being lynched just to produce excitement. Presley rather pushed this into the scene heavily but it is not really part and parcel of rock at all. It takes a very skilled singer to sing with excitement and actually sing properly.)

The key to rock is really beat. The dictionary defines beat as, “Music. A regular pulsation; the basic unit of musical time. The measured sound of verse; rhythm.”

What makes actual rock rock is by accenting the beat. The definition of accent is, “Music. Emphasis or stress on a note or chord.”

In examining rhythm I recently invented what you could call “counter-rhythm” which would underlie the drum rhythm usually at lower pitch than the drums. This counter-rhythm would surge exactly in the same way as the rest of the beat.

This accent is repetitive. This is done usually by hitting the principal drum at the quarter note point being accented or by adding a bass at that point or some other such mechanism. A very expert drummer of course can change the volume of sound on the same drum.

It is with this surge that physiological impact is produced.

The genre, rock, has an emotional target in most cases of excitement. Most modern rock groups, however, forget that they are dealing with sound and perform in an excited way while not really playing in an excited way. But the real stars could produce a feeling of excitement. They do this by various mechanisms but I assure you they haven’t actually really touched the mechanisms available. Presley rather set the pace and left his brand on rock singing but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to sing like Presley - a long way from it.

Excitement consists of the emotional response of something of great interest happening or about to happen but excitement can be produced simply by successions of notes and melodic sounds. In trying to do this singers lose articulation and who knows what they’re singing about. In other words, they are not well enough trained to sing excitedly and articulately and substitute for it getting strangled. It takes real skill to shout, for instance, and still have somebody understand what you’re shouting about and still shout melodiously. They manage it in opera. They managed it exceptionally well in light opera. But those guys had trained voices.

The conclusion of the analysis is that if one combined points 1 to 7 above with (a) to (d) above, one would really produce some stellar, popular music.

But it should be added that such music would have to be handled well from beginning to end. Proportionate sound would have to be known about and used in arranging, recording and mixing (this is the technique of “separation” -- as it is known in the recording industry. Without it one gets instruments wiped out and gets clashing and mushes.)

It is agreed that it takes real expertise to bring off all those points in a piece of music but it can be done.

An analysis of rock as it is being performed contemporarily shows that it is not being done.

Thus the door is wide open to a new era of popular music.