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Bass isn’t only crucial to the listening experience, it has played an important social role in many musical cultures – including my own, says culture writer Micha Frazer-Caroll
Noun; denoting the member of a family of instruments that is the lowest in pitch.
When it comes to the constituent parts that make up our experience of music, bass is a dark horse. It’s crucial to a song feeling whole. For almost any given piece of music, bass is the glue that holds everything together. For me, it’s the emotional core that guides me through a song.
Yet, bass often goes criminally underrated. This is in part because its musical counterpart, treble – which might include dainty soprano voices and the higher pitched, more standout elements of production – often steals the spotlight. Studies also back this idea, suggesting that while the human brain is better at detecting changes in pitch in the upper ranges (think wailing electric guitar solos or screeching sax), it is faster at detecting low frequency sounds. Cognitive scientists, like the University of Vienna’s Tecumseh Fitch, have hypothesised that this is why bass plays such a vital role in setting the rhythm and structure of a piece.
It makes a lot of sense. In fact, the very nature of video-gaming is dependent on exceptional scores. If music can be used as a tool not only to echo, but establish, control or amplify our emotions, where could it be more necessary than in worlds we’re not only immersing ourselves in, but actively engaging with?
As a result, in almost every genre, bass has its own story. Consider jazz music, which might include a huge amount of modulation and improvisation; bassists play an integral part in reorienting the listener, and ensuring a piece still sounds coherent. And, if we cast our lens back as far as the 17th century Baroque period, ground bass – a short theme repeated throughout a piece, while melody and harmonies evolve – was the foundation upon which composers like Henry Purcell and Johann Pachelbel would build their music. Throughout a composition, ground bass would often be unchanging.
Today, bass tones are best replicated by woofers – speakers that take their name from the deep sound of a dog’s “woof”. It’s necessary to push a lot of air to create a low frequency sound, so woofers are usually cone-shaped. For extremely low bass, there are also subwoofers – which range between around 20-200Hz, and augment the sound produced by loudspeakers that cover higher frequencies. From an equipment perspective, these are the elements that have helped me enjoy a good old thumping bassline throughout my life.
Being a British-Caribbean person, bass pops up time and time again in my own community’s social history. When I was a child, my mum permanently tweaked the bass on our car stereo to the maximum setting (with the treble turned down accordingly). On the school run, the hip hop compilations we listened to so religiously would vibrate through the whole car and rattle the dashboard. “If you can’t feel it in your chest, the bass isn’t loud enough,” mum loved to proclaim over the buzz of the stereo, as if she were imparting some objective wisdom that would come in handy later in life.
Mum’s love for bass had easily traceable roots. Like many first generation West Indians living in Britain, she inherited it from Caribbean sound system culture. Originating in 1940s Jamaica, sound system street parties revolved around trucks loaded up with turntables, generators and huge speakers, which might be around eight feet tall. In the beginning, these parties mainly featured rhythm and blues, but over time evolved into ska, reggae and rocksteady music. By the late 1950s the technology had also evolved, with custom-built, wardrobe-sized systems popping up from the workshops of specialists like sound engineer and inventor Hedley Jones. DJs (who rapped over the music) were crucially important, as was bass, with speakers capable of playing bass frequencies at 30,000 watts.
Then, come the 1970s and 80s, systems started to become more heavily customised. Foam was added to subwoofer enclosures to increase the quality of frequencies below 100 Hertz (consider that 20Hz is around the lowest frequency humans can hear). Speakers were no longer standalone, but low and high bass bins would be piled on top of one another to achieve the sort of chest vibration that my mum still speaks about today.
A group of people moving speakers, constructing a sound system Notting Hill, Carnival, London, UK, 1983
Around the same time in England, sound system and sound clash culture found another life in the basements of ‘Blues Parties’. These informal, ticketed nights were held by members and descendants of the Windrush Generation – who migrated from the Caribbean to Britain between the 1950s and 70s. The same, gigantic systems were the star of the show at these parties, and would be carefully loaded into the host’s house during party preparations. Nights would be full of the dulcet sounds of Lovers’ Rock – the 1970s musical love child of reggae and soul – which heavily featured slow, syncopated rhythms, bass guitar, and, occasionally chest-trembling bass solos.
Whether it’s reverberating through your body at a rave or adding balance to a sonata, low frequency sound has the ability to ground us, emotionally move us, physically move us.
Predictably, Blues parties were plagued by racially-motivated police raids. One interviewee anecdotally remembers in Steve McQueen’s most recent documentary Uprising, police might pierce the speakers during ambushes, rendering them unusable. It was the most invasive form of property destruction – destroying the bass meant destroying the party.
And so, despite the eventual demise of Blues Parties (compounded by persistent police presence), bass remains in the DNA of both my community, and of Britain. After Lovers’ Rock, and a subsequent reggae and ska revival, its low frequencies crept their way into Hip Hop, R&B, and of course Drum and Bass. The latter, in particular, found its home at other types of underground rave, which borrowed from the Jamaican sound clash style of speaker stacking.
Bass is crucial to the listening experience; it’s the first thing to go when music is played on phones, laptops or cheap Bluetooth speakers. It has also played an important social role in so many musical cultures, including my own. Whether it’s reverberating through your body at a rave or adding balance to a sonata, low frequency sound has the ability to ground us, emotionally move us, physically move us, and, as a result, create a certain spirit of togetherness in the listening experience. Music – and our parties – would be hollow without it.
Micha is an award-nominated journalist and arts columnist for the Independent..
She is former opinions editor at gal-dem magazine.