You know what to do...
So, once upon a time, there was this young tribal dude
called Mongo. This happened many centuries ago… that’s important to remember,
because I wouldn’t want anyone drawing any strange correlations to our modern,
educated, enlightened society, where superstition and hearsay have no place.
Anyway, so Mongo discovered that if he blew over a hollow reed, it made a
noise. “Wow”, thought Mongo, “that’s pretty awesome”. Mongo took his hollow
reed back to his village, and blew on it. The other villagers were amazed,
although many of them did not understand it. Some of them even tried, and soon
the hobby of blowing over hollow reeds took off.
Not long after, Mongo discovered that reeds of different
lengths made different sounds, varying in pitch. He blew a few times over
various reeds, before heading back to his village. Once again, the villagers
were awe-struck by this amazing new technology, and some of them started doing
it, too. Others, though, thought it was weird the way that the reed-blowers
would gather together and blow reeds together, seemingly for hours at a time.
Reed blowing really started catching on, with Mongo being an
innovator. Before long, he found that he could strap a number of reeds
together, improving the idea of blowing on different lengths. The next
generation of reed blowing arrived.
Once again, the trend caught on, and others started
experimenting with reed blowing. Mongo got a partner, called Bokk, and the two
of them started trying out improved ideas. Soon, they found that they could
arrange the reeds in a sequence, from highest tonality to lowest tonality. They
also found that notes could be played in repetitive order, creating the first
ever tunes… or, and Mongo and Bokk called it, “synchronised hollow reed
acoustic dynamics”, or SHRAD, for short. They were a primitive people, and
hadn’t figured out a complex word like music yet.
SHRAD became very popular, and started spreading from
village to village. And all the while, those that didn’t participate saw the
SHRADers as weird, antisocial and geeky. But they did little more than treat
the SHRAD players with contempt, disrespect and dislike. They didn’t understand
the ideas behind SHRAD, and therefore they didn’t try to educate themselves
about it.
And then, one fateful day, someone in a village near Mongo
and Bokk’s town went a little crazy. He came from a broken hut, see, where mom was
too busy in the fields and dad went on long hunting trips, leaving this guy –
let’s call him Argle – to his own, misguided devices. So Argle goes down to the
nearest reed grove, and finds himself a great big, heavy reed section. He takes
it back and kills everyone in the village. As he swings the reeds over and over
again, the wind blowing over the hollow side of the reed makes a sound just
like SHRAD…
Word of the terrible events spread like dreaded wild-fire,
and the somewhat tenuous connection to SHRAD was not overlooked. Even though
no-one knew that Argle was not a SHRADer, is was assumed that the activity - so
misunderstood by the masses – had led to his actions. Everyone ignored the
influences of his absentee parents. SHRAD was evil, and the village
witch-doctors confirmed it after entering hallucination-states and communing
with their gods. In moments those that knew nothing about SHRAD had vilified,
even demonised it, and refused to accept any opinion other than what they were
told by other non-SHRADers. They didn’t want to educate themselves; it was
obvious that SHRAD was evil, and was to blame for the massacre. Mongo and Bokk
were sentenced to a brutal death in what was one of the world’s first
witch-hunts.
Pretty interesting bit of history, isn’t it? And aren’t you
glad that we live in a time where ignorance, hysteria, lack of education,
presumption and hearsay no longer influence the opinions of the common man?
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