Malcolm Smith, PhD

Harold Hausenfluck left us this past year.  He took with him one of the greatest set of ears that any old time mountain musician had or probably will ever have.  Cantankerous, often rude and definitely politically incorrect, Harold was a fiddler extraordinaire, an accomplished banjo player, a critic of musical approaches and styles, and perhaps, most importantly, an incredible teacher who’s students are some of the greatest Appalachian musicians on the planet.  Accomplished current players like Mark Campbell, Mac Traynham, Andy Buckman, Trish Fore, and many others credit their musical proficiency to Harold’s teaching and recordings.  Not only was Harold a master musician, he was a lifelong student of mountain music, in search of an authentic mountain sound.

Harold Hausenfluck’s Banjo Recording available from http://www.fieldrecorders.org

Blinded during infancy, Harold grew up with a father who loved old time music and who fostered that same passion in Harold by taking him to experience fiddle contests, concerts, and play parties across SW Virginia.  Harold’s first self-taught instrument was the harmonica and that led him to both the fiddle and the banjo in his teen years.  Born in 1952, Harold was an eager learner who focused his intense musical capacities on learning from the last of the authentic “old timers” like Wade Ward of Independence, VA.; Glen Smith of Hillsville; Abe Horton of Fancy Gap, Dent Wimmer of Floyd County, Joe Birchfield from Roan Mountain, TN and others.  He developed both an extremely solid sense of rhythm and the ability to emulate and dissect the exact fiddle strokes and banjo brushes of the old timers. Thankfully, Harold was fascinated with the medium of radio and recording and left us with hours and hours of his playing and of his self-produced radio shows.

According to Mac Traynham and several others that knew him, Harold was always searching for the illusive “Mountain Whum.”  Harold would describe the “whum” as an ideal mix of intonations on the banjo that allowed the instrument to resonate in a certain, beautiful manner, combining perfect tension on the head, a resonant wood on the pot of the banjo, and a forceful, deep method of playing that brought all of the strings into a perfect harmonious sound.  Banjoist Glen Smith had it, Harold commented, but Wade Ward did not.  Some folks got it on an open backed banjo, some on a resonator banjo.  When someone produced the “whum,” it made Harold ecstatic. He could hardly contain his excitement.

For me, the “whum” explains a lot about modern day clawhammer players. It explains why most of us have more banjos under the bed and hiding in closets than we ever admit to our spouses or significant others.  It explains why we would pay 40 or 50 bucks to find the perfect stuffing to put in the back of our banjos, from sea sponges to plush toys to specifically manufactured “banjo bolsters” to dampen the overtones and supposedly adjust the “whum” factor.  Harold’s keen ears, his life of immersion in old time music, and his intense passion for the mountain sound demanded he search, constantly, for the “Whum.”

Overtones and Ghost Tones

There is another phenomenon that in my mind is closely related to the “mountain whum.” It happened again to me in a recent jam.  There were maybe 15 musicians playing together in a great sounding wood encased room – a remodeled grain silo.  There were at least three fiddlers locked together in beautiful melody with guitars banjos and bases following their lead and just as I reached the euphoric state that many of us refer to as “the old time trance,” those moments in the tune when you become totally mindful of the tune and the notes rise from your fingers effortlessly, when suddenly I was hearing overtones.  Notes were filling the void above the music as if there was a fourth fiddle in the room playing harmonious notes that seemed to embellish the tune in a new and unusual way.  I looked around to see who this new fiddle part was being played by.  No one. I focused on the lone mandolin player in the jam.  It wasn’t him. The fleeting fourth part came and went and soon the tune was over.  If I had not heard this phenomenon many times over the years at jams and campouts, parties and practices, I would have been blown away.  Where did that fourth part come from?

Turns out that the answer to that question is a worm hole that a person can spend hours crawling through. Basically, there are two schools of thought about ghost fiddles and other sounds hovering above a jam.  The first is mechanical the second is purely mental.  One camp firmly believes that these notes, tones, voices and sounds are the result of luthiery and of one’s ear sensitivity.  Like the “mountain whum,” it is believed that many luthiers seek for their instruments to be carefully calibrated to produce melodic overtones and that this quality increases both the sound quality and the playability of the instruments.  Legendary fiddle maker Albert Hash, for example would start each Appalachian Spruce fiddle he built by whumping various trees with a rock to hear the tonal quality of the wood. Others, like guitar builder Jackson Cunningham adjust the thickness and bracing of their guitar tops according to the overtones a certain piece of wood produces.

In other words, ghost tones or “whum” are the mechanical result of certain qualities of tonal wood that cause a note to produce multiple oscillations above the primary note picked, and when those sounds meet the oscillations produced by a variety of strings played together, they produce a new set of sounds that can be heard and interpreted by sensitive ears.  This all make sense until you start to ask musicians about the qualities of ghost notes they hear in a jam.

“All of a sudden I heard someone singing words to that fiddle tune.  It was clear as a bell, but as soon as I looked around the jam and there was absolutely no one singing that tune!”  Over the past two years, while mulling over this writing piece, I have asked over 100 acoustic musicians about the experiences with “whum,” ghost notes, overtones and voices.  Some musicians told me it happened frequently in Bluegrass harmony singing, when three voices locked in gospel harmonies produce a fourth part, a harmonious voice.  Still others said the “notes” actually sounded like talking, as though there was someone rudely talking over the jam tune.  Many explained that they thought it was the old-timers talking from beyond, expressing their likes or dislikes for the way the tune was being played.  Although they usually said it with a laugh, this remark often caused me chills.

This leads to the second predominate theory in the academic literature (yes people in academic caves spend hours mulling over this type of thing.)   These folks believe that a musical experience is much like watching TV in that the mind is constantly filling in the spaces between, below and above the notes.  In other words, when you grab your Cheetos and your remote to tune into the latest Netflix offering, it is a fact that you are only seeing one line of graphic display at a time and that your mind is imagining the rest as the screen illuminates rapidly downward.  The belief here is that your mind is rapidly filling in sound between the notes to make a song, and that during this engagement, your mind sometimes fills in things that it thinks should be there, such as tones, notes, singing and yes, even talking.  In other words it’s a figment of your imagination, your dream.

So, the question is, for me, are the ghosts of old time music real?  Are they the diabolic plot of centuries of fiddle, banjo, mandolin and guitar makers and the councious act of scary bluegrass and church singers or are they the fiction of my imagination?  It’s a lot like the ultimate old time question, “Where’d you come from? Where’d you go, Uncle Joe?”

For many years, another related scientific theory was predominate. It goes clear back to 1714 when musical sage and violinist, Giuseppe Tartini noticed that when he played two notes on his fiddle at the same time, they would produce, amazingly, a third sound.  He called it a “combination” tone because it consisted of frequencies from both notes. Immediately, and for at least the next 200 hundred years, audiologists believed that this note was created inside a person’s ear by the cochlea rather than being a product of the instrument. Eventually, sometime in the 19^th Century a German physicist proved that certain instruments could produce combination or ghost tones on their own. Recently, researchers have gone deeper by comparing paired notes on different violins and separating the sound waves.  They found that all five instruments used in the study produced ghost tones, but that the OLDER instruments produced the strongest overtones.  They also tested who could hear these phantom notes, by playing the notes for a group of amateur and professional musicians.  Over 93% of the time everyone heard the “ghosties.”

Needless to say, this research is only getting started, but current thinking is the ghost is in the instrument, not residing in my ear.  It is my conclusion that whatever we’re hearing is real, not an auditory illusion.  It is also my opinion that we must all continue, in tribute to Harold Hausenfluck, to keep searching for the Mountain Whum and listening to what the old timers are singing and saying to us.

References:

University of South Wales Physics Department (2023) Tartini Tones and Temperament,Retrieved Nov. 1, 2023 from: https://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/tartini-temperament.htm

Padavick-Callaghan, K. (2022) Phantom Notes on the Violin Turn out to be a Real Sound. Retrieved Nov. 1, 2023 from https://www.newscientist.com/article/2344992-