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Paranoid In Relation To Albin Zak

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“Paranoid” from the band Black Sabbath was released in 1970 featured on the album Paranoid. ‘Parnoid’, one of Black Sabbaths iconic songs is equipped with heavy riffs and repeated rhythms giving it the ability to stand alone and out from the crowd.
In this short essay I will discuss “Paranoid” in relation to Albin Zak’s 5 categories: Musical Performance, Echo, Timbre, Ambience and Texture. Alongside these categories I will also discuss what makes this song iconic and what ingredients are mixed together to form their famous ‘sonic signature’.
Musical performance is a key ingredient for any song being performed, without a type of performance would you have music? Musical performance does not only mean live performance in-front of an audience …show more content…

So how does a performer, in this case, Black Sabbath, captivate the audience to listen to their music even with repetitive rhythms and no visual stimulus?
One thing that captivates a listener of “Paranoid” is the use of panning and 3D sound recording to enrapture a surround, full sounding track. The iconic opening riff (which is one of the most famous heavy metal opening riffs of all time (Staff, 2007)) is a great example of this, it is only played in the left ear from 0:00-0:07. “Paranoid” also features a repetitive rhythm and a steady cymbal beat leaving it easy to tap along to: this “motif” so to speak, can be heard from 1:00-1:11.
Not a lot was lost in the transformation from live to recorded as they didn't use many techniques which can create a larger impact such as auto-tuning and so there was a similarity between the live and recorded edition making it more enjoyable to listen to. The studio recoded track being parallel to the live recording gives the listener an authentic feel; what you hear is what you …show more content…

In short it is the ‘sonic colour’ which distinguishes the genre and/or artist thus transforming the music itself. The sonic colour can act in two different ways: Physical; meaning the actual sonic properties of the genre or artists and Rhetorical; the symbol associations within a particular sound.
“Paranoid” by Black Sabbath is a perfect example of timbre and ‘sonic colour’ that has greatly influenced many bands in their shadow with a few sub-genres spawning from its genre: heavy metal.
“Paranoid” doesn't feature a stereotypical sound, it features a dark and heavy one. This is due to the flattening of the tuning of the guitar into E flat by Tony Iommi. Along with this down-tuning, Black Sabbath was also very fond of using the Locrian scale (B to B) and the minor pentatonic scale which ended up influencing many big bands in the future such as Metallica. Metallica used an augmented fourth/diminished fifth (also known as a tritone) in many of their songs.
Black Sabbath also had a highly charged tempo in their songs (“Paranoid” being a prime example). This physical act of ‘sonic colour’ influenced the founding of thrash

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