Yesterday I was driving in a car with a friend named Tǐr. We ended up creating a composition inspired by the seatbelt warning signal which has such a refined, velvety tone, pitched at the note F.
We discovered that the seatbelt was sounding an F because his son Vuk, who had heard the sound before, immediately started singing “fa, fa, fa, fa.” Tir asked him, “Son, how do you know that’s an F?” but his son Vuk seemed to find the question meaningless and simply kept singing “fa, fa, fa” for as long as the sound lasted. Meanwhile, Tir pulled out a tuner app to check whether it really was an F – and it was. His son had identified it correctly because he has absolute pitch; people with absolute pitch can recognize tones instantly and with perfect accuracy.
I found both the story and the sonority of the Porsche seatbelt warning signal fascinating. In other cars, that sound feels more raw, but in a Porsche even the seatbelt alert sounds more sophisticated. Tǐr and I then spontaneously began to sing, each following own melodic line, and we created a kind of polyphony for two seatbelt and three voices, in F major/minor.
We ended just as spontaneously as we began, at the moment when the seatbelt stopped beeping.
A magical moment.