Geoffrey Keezer and onions

here's funny as hell article(actually a letter Geoffrey wrote to a friend) after he told him that his recording had made his(the friends') grandma cry..read on..something interesting
btw, GK is one of the most amazing pianists out there, he's good..damn good


You think the people you work with are strange? Sometimes REALLY TALENTED musicians have a serious kink in their inner guitar strings. I've started musical experiments with Geoffrey Keezer, a brilliant Bay Area pianist. After he left my studio in Hawai'i, my mom came over for a visit and I played her some of the music we had been recording. My dear, sainted, 81 years young mother, (and revered Hawaiian kupuna) Nona Beamer, was so moved by what she heard, that she started crying.

I sent Geoffrey an email about this. Here is his response...

Aloha Keola,

I must admit the truth, the "crying" that your Mom experienced when she listened to the music is really the successful result of a new stealth technology (I got Justin to download the plug-in when you were out of the room) called "Onionlabs E-Motomatic", which secretly encodes an audio form of DNA corresponding to the mild sulfuric acid gas which is released when you cut into an onion, causing tearing. Here is a bit of the history of this technology, copied from a quick Google search this morning:

In the early 70's, two young Dutch scientists, Victor Van Hooversnooten and Hans Roostergouda were working the night shift at Windmill Studios in Rotterdam, a small but friendly recording facility which was famous for producing Dutch pop hits such as "I Love You So Much I'd Cut Off My Ear and Mail it To You" and "Let's Get Noodstop". One night while waiting through the tedious process of printing time code, the boys decided to cook some breakfast. They went to the small kitchen and began to prepare their usual stoner late-night fare of cheese, bread, pickled herring, fried potatoes and onions. It was while chopping the onions that Van Hooversnooten had an epiphany (as is often the case under the influence of "Dutch coffee"). "Hans", he coughed, "if WE could somehow put these ONIONS into the music itself, we could make people cry whenever they hear our songs. The more people cry, the better they will think our songs are, and the more records we'll sell! We'll be millionaires and can retire to Belgium, or even Luxembourg!"

So, the two boys set out to isolate the chemical reactions that cause us to cry when onions are cut. They discovered that it works something like this: After peeling some outside layers off, you slice right into the onion. The knife breaks open some onion cells. Inside some of these cells are enzymes called allinases. In the air, the allinases break down some of the other substances, like amino acid sulfoxides, released from the onion cells. The amino acid sulfoxides form sulfenic acids, which rearrange themselves in a flash into a volatile gas. This gas flows to your eyes and reacts with the water in them. A chemical reaction occurs, producing a mild form of sulfuric acid. The sensitive nerve endings in your eyes are irritated, and more water is produced in the form of tears. The tears are trying to neutralize the irritant. Sulfenic acids also form odorous thiosulfinates, which are responsible for the strong odor we smell from onions.

Quickly, they got to work. While tedious after-hours studio work fell behind schedule, the boys spent hours analyzing the chemical components of onions, trying yellow onions, red onions, white onions, green onions, chives, leeks, and even the unpopular Stink onion (not an officially recognized breed, but quite potent nonetheless). The first experiments were somewhat successful - they simply cut an onion if half and rubbed it directly onto the 2-inch tape, causing the gases to be released during playback. While it caused them to cry in the studio, they couldn't figure out how to transfer the onion juice onto vinyl for mass production. It would simply be too expensive and time consuming to rub onions directly onto thousands of LPs for the mass market. One idea was to distribute the records with "special packaging", simply stapling a small onion onto each record jacket, with instructions to the listener to apply the onion immediately before playing the record. While this worked OK for the first 2 or 3 spins, eventually the juice would dry and lose its effectiveness, thereby diminishing the ability of the music to cause crying. The main problem was with Radio. In those days, most people heard their favorite song on the radio before they rushed out to the store to buy the 45. Even if the DJ rubbed onions onto his own vinyl, and cried profusely, how would the thousands of listeners experience the same effect?

(Young Stoners, Van Hooversnooten and Hans Roostergouda, soon to be inventors of the E-Motomatic)

The answer came a year later, when Van Hooversnooten and Roostergouda met a Finnish computer engineer named Jaako Jarvinen, who was employed by IBM as a mainframe programmer. Jarvinen was working on an early version of computer voice technology, and was very knowledgeable in the area of converting electronic signals into audio. He also drank a lot of beer and was an expert snowboarder, which really had nothing to do with anything. The three young scientists hit if off immediately, and came up with a plan to encode the essential building blocks of sulfenic acids and thiosulfinates into a very high frequency, almost subliminal audio signal that would be undetectable by human ears but would piss off the hell out of dogs. When the human brain, through the little-understood process of synaesthesia (a mixing of the senses causing a person to experience such things as colored hearing, gustatory sights, and most importantly auditory smells), subliminally decoded the signal, it would interpret it as onion gas and cause immediate crying. And the crying, of course, would cause the listener to believe that he or she was being emotionally moved by the music. Eureka, they had found it!

(Finnish computer engineer; Jaako Jarvinen takes a moment for relaxation)

Of course their early trials were not without mishaps. One night, there was a big snowstorm and their nightly onion delivery truck didn't make it. Out of onions, but eager to press on, the boys decided to try chipotle peppers instead (don't ask me why there were chipotle peppers in Holland in the 1970's please). While the studio was infused with a delicious smoky flavor, it caused major eye irritation and sneezing. Pickled herring didn't work at all. Aged Gouda met with similarly disastrous results.

It wasn't until the early 80's that the three stoners finally perfected their protype E-motomatic technology, enhanced greatly by the digital revolution. The first major artist to utilize this technology was, oddly enough, the Pointer Sisters, whose hit "Neutron Dance" released an encoded onion signal every 30 seconds over the course of the 3 1/2 minute song. It was perhaps not the wisest choice, as the lyrics repeat over and over, "I'm so happy!" Women all over the world were crying to this song, and their boyfriends and husbands were consoling them, saying, "What's the matter, honey? Why are you crying?" to which they would answer, "I don't know! I'm so happy! I'm crying because I'm so happy I guess! Isn't this song wonderful?" Other markets caught on, and creatively tailored their audio smells to their demographic. For example, the Thai music industry began encoding scallions and lemongrass onto their records. The French actually figured out how to encode French onion soup. And a major pop record in Hawai'i, Keola Beamer's "Sweet Maui Moon" contained code for; you guessed it, sweet Maui onions.

So there you have it. With the advent of Protools and it's multitude of expensive plug-ins (don't worry, Justin only got the trial version, but we had to rummage through your wallet and provide your name, address, social security #, all of your credit cards, birth date, name of your high school, favorite pet (that was easy), blood type, fingerprints and stool sample - don't ask me how I got that) it's now easier than ever to make people cry with your own music. The Onionlabs E-Motomatic (tm) is the latest innovation in Emotion Automation Technology (EAT). The newest cross-platform version lets you choose the level of crying from a pull down menu, ranging from "Slight Moistness" to "Blubbering Idiot". I think Justin went for the middle of the road on this one.

Thought you might want to know.

Love,
Geoffrey Von Cheezerhoover