Wading into the fray for just a second here! A lot of people are asking the question of "why doesn't he just break it up into two bars (of 5/8 and 3/8). The reason is that there are a lot of other things going in the piece and the conductor needs to keep a steady beat to keep it all together.
Would a 5/4 setting have been possible, like |5/4 ♩♩♩⌣‴ ♪.. ⌣‴ ♪.. |♩♩♩⌣‴ ♪.. ⌣‴ ♪.. |♩♩♩⌣‴ ♪.. ⌣‴ ♪.. |♩♩♩⌣‴ ♪.. ⌣‴ ♪.. | with ‴ for 1/32 ths, or do the other parts altogether ask for keeping 4/4?
well yea, there is really nothing to it... but musicians like exaggerating their maths: everything having other divisors than 2 is irrational, and now something that is hard to read must be quantum ;-) at least his computer uses quantum effects, and the sound waves created by the musicians resemble quantum wave functions ^^
"Quantum" is just a buzzword that non-scientists and pseudo-scientists use whenever they wanna claim some ridiculous BS with no evidence. Like when some people go "omg quantum mechanics proves that souls exist! I can't even, omg" It drives actual physicists mad. The term "quantum mechanics" is abused so much by people who have no idea what it actually is, to make whatever they're claiming sound scientific to gullible fools who don't know any better. Because even physicists find it difficult to translate quantum mechanics from its native language Maths, into English. It's very hard to explain using just words. So snake oil salesmen abuse that fact about it to sell whatever homoeopathic healing energy crystals chiropractic BS they're selling. Here's a video of an actual physicist explaining why all this stuff drives him mad, he calls it "quantum woo": th-cam.com/video/8DGgvE6hLAU/w-d-xo.html
“Every beat is personalized, unable to break down. When you analyze love, is crashes into waves. And you know that though I will be in one mood or another, all of these perturbations represent my love. Quantum rhythm.”
Here goes a non-Patreon Postcard :) Hi David, I’m 20 years old, watch the likes of Adam Neely, Jacob Koller, Jacob Collier, and Signals Music Studio on TH-cam (I also watch many non-music channels). I’ve played the piano since elementary school (current skill level ~ ability to play e.g. Jacob Koller’s arr. of Hey Jude) but never taken lessons or performed. I’ve also played trumpet since 6th grade and performed with my high school’s orchestra for the past four years, currently prepping 3 days a week for Annie in late February. If anyone at all cares, or even read this, have a splendid day!
Thank you Christopher Cerrone for the line "What I want to do with my music is to communicate". Nice sentiment, and even nicer formulation (instead of "music is all about communication" and similar statements). Thank you!
"There are no secrets among true artists." I had a chance to hear Quincy Jones at a clinic urge us all to go up and talk to the musicians after the performance to see what/why/how they played something. He said something like, "If they won't talk to you they're not worth listening to." I also had an opportunity to hear Edward Teller after giving a forum at my university come up to the dorm to have a bull session and he said "The greatest advantage in US science was the free and open sharing of ideas. You learn by teaching." (As long as you were mixing music and physics)...
Composer: quantum rhythms are impossible Scientist: we literally use the decay of caesium due to the weak force as the most accurate clock, or metronome if you will
Having just an hour of rehearsal for a contemporary composer is absolutely brutal. I think of Frank Zappa's frustration that his orchestral works couldn't be performed properly-it wasn't until the late 80's that he had enough interest in his "classical" compositions that he could afford the rehearsal time to have them up to his standard.
David Letterman: “Wow, and you’ve got the London Symphony Orchestra playing on this record. That’s quite something. How do you get such a prestigious orchestra to play your work?” Zappa: “You pay them.”
Those are the conditions. Most professional conductors and orchestra musicans do not want to spend more time than absolutely necessary on "that contemporary piece sneaking into their program", which is only part of the program and usually won't be what the audience will remember when going home. Orchestras and conductors who do this kind of repertoire a lot can still get very accurate results, though!
16:46 This. There's a bridging that occurs for performance art, where you are pulling the performers into your vision, but being pulled by them into an interpretation of your vision that is pleasing/possible for them to do well.
Awesome video David Bruce! Engaging, entertaining and informative. This particular topic is something I remember discussing frequently during my graduate work. It brings me back to when I was neck deep in the music of Conlon Nancarrow: player pianos, DAWs before DAWs existed. Also, thank you for including my reimagining of Chopin! My childhood piano teacher will be proud.
@@SeanPeckham-xe2gt in all honesty, planck length technically isn't the smallest possible length. It is the smallest measurable and significant length, but people usually twist it, thinking as if the universe was made out of a hardwired grid of planck lengths where nothing can fit inbetween, which is not true. Release two photons so that they move in parallel by placing them so that one photon is always further from the start line than the other by a non-integer multiple of the planck length. The two photons will only be measurable in increments of the planck length, but nothing stops them from being offset/displaced by less than the planck length itself. Unless there indeed is a hardwired grid that all objects are constrained to, but that doesn't make much intuitive sense, and there aren't any theories which might suggest that... unless we accept that we live in a simulation, in which the grids would be the discrete "voxels" making everything up lmao
I'm reminded of Don Byrd's preface to his page on "Extremes of Conventional Music Notation": "[C]onventional Western music notation is far more complex and subtle than most people think. In particular, it does not have well-defined borders; it just fades away indefinitely in all directions. "
So great to hear about the process for making these pieces and something I can definitely relate to, recording parts and figuring out how I should notate it. It's inspiring!
i cant thank you enougn for your videos mister David, i feel so inspired by them. LOve the way you showcase diferent aproaches to composition. I just want keep exploring music and art.
A good peek into working methods that I actually found inspiring, in the sense of "I think I might be able to do something like that". Also, loved the excursion into Ferneyhoughland, because I recently watched part of a Samuel Andreyev analysis of a Ferneyhough piece and am still trying to decide whether I really want to try to hear what is going on there or not. It was good to get another point of view on his stuff.
Ahh music technology and synthesis combined with classical music notation and schools of thought pushing the envelope of music into the future with new techniques and thoughts. It’s an amazing time to be a musician or lover of music and wondering what might come tomorrow.
So coming from a maths background this all seems like so much basic number theory. The difficulties (the conceptual ones, not the performative ones!) seem artificial-sure, when writing Chinese with the Roman alphabet you find yourself spelling 女 as nǚ, with a stack of accents, but that's what you get for using a notation that makes false assumptions. Start with a notation that assumes there are five vowels and pitch is not significant and don't speak like that-you get a slight mess of diacritics. Start with a notation that assumes a bar is subdivided by powers of two and don't play like that-you get a slight mess of diacritics. Time signatures, like key signatures, are similar methods of setting expectations. Suddenly you need a microtonal bar or a bar with offset tuplets and-well, you may now wish you'd started with a more general notation. Anyway, seems like declarations that say “these are the prime factors you need to decompose and align this bar” and notes that instead of laying emphasis on length (like dotted quavers) say which edges of that nonce grid they attract to would help a lot. After all, it's not like “quantum weirdness” in these examples (which IMO has as much to do with space not being the shape you thought it was as things not being in the places you thought they were) because the intention is something repeatable, not something random. It's just sad tadpoles. So-at what point do we admit that our musical language has changed enough that it's time for a spelling reform? Not in the academic/conceptual sense (not that that isn't a lot of fun), but for the, um, musician on the street? Because maybe it's just a consequence of what the TH-cam recommendation algorithm is feeding me this week, but these discussions sure seem to come up a lot-and surprisingly often seem to bear on music that I already know and hum. Disclaimer: notation person and amateur linguist, yes; musician, no, merely curious!
There are alternate musical notations in other musical traditions across the world, but western classical tradition seems to pretend they don't exist for some reason.
@@ixian_technocrat So in this context the question is, I guess, whether any of them provide better (or differently structured) rhythmic analyticity, or inspiration for achieving that. Do you know of any that would allow you to sight-read a new rhythm with greater facility than the tadpole staff? (We need better words for cultural spreads, too-I think Senegal out-wests all of Europe ;). ) As a casual passer-by in a time of lockdown I don't have access to musicological or ethnological journals, so I'm stuck at a wikipedia level of research ability-and I'm not easily finding anything. Of course, that is often as much about the bias you allude to as it is about the world.
The introduction of notated music in order to coordinate ensemble playing was simultaneously a wellspring for the Western tradition of music, and a barrier to the older style of producing music with an organic, nuanced feel, rhythmically and in terms of intonation. The introduction of recording, especially of folk music, and music from other cultures, began to reverse this process, but computerized audio production has provided a tool for the acceleration of this reversal, and the possible recovery of the older style. The problem with nuance is to capture and understand it in order to preserve and transmit it to newer generations. Maybe in the future, the score will become just a general mnemonic device, and the players will have to immerse themselves in a recording in order to grasp a piece.
It's kinda funny how you talk about composing directly in a DAW as if it was something new or weird, when most working composers have to work like that nowadays (mostly in media). 😋 Great video, as always!
I see piano roll as the baked result, while the score an implication. Kinda have a feeling that if one starts composing in DAW they might at one point have to switch to a score writer if the concept become too complicated to understand when presented in piano roll form.
Fascinating video; thanks so much! Very cool rhythm too. I was wondering if the first two notes could be notated as dotted quavers, and the third as two tied quavers? At 120 bpm, the difference in timing would be 25 ms, if I calculated correctly. I've tried it, and I find it very hard to hear the difference between the quintuplets in the eventual notation and dotted quavers, and I certainly wouldn't be able to reproduce the difference in performance. But of course, this may be due entirely due to my limitations as a musician.
Great video, David! This reminded me a lot of Dialectics. The philosophical notion of Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis. My experience with it comes from Mental Health - specifically, Dialectical Behavioural Therapy. DBT is for people with severe difficulties regulating their emotions. They are helped explore the paradox that is being both able and unable to regulate emotions, and what the implications of that are pragmatically. I find it fascinating, and increasingly experience these... quantum paradoxes of "two things being true" in all walks of life. Thanks for teaching me how it applies to music, too!
I normally use the DAW as the basis of my compositions (Cubase in my case). A couple of years ago, I added Dorico so I could work with notation if/when needed, which I hadn’t thought about since school. I am still exploring this combination whenever I can. Also this integration of music and quantum mechanics ... Vangelis’s Invisible Connections was his attempt to illustrate that subatomic world through music, mostly (room) space and simple sounds. The title track is the clearest representation of this concept whilst “Atom Blaster” is fission and “Thermo Vision” is “seeing” beyond the visual spectrum.
Conflating quantum waveform collapse with the problem of notation was... disappointing. Especially when you ran right by the use of QUANTIZATION in composition. There is so much more interesting stuff to look at here but the I have to say the title set me up for something I was really hoping to find and then did not. (Especially as I am trying to figure out how to capture the notion of quantum wave form collapse in music RIGHT NOW. And haven't figure it out.)
That's a very interesting way of composing. It reminds me of videos music by "silly" composers like Adam Neely (most recently the infinite bass solo one), where he generates sounds in a weird way and tries to make music out of it. It's surprising to see a "serious" composer using similar techniques!
There many ways to say the same sentence and some of them might convey opposite meanings. When that sentence is written down it collapses to the same written form. Reading is pattern recognition; patterns that we come across more often are easier to recognize. We are trying to maximize reading speed while keeping the notation fidelity high enough so that reproduced sound will satisfy the musician, the composer and the audience. This is a “design optimization” problem where we optimize the notation and the “cost function” involves the question of “why do we like music” and hard to pin down.
This is closely related to an interest of mine: jazz "notation" which is initially about recordings, vs classical notation. My thought is that jazz could not have come into existence without recording technology, and in fact, the historical knowledge of jazz pretty much dates to the advent of recording. I've been following a group called Sant Andreu Jazz Band -- a youth jazz school band -- in Barcelona. For example, th-cam.com/video/xIDjs7ADjro/w-d-xo.html and here is a whole playlist: th-cam.com/play/PLpAcQ-aCanC5QZl2tsju4WHMehwN__2Ft.html Maybe you would like watching these kids playing great stuff. A friend who is a harpsichordist tells me when she follows a jazz recording while reading the score, the beats are no longer even, that is, the notation is.not really representing the sounds accurately. So that is why I think real. jazz -- improvised jazz -- required recording to be born.
I love this interview. I follow this approach up to, but not including, the reduction of a piece to sheet. I routinely encounter musicians - virtuosos - who are purests and reject Cerrone's approach. But I embrace the philosophy that the result is far more imporant than how the result is created. I think Cerrone would agree with that.
I was thinking it should be notated all as a 5:4 polyrhythm. You would have: qtr qtr qtr tied with a 32 note qtr double-dotted 8th note So, you could see the last two hits are slightly "late". A note on the score could say the 4 hit corresponds to the "and" of 3. I'm a drummer though. I'm not much for too many tied notes. Hehe.
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I was looking for other ways to write it down, non of them were as simple as the quintuplet version Christopher did (imagine a 10/20+1/8+5/20+1/8 situation) and using konnakol I was almost able to play the "off beat quintuplet" two last notes in a few minutes, but when you guys talked about the time pressure for the recording session I totally got the reason why it ended up being a triplet, it has to be something "sight readable"... wich confirms my theory, konnakol should be teached as a rhythmic solfeggio in every music school from grade 1. Also great video, I'm a fan of Christopher's work from now on!
Quantum mechanics is so complex (no pun intended) its solutions are obtained via approximation and done by computers. It seems counter intuitive to me to make a composition via computer and struggle to get humans to perform it when it'd be easier to have an actual computer performance. It's somehow naïve and overly complex like having eigenvectors obtained via supercomputer and have them checked by theoretic physics using pencil and papers. But it's probably me.
At the same time, the difference in time between the written original and the final version has one note played literally only milliseconds different. Ain't nobody going to hear that when human interpretation and general inaccuracies are in play, not to mention an acoustically live room.
I made the transition to composing directly into the DAW when I stopped caring if it would actually get played, and started regarding the rendering as the finished piece. On the occasions where it has been necessary, I have reverse-engineered the parts in the DAW and entered them into notation software. Pulling the MIDI information in turns out to be much like bad OCR -- I spend so much time chasing mistakes that it doesn't actually help.
The final notation hides the (then approximately) equal length of notes 1, 2 and 4. I also think the first notation was by far the easiest to read. The way I heard the rhythm was as a quintuplet where the third beat is emphasised by being delayed and the first beat emphasised by being early. I don’t think one can hear that the third note falls 5/8 of the way in the cycle. He also doesn’t seem to sing it as he notated it. His fourth note seems to short. He simply seems to intend a delay after the third note and then catch up with two slightly quicker notes back to the one.
13:48 It's "Idioteque" which has a sample at around 0:40 seconds in to Paul Lansky's "Mild und Leise" It is like Gmin6 Emaj7sus2 Gmin Emaj7 Succinctly beautiful for a two chord vamp to improvise over I tell ya h'what. I retuned my 8 string guitar to perform Idioteque's intro+verse melody and chord progression simultaneously (the chords are all in first inversion to make it playable without making too many tuning adjustments). If anyone is interested lmk and I'll post an unlisted video. Thanks, Aric Addendum: Thank you David (I adore your videos and have learned and applied a substantial bit to my own style from you) & guest.
Assuming notation A is the mathematical intention of the composer, you could subdivide every beat into the lowest common denominator (a 16th note quintuplet) which would turn 4/4 into 40/32 (or 25+15/32) subdivided into 8+8+9+8+7. Each 8 could be notated as a quarter note. 9 would be a quarter tied to a 32nd. 7 is an eighth tied to a dotted 16th. I don't know if there would be any advantage in notating it this way, but working out the math was an exercise I thought was worth sharing. Getting rid of the quintuplets makes for notation that looks more straightforward (to me), at the cost of having a fairly bizarre time signature.
So it's in 4/4... Why don't we pretend it's actually a bar of 5 by putting the whole bar inside a quintuplet? The place in time of the 3+ in a bar of 4/4 translates to the second 32nd note of the 4th beat in a bar of 5/quintuplet, which is where the sample begins again. In the original sample (before it was truncated and manipulated) each note was (in the context of the big bar-lengthed quintuplet) 1 quarter note long. Therefore the last 2 notes are just quarter notes, but starting on the 2nd 32nd note of the 4th beat! Therefore, we can either write the rhythm out as (4=quarter note, 8=8th note etc. Notes within a parenthesis are tied together, full stops are dots as in dotted and double dotted): Option 1: 4 4 (4 32) 4 8.. all within a quintuplet OR if you want to keep the visual separation of each beat: Option 1: 4 4 (4 32) (8.. 32) 8.. all within a quintuplet
I think it’s more style than anything. I don’t use double dots because they’re unfamiliar and easy to miss for performers. I also try to stay away from tying together any notes more than 2 divisions away (4 32) for sight reading.
@@sion-dafyddlocke9913 That's fair enough, but also what I found out using this notation is how actually shows in a visual way that, at Crotchet=120, it may as well be written as 5 quintuplets (what Cerrone chose in the end)
@@TorilAzzalini-Machecler Sorry, just to clarify, those are things that personally, I avoid, not things that are bad form. The options you gave are more precise, but I would be willing to sacrifice precision for sight readability and hope the musician gets the “feel” for it. Honestly, I also start with DAWs and then move to notation and sometimes I’m happy to get to 90% precision and fix the other 10% when I have performers to tell me what they prefer.
bruh i notated it as 1 full measure of quarter notes for 3/4 with the first note accented and 1 bar of 2/4 with the first note accented. am i missing something or do compsers just want to get really technical? thanks
In terms of breaking technology, my favorite technique lately is synthesizing a normal patch with stuff like key tracked FM or RM, and then pitching it up/down ridiculously (or playing in like C10) to get weird wobbles/shakes/overtones in the sound, lots of fun. Makes it feel like the software is struggling
In units of 10ths of a quarter note, the note durations are 8-8-9-8-7 if I make no mistake. So I'm a bit confused by the "compromise" notation at 15:27. I wouldn't understand this to mean a slightly lengthened third note and a slightly clipped fifth note. In any case, I think the rhythm defies conventional notation because conventional notation is adapted to human capabilities. But in my opinion this rhythm, at this tempo, is unplayable for humans, even though it's easy enough to approximate it. Nobody can seriously play the fifth note 12.5% shorter than the fourth with the precision necessary to distinguish it from, say, 15:57.
What about a hybrid of a piano roll with staff notation? The staff horizontal lines give the pitch as usual, but instead regular notes where the shape of the note gives the length, the notes are thick horizontal lines, where the length of the line is proportional to the length of the note? Also add faint vertical lines at say the 1/4 beat.
Since the intent is to communicate a feel of simultaneously overlapping but slightly offset quarter-note quintuplets, why not use exactly that in the notation in the following very clean way using two voices: Upstemmed voice: A 5:4 bracketed group of three quarter notes and two quarter rests Downstemmed voice: A 5:4 bracketed group of two quarter notes and three quarter rests. This voice is preceded in measure 1 by a half rest and an eighth rest to place the first struck note on the "three-and," and each of the 5:4 brackets crosses over bar lines. This puts the attack of every note precisely on the "fortieth-note" grid where the composer intended. The implied "release" of each note isn't quite the same as the intent (there will be some underlap/overlap where the voices cross over) but since this figure seems geared to a more percussive instrument, where the notion of sustain and release doesn't really exist (piano aside), that seems to me to be a more forgivable shortcoming than a notation that uses a sixteenth note symbol outside of a quintuplet bracket. Aside from that, the premise of the video reminded me of a fascination I had in high school (in the mid 80's) with books like The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, that tried to draw parallels between spirituality and quantum physics. I think I'll just say that I've grown up since then...
I don't get it. Times written are 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.625, 0.825. But when I _hear_ it first time, I was sure that it is a simplest stupidest quintuplet: 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8. I would like rewrite this in 5/4 and would not powder my brain. If you have five notes just write five notes! Does any mere mortal human being can hear the shift in 1/40 note?? But this difference can be completely blurred by articulation: the attack of note (depending on dynamic accent) has such duration.
Hard disagree, pal. I think you can totally hear that difference. You can also see the difference in the wave form that David cleverly shows when we first hear the rhythm. It's subtle but it leaves you (in my opinion) unsettled, on edge, anticipating, unsure. I'd argue even if you can't hear that consciously (and I'm not sure I'd have registered it if I simply heard it as opposed to seeing it) that those feelings are still communicated unconsciously.
This probably means 'something important' in the context of 4/4, or rather 8/8, when we keep count the eights, and feel the exact moment when the note @5/8 (0.625) should come. But this context must exist (before the snippet or in parallel part). It's hard to just image it in five-beat measure out of context.
4/5 of a beat v. 9/10 of a beat v. 7/10 of a beat. For anyone curious about the division of the measure by note: 1/5 + 1/5 + 9/40 + 1/5 + 7/40 Somehow that actually does add up to 1.
Okay I'm going to throw in my two cents here and I wouldn't normally do this sort of thing these days honestly I give this order thing up many years ago but that's not a machine that's me on a piano with the Reverb turned on the Reverb is mathematical and hearing a note is just something that people should be able to do if they're going to bother playing a piano I'm happy to replicate then sentence for you I still have the same exact piano that I wrote everything on and it makes a bunch of weird noises that I'm sure people would be delighted to hear or astonished or whatever the hell it is that people are these days but while I think that he is a lovely man and what he's done with this noise is fantastic he definitely did not calculate anything to do with it at all
Oh please. Frank Zappa's band would have no problem with this. Quantum uncertainty is a pretentious analogy. The notes have durations that can be measured. Just write them down. If the musicians have problems with the math, suck it up! The rhythm can be specified, measured and performed.
Id question the role of notation, then. Aside from some tenutos and maybe a new anti-tenuto mark. Rehearse with performers along to the digitally composed audio, if its meant to sound that way. Why sight read if you can ear read.
It sounds like a quintuplet with the last note truncated a little. Personally, I would invent an "inverse fermata". Normal fermata: stretch this note a little. Inverse fermata: shrink this note a little.
As a physicist I found this cute hehehe Btw I have a question: lately I've been moving away from sibelius (into ableton) as a composing tool, because it's midi default sounds are just way too unreal and it kinda blocks me when I have trouble envisioning how some transitions or textures should sound. Do you use any specific custom sounds for sibelius playback? I tried to customize it a coupled of times but it looked too messy. Cheers from Brazil, love your videos
Thank you! Interesting video in itself though quite useless in practical terms. I think we all need to listen to E. Varèse's music. Always weird,super modern, visceral, fresh sounding and yet always using regular/normal meter signatures and rhythms of daily usage that performers love. In my view quantum mechanics have nothing to do with notating rhythms and expressing emotions thru sounds. (cheers from Barcelona!)
I'm about a third of the way in and, given perhaps that I am less a musician than a "person who does music," my own solution would be to bracket the measure with a 5 or 5:4 up top and notate it thus: Quarter, quarter, dotted-eighth tied to dotted-sixteenth, quarter, double-dotted-eighth. But I can understand that being a bit visually confusing moment to moment for people who have to actually read it, so the dilemma remains. Still, it's not impossible so much as exasperating and context-dependent. Edit: After having watched the whole shebang, I think the compromise there was understandable, even if my microrhythm-fixated brain wants to be fussy about it; that generosity thing is definitely important, and it's hard to nail a nuance that small in a way that translates without you either literally being there to explain it in rehearsal or having a silly little note appended to an asterisk or something which will probably be more trouble than it's worth if very precise relationships aren't essential to some greater effect. The essence is that shifty quintuple feel in the nuances of the movement, not the hard and fast notation per se, in the same way that real swing is generally not in strict triplets or dotted notes.
Awesome video. My solution to the notation would be to make a measure of 5/8 with the first 3 quintuplets, then a bar of 3/8 with the last two quintuplets. What do you think?
The first buildings were made of mud brick and were just one story. Later they added straw to the mud and got perhaps a two story building. Then stone and brick and got perhaps seven or eight stories. Later we got steel and glass buildings--up to over a hundred stories. But one thing they all had was a solid and enduring foundation. This idea that progress in music allows you to abandon the solid foundation (discovered over hundreds of years) leads to collapsed structures. Observe this: this zeitgeist of musical progress exists only in countries that are under US military occupation.
What about notes that actually existed in a quantum state where only when you play the piece does a note get chosen. Thus creating two universes one where one note was played and one where the other was. Obviously not actually quantum but its a cool idea someone could try. Include enough of these and every play-through the piece would be different (probably) because variations increase exponentially with n options to effectively infinite. You could play with how much this changes the actual piece by changing if it sets the root note or an incidental on a top melody.
@@jorgepeterbarton I just watched 12tone's video and I did actually mean something slightly different. Rather than arrange different bars it would be notes. The notation would read both notes (in the same way superposition is both states) until it is played out loud whne the musician would choose one (this would be measurement in the quantum analogy).
I believe that I have achieved a very similar beat by simply using three-four followed by two-four followed by three-four...and so on... Surely it can even be achieved using five-four...with emphases on the first and fourth beats? What am I doing wrong or not understanding?
Dear David, that is very interesting and insipiring video. From my side I would like to recommend a very interesting Swiss composer and musician, Nik Bärtsch, who is also using and implementing a lot of those ideas from your video. I hope it can be interesting for you to discover him and his band (if you don't know) and to have an inspiration too! Thank you!
It looks like some of these rhythms are best suited for sequencers, not humans (fight me!!!).....this is not a bad thing, especially as outboard analogue sequencers (and analogue synths) are experiencing a renaissance (as well as fully digital tools). I can see how to map these rhythms into a Euclidean Circles module (which itself is a great performance and composing companion) or any other sequencer......also, not super into the Quantum Mechanics comparison. Still, love your content man, keep up the good work!
So, in regards of the awesome postcard. You have this game called Frederic: Resurrection of Music (there are 3 of them). Sooo, if you are ever wondering: "How does Chopin's ... sounds like on ... instrument/in ... genre, check it out. It's funny as hell and almost good.
It seems to me that as the level of complexity increases, the intentions (whatevertheyare) of the composer would suffer to the point of collapse, leaving the listener as confused as the performers were left confounded. I don't believe any listener would perceive the .333... difference, and we make noise/music for the listener, not the DAW (those workstations, and Sibelius are both soooo demanding!).
Wading into the fray for just a second here! A lot of people are asking the question of "why doesn't he just break it up into two bars (of 5/8 and 3/8). The reason is that there are a lot of other things going in the piece and the conductor needs to keep a steady beat to keep it all together.
Thanks chris, that thought as you know was also my initial response, I should have included a mention of it here.
Would a 5/4 setting have been possible, like
|5/4 ♩♩♩⌣‴ ♪.. ⌣‴ ♪.. |♩♩♩⌣‴ ♪.. ⌣‴ ♪.. |♩♩♩⌣‴ ♪.. ⌣‴ ♪.. |♩♩♩⌣‴ ♪.. ⌣‴ ♪.. |
with ‴ for 1/32 ths, or do the other parts altogether ask for keeping 4/4?
@@dominiquemanchon9914 it's a good idea but there's a strong 4 pulse below it, so it's gotta be in brackets. a+ textified rhythmic notation tho
@@cerronecomposer Thanks!
@@dominiquemanchon9914 How do you do music notation in a youtube comment?
"Quantum rhythm" sounds like something somebody made up for a time travel movie to pretend they know what they're talking about
Heh if only you knew..
Something made up by an artist or composer to pretend they know what they are talking about
well yea, there is really nothing to it... but musicians like exaggerating their maths: everything having other divisors than 2 is irrational, and now something that is hard to read must be quantum ;-)
at least his computer uses quantum effects, and the sound waves created by the musicians resemble quantum wave functions ^^
"Quantum" is just a buzzword that non-scientists and pseudo-scientists use whenever they wanna claim some ridiculous BS with no evidence. Like when some people go "omg quantum mechanics proves that souls exist! I can't even, omg"
It drives actual physicists mad. The term "quantum mechanics" is abused so much by people who have no idea what it actually is, to make whatever they're claiming sound scientific to gullible fools who don't know any better. Because even physicists find it difficult to translate quantum mechanics from its native language Maths, into English. It's very hard to explain using just words. So snake oil salesmen abuse that fact about it to sell whatever homoeopathic healing energy crystals chiropractic BS they're selling.
Here's a video of an actual physicist explaining why all this stuff drives him mad, he calls it "quantum woo": th-cam.com/video/8DGgvE6hLAU/w-d-xo.html
“Every beat is personalized, unable to break down. When you analyze love, is crashes into waves. And you know that though I will be in one mood or another, all of these perturbations represent my love. Quantum rhythm.”
"Now I don't know how much you follow particle physics but knowing my audience, probably quite a lot"
Me, a physicist, not expecting to get called out like that
Listen... I feel honoured that he even thinks I'm that smart. :B
How? How did he know!? He must be some kind of wizard! Send him to the stake 🤣
yep 😆
Yeah I know right! I feel attacked!
"This is the stuff my audience want's to hear about." - hit the nail on the head there
We probably want to hear it without the apostrophe though
@@nathanaelhahn It is still grammatically acceptable if you treat "audience want's" as a contraction of "audience want is". No need to be a stickler.
@@user-et3xn2jm1u Lol
That working out a fragment in notation software then saying “this is not good;”. I felt that to my core.
Here goes a non-Patreon Postcard :)
Hi David, I’m 20 years old, watch the likes of Adam Neely, Jacob Koller, Jacob Collier, and Signals Music Studio on TH-cam (I also watch many non-music channels). I’ve played the piano since elementary school (current skill level ~ ability to play e.g. Jacob Koller’s arr. of Hey Jude) but never taken lessons or performed. I’ve also played trumpet since 6th grade and performed with my high school’s orchestra for the past four years, currently prepping 3 days a week for Annie in late February.
If anyone at all cares, or even read this, have a splendid day!
Hi. Welcome fellow musician
Thank you Christopher Cerrone for the line "What I want to do with my music is to communicate".
Nice sentiment, and even nicer formulation (instead of "music is all about communication" and similar statements).
Thank you!
"There are no secrets among true artists." I had a chance to hear Quincy Jones at a clinic urge us all to go up and talk to the musicians after the performance to see what/why/how they played something. He said something like, "If they won't talk to you they're not worth listening to." I also had an opportunity to hear Edward Teller after giving a forum at my university come up to the dorm to have a bull session and he said "The greatest advantage in US science was the free and open sharing of ideas. You learn by teaching." (As long as you were mixing music and physics)...
Composer: quantum rhythms are impossible
Scientist: we literally use the decay of caesium due to the weak force as the most accurate clock, or metronome if you will
I want an atomic cv/midi clock!
When people try to make caesium decay musical
I am not being sarcastic. I would like to hear a musical interpretation of caesium decay.
I love the Patreon Postcards concept!
Having just an hour of rehearsal for a contemporary composer is absolutely brutal. I think of Frank Zappa's frustration that his orchestral works couldn't be performed properly-it wasn't until the late 80's that he had enough interest in his "classical" compositions that he could afford the rehearsal time to have them up to his standard.
David Letterman: “Wow, and you’ve got the London Symphony Orchestra playing on this record. That’s quite something. How do you get such a prestigious orchestra to play your work?”
Zappa: “You pay them.”
The Yellow Shark album is one of my favorites in my collection.
Those are the conditions. Most professional conductors and orchestra musicans do not want to spend more time than absolutely necessary on "that contemporary piece sneaking into their program", which is only part of the program and usually won't be what the audience will remember when going home. Orchestras and conductors who do this kind of repertoire a lot can still get very accurate results, though!
16:46 This. There's a bridging that occurs for performance art, where you are pulling the performers into your vision, but being pulled by them into an interpretation of your vision that is pleasing/possible for them to do well.
Awesome video David Bruce! Engaging, entertaining and informative. This particular topic is something I remember discussing frequently during my graduate work. It brings me back to when I was neck deep in the music of Conlon Nancarrow: player pianos, DAWs before DAWs existed. Also, thank you for including my reimagining of Chopin! My childhood piano teacher will be proud.
Hey, I loved your postcard!
@@Ermude10 Ayy thanks!
Christopher is one of my favourite composers. Great to see a video on his music.
If it's within Planck length, I'm not interested.
All the good bits are within Planck's length. Join the dark side!
@@SeanPeckham-xe2gt in all honesty, planck length technically isn't the smallest possible length. It is the smallest measurable and significant length, but people usually twist it, thinking as if the universe was made out of a hardwired grid of planck lengths where nothing can fit inbetween, which is not true. Release two photons so that they move in parallel by placing them so that one photon is always further from the start line than the other by a non-integer multiple of the planck length. The two photons will only be measurable in increments of the planck length, but nothing stops them from being offset/displaced by less than the planck length itself. Unless there indeed is a hardwired grid that all objects are constrained to, but that doesn't make much intuitive sense, and there aren't any theories which might suggest that... unless we accept that we live in a simulation, in which the grids would be the discrete "voxels" making everything up lmao
I'm reminded of Don Byrd's preface to his page on "Extremes of Conventional Music Notation": "[C]onventional Western music notation is far more complex and subtle than most people think. In particular, it does not have well-defined borders; it just fades away indefinitely in all directions. "
Those synths at the end sounded really amazing!
"Moves like a wave, hits like a particle."
It pleases me greatly how well the lamp in Chris' apartment lines up with David's mic stand... very satisfying. Great video!
A new david bruce video, yes!!!!!!!!!
Molto autotunissimo i’m Italian and I find it pretty funny!
So great to hear about the process for making these pieces and something I can definitely relate to, recording parts and figuring out how I should notate it. It's inspiring!
i cant thank you enougn for your videos mister David, i feel so inspired by them. LOve the way you showcase diferent aproaches to composition. I just want keep exploring music and art.
A good peek into working methods that I actually found inspiring, in the sense of "I think I might be able to do something like that".
Also, loved the excursion into Ferneyhoughland, because I recently watched part of a Samuel Andreyev analysis of a Ferneyhough piece and am still trying to decide whether I really want to try to hear what is going on there or not. It was good to get another point of view on his stuff.
Ahh music technology and synthesis combined with classical music notation and schools of thought pushing the envelope of music into the future with new techniques and thoughts. It’s an amazing time to be a musician or lover of music and wondering what might come tomorrow.
Fascinating. Loved his textures too.
So coming from a maths background this all seems like so much basic number theory. The difficulties (the conceptual ones, not the performative ones!) seem artificial-sure, when writing Chinese with the Roman alphabet you find yourself spelling 女 as nǚ, with a stack of accents, but that's what you get for using a notation that makes false assumptions. Start with a notation that assumes there are five vowels and pitch is not significant and don't speak like that-you get a slight mess of diacritics. Start with a notation that assumes a bar is subdivided by powers of two and don't play like that-you get a slight mess of diacritics. Time signatures, like key signatures, are similar methods of setting expectations. Suddenly you need a microtonal bar or a bar with offset tuplets and-well, you may now wish you'd started with a more general notation.
Anyway, seems like declarations that say “these are the prime factors you need to decompose and align this bar” and notes that instead of laying emphasis on length (like dotted quavers) say which edges of that nonce grid they attract to would help a lot.
After all, it's not like “quantum weirdness” in these examples (which IMO has as much to do with space not being the shape you thought it was as things not being in the places you thought they were) because the intention is something repeatable, not something random. It's just sad tadpoles.
So-at what point do we admit that our musical language has changed enough that it's time for a spelling reform? Not in the academic/conceptual sense (not that that isn't a lot of fun), but for the, um, musician on the street? Because maybe it's just a consequence of what the TH-cam recommendation algorithm is feeding me this week, but these discussions sure seem to come up a lot-and surprisingly often seem to bear on music that I already know and hum.
Disclaimer: notation person and amateur linguist, yes; musician, no, merely curious!
There are alternate musical notations in other musical traditions across the world, but western classical tradition seems to pretend they don't exist for some reason.
@@ixian_technocrat So in this context the question is, I guess, whether any of them provide better (or differently structured) rhythmic analyticity, or inspiration for achieving that. Do you know of any that would allow you to sight-read a new rhythm with greater facility than the tadpole staff? (We need better words for cultural spreads, too-I think Senegal out-wests all of Europe ;). )
As a casual passer-by in a time of lockdown I don't have access to musicological or ethnological journals, so I'm stuck at a wikipedia level of research ability-and I'm not easily finding anything. Of course, that is often as much about the bias you allude to as it is about the world.
Before seeing the notation, it sounded like plain old 5/4 with accent on 1 and 4.
Great video as always. The patron postcards are a lovely idea as well!
The introduction of notated music in order to coordinate ensemble playing was simultaneously a wellspring for the Western tradition of music, and a barrier to the older style of producing music with an organic, nuanced feel, rhythmically and in terms of intonation. The introduction of recording, especially of folk music, and music from other cultures, began to reverse this process, but computerized audio production has provided a tool for the acceleration of this reversal, and the possible recovery of the older style. The problem with nuance is to capture and understand it in order to preserve and transmit it to newer generations. Maybe in the future, the score will become just a general mnemonic device, and the players will have to immerse themselves in a recording in order to grasp a piece.
Why have you got a car suspension spring next to your ukulele?
It's not a car suspension spring, it's a percussion instrument.
@@Opuskrokus It's not a gun, it's a percussion instrument.
For bass
@@bruno_semi its not a cannon, its a percussion instrument.
Doesn't everyone?
It's kinda funny how you talk about composing directly in a DAW as if it was something new or weird, when most working composers have to work like that nowadays (mostly in media). 😋
Great video, as always!
I see piano roll as the baked result, while the score an implication. Kinda have a feeling that if one starts composing in DAW they might at one point have to switch to a score writer if the concept become too complicated to understand when presented in piano roll form.
Fascinating video; thanks so much! Very cool rhythm too. I was wondering if the first two notes could be notated as dotted quavers, and the third as two tied quavers? At 120 bpm, the difference in timing would be 25 ms, if I calculated correctly. I've tried it, and I find it very hard to hear the difference between the quintuplets in the eventual notation and dotted quavers, and I certainly wouldn't be able to reproduce the difference in performance. But of course, this may be due entirely due to my limitations as a musician.
Great video, David! This reminded me a lot of Dialectics. The philosophical notion of Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis.
My experience with it comes from Mental Health - specifically, Dialectical Behavioural Therapy. DBT is for people with severe difficulties regulating their emotions. They are helped explore the paradox that is being both able and unable to regulate emotions, and what the implications of that are pragmatically.
I find it fascinating, and increasingly experience these... quantum paradoxes of "two things being true" in all walks of life. Thanks for teaching me how it applies to music, too!
Lol the classical player inside me groaned after trying to make that rhythm out.
I normally use the DAW as the basis of my compositions (Cubase in my case). A couple of years ago, I added Dorico so I could work with notation if/when needed, which I hadn’t thought about since school. I am still exploring this combination whenever I can.
Also this integration of music and quantum mechanics ... Vangelis’s Invisible Connections was his attempt to illustrate that subatomic world through music, mostly (room) space and simple sounds. The title track is the clearest representation of this concept whilst “Atom Blaster” is fission and “Thermo Vision” is “seeing” beyond the visual spectrum.
Conflating quantum waveform collapse with the problem of notation was... disappointing. Especially when you ran right by the use of QUANTIZATION in composition. There is so much more interesting stuff to look at here but the I have to say the title set me up for something I was really hoping to find and then did not. (Especially as I am trying to figure out how to capture the notion of quantum wave form collapse in music RIGHT NOW. And haven't figure it out.)
Exactly. The title is completely misleading.
That's a very interesting way of composing. It reminds me of videos music by "silly" composers like Adam Neely (most recently the infinite bass solo one), where he generates sounds in a weird way and tries to make music out of it. It's surprising to see a "serious" composer using similar techniques!
Mathematics is universal. You can't not do that.
There many ways to say the same sentence and some of them might convey opposite meanings. When that sentence is written down it collapses to the same written form. Reading is pattern recognition; patterns that we come across more often are easier to recognize. We are trying to maximize reading speed while keeping the notation fidelity high enough so that reproduced sound will satisfy the musician, the composer and the audience. This is a “design optimization” problem where we optimize the notation and the “cost function” involves the question of “why do we like music” and hard to pin down.
Who knows maybe "design optimization" in the title will entice more people to click in the future.
I appreciate the implication that New Complexity composers and their performers are basically in a BDSM relationship XD
It’s accurate though 😂
Great video, really interesting to have a look in this particular process of composing!
This is closely related to an interest of mine: jazz "notation" which is initially about recordings, vs classical notation. My thought is that jazz could not have come into existence without recording technology, and in fact, the historical knowledge of jazz pretty much dates to the advent of recording. I've been following a group called Sant Andreu Jazz Band -- a youth jazz school band -- in Barcelona. For example, th-cam.com/video/xIDjs7ADjro/w-d-xo.html
and here is a whole playlist:
th-cam.com/play/PLpAcQ-aCanC5QZl2tsju4WHMehwN__2Ft.html
Maybe you would like watching these kids playing great stuff.
A friend who is a harpsichordist tells me when she follows a jazz recording while reading the score, the beats are no longer even, that is, the notation is.not really representing the sounds accurately. So that is why I think real. jazz -- improvised jazz -- required recording to be born.
What if you had the straight quintuple and just wrote “lag” underneath the last two notes.
Thanks again bruce, awesome vid as always
Back in my day we played 4/4 with rocks and sticks..
Nowadays they play quantum rythm on the theremin.
Who’s using real theremins. There are plug-ins for that.
I love this interview. I follow this approach up to, but not including, the reduction of a piece to sheet. I routinely encounter musicians - virtuosos - who are purests and reject Cerrone's approach. But I embrace the philosophy that the result is far more imporant than how the result is created. I think Cerrone would agree with that.
I was thinking it should be notated all as a 5:4 polyrhythm.
You would have:
qtr
qtr
qtr tied with a 32 note
qtr
double-dotted 8th note
So, you could see the last two hits are slightly "late". A note on the score could say the 4 hit corresponds to the "and" of 3.
I'm a drummer though. I'm not much for too many tied notes. Hehe.
I was looking for other ways to write it down, non of them were as simple as the quintuplet version Christopher did (imagine a 10/20+1/8+5/20+1/8 situation) and using konnakol I was almost able to play the "off beat quintuplet" two last notes in a few minutes, but when you guys talked about the time pressure for the recording session I totally got the reason why it ended up being a triplet, it has to be something "sight readable"... wich confirms my theory, konnakol should be teached as a rhythmic solfeggio in every music school from grade 1.
Also great video, I'm a fan of Christopher's work from now on!
I can just imagine PBS Space Time with a video titled The Rhythm that Broke Quantum Physics.
Always great material
can't you put, above the note, "bit late" ?
Quantum mechanics is so complex (no pun intended) its solutions are obtained via approximation and done by computers.
It seems counter intuitive to me to make a composition via computer and struggle to get humans to perform it when it'd be easier to have an actual computer performance.
It's somehow naïve and overly complex like having eigenvectors obtained via supercomputer and have them checked by theoretic physics using pencil and papers.
But it's probably me.
To me this only shows that musicians have trouble with fractions.
At the same time, the difference in time between the written original and the final version has one note played literally only milliseconds different. Ain't nobody going to hear that when human interpretation and general inaccuracies are in play, not to mention an acoustically live room.
I made the transition to composing directly into the DAW when I stopped caring if it would actually get played, and started regarding the rendering as the finished piece. On the occasions where it has been necessary, I have reverse-engineered the parts in the DAW and entered them into notation software. Pulling the MIDI information in turns out to be much like bad OCR -- I spend so much time chasing mistakes that it doesn't actually help.
Thanks; that was helpful to me.
"Knowing my audience, probably quite a lot" 🤣
The final notation hides the (then approximately) equal length of notes 1, 2 and 4. I also think the first notation was by far the easiest to read. The way I heard the rhythm was as a quintuplet where the third beat is emphasised by being delayed and the first beat emphasised by being early. I don’t think one can hear that the third note falls 5/8 of the way in the cycle. He also doesn’t seem to sing it as he notated it. His fourth note seems to short. He simply seems to intend a delay after the third note and then catch up with two slightly quicker notes back to the one.
13:48 It's "Idioteque" which has a sample at around 0:40 seconds in to Paul Lansky's "Mild und Leise" It is like
Gmin6
Emaj7sus2
Gmin
Emaj7
Succinctly beautiful for a two chord vamp to improvise over I tell ya h'what.
I retuned my 8 string guitar to perform Idioteque's intro+verse melody and chord progression simultaneously (the chords are all in first inversion to make it playable without making too many tuning adjustments). If anyone is interested lmk and I'll post an unlisted video.
Thanks,
Aric
Addendum: Thank you David (I adore your videos and have learned and applied a substantial bit to my own style from you) & guest.
so composers finally figured out what a demo is?
in all honestly this is actually really cool though
3:09 is that the Cylon theme from Battlestar Galactica?? :)
Assuming notation A is the mathematical intention of the composer, you could subdivide every beat into the lowest common denominator (a 16th note quintuplet) which would turn 4/4 into 40/32 (or 25+15/32) subdivided into 8+8+9+8+7. Each 8 could be notated as a quarter note. 9 would be a quarter tied to a 32nd. 7 is an eighth tied to a dotted 16th. I don't know if there would be any advantage in notating it this way, but working out the math was an exercise I thought was worth sharing. Getting rid of the quintuplets makes for notation that looks more straightforward (to me), at the cost of having a fairly bizarre time signature.
So it's in 4/4... Why don't we pretend it's actually a bar of 5 by putting the whole bar inside a quintuplet? The place in time of the 3+ in a bar of 4/4 translates to the second 32nd note of the 4th beat in a bar of 5/quintuplet, which is where the sample begins again. In the original sample (before it was truncated and manipulated) each note was (in the context of the big bar-lengthed quintuplet) 1 quarter note long. Therefore the last 2 notes are just quarter notes, but starting on the 2nd 32nd note of the 4th beat! Therefore, we can either write the rhythm out as (4=quarter note, 8=8th note etc. Notes within a parenthesis are tied together, full stops are dots as in dotted and double dotted):
Option 1: 4 4 (4 32) 4 8.. all within a quintuplet
OR if you want to keep the visual separation of each beat:
Option 1: 4 4 (4 32) (8.. 32) 8.. all within a quintuplet
That's exactly what I thought! This also conveys much more clearly the idea that he explained in words.
I think it’s more style than anything. I don’t use double dots because they’re unfamiliar and easy to miss for performers. I also try to stay away from tying together any notes more than 2 divisions away (4 32) for sight reading.
@@sion-dafyddlocke9913 That's fair enough, but also what I found out using this notation is how actually shows in a visual way that, at Crotchet=120, it may as well be written as 5 quintuplets (what Cerrone chose in the end)
@@TorilAzzalini-Machecler Sorry, just to clarify, those are things that personally, I avoid, not things that are bad form. The options you gave are more precise, but I would be willing to sacrifice precision for sight readability and hope the musician gets the “feel” for it. Honestly, I also start with DAWs and then move to notation and sometimes I’m happy to get to 90% precision and fix the other 10% when I have performers to tell me what they prefer.
"Great Vid, David"
-Me, a person with glasses
Here it’s a perfect example on how to write an awfully complex 5/8 (3+2) meter
bruh i notated it as 1 full measure of quarter notes for 3/4 with the first note accented and 1 bar of 2/4 with the first note accented. am i missing something or do compsers just want to get really technical? thanks
Please do a video on Les Espaces Acoustiques
In terms of breaking technology, my favorite technique lately is synthesizing a normal patch with stuff like key tracked FM or RM, and then pitching it up/down ridiculously (or playing in like C10) to get weird wobbles/shakes/overtones in the sound, lots of fun. Makes it feel like the software is struggling
I'd notate it as 10/8 or a bar of 7/8 followed by a bar of 3/8.
In units of 10ths of a quarter note, the note durations are 8-8-9-8-7 if I make no mistake. So I'm a bit confused by the "compromise" notation at 15:27. I wouldn't understand this to mean a slightly lengthened third note and a slightly clipped fifth note.
In any case, I think the rhythm defies conventional notation because conventional notation is adapted to human capabilities. But in my opinion this rhythm, at this tempo, is unplayable for humans, even though it's easy enough to approximate it. Nobody can seriously play the fifth note 12.5% shorter than the fourth with the precision necessary to distinguish it from, say, 15:57.
Isn't it just an 11/16 then?
What about a hybrid of a piano roll with staff notation? The staff horizontal lines give the pitch as usual, but instead regular notes where the shape of the note gives the length, the notes are thick horizontal lines, where the length of the line is proportional to the length of the note? Also add faint vertical lines at say the 1/4 beat.
Since the intent is to communicate a feel of simultaneously overlapping but slightly offset quarter-note quintuplets, why not use exactly that in the notation in the following very clean way using two voices:
Upstemmed voice: A 5:4 bracketed group of three quarter notes and two quarter rests
Downstemmed voice: A 5:4 bracketed group of two quarter notes and three quarter rests. This voice is preceded in measure 1 by a half rest and an eighth rest to place the first struck note on the "three-and," and each of the 5:4 brackets crosses over bar lines.
This puts the attack of every note precisely on the "fortieth-note" grid where the composer intended. The implied "release" of each note isn't quite the same as the intent (there will be some underlap/overlap where the voices cross over) but since this figure seems geared to a more percussive instrument, where the notion of sustain and release doesn't really exist (piano aside), that seems to me to be a more forgivable shortcoming than a notation that uses a sixteenth note symbol outside of a quintuplet bracket.
Aside from that, the premise of the video reminded me of a fascination I had in high school (in the mid 80's) with books like The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, that tried to draw parallels between spirituality and quantum physics. I think I'll just say that I've grown up since then...
Jennifer really brought that piece to life. Beautiful.
I don't get it. Times written are 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.625, 0.825. But when I _hear_ it first time, I was sure that it is a simplest stupidest quintuplet: 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8. I would like rewrite this in 5/4 and would not powder my brain. If you have five notes just write five notes! Does any mere mortal human being can hear the shift in 1/40 note?? But this difference can be completely blurred by articulation: the attack of note (depending on dynamic accent) has such duration.
Hard disagree, pal. I think you can totally hear that difference. You can also see the difference in the wave form that David cleverly shows when we first hear the rhythm.
It's subtle but it leaves you (in my opinion) unsettled, on edge, anticipating, unsure.
I'd argue even if you can't hear that consciously (and I'm not sure I'd have registered it if I simply heard it as opposed to seeing it) that those feelings are still communicated unconsciously.
This probably means 'something important' in the context of 4/4, or rather 8/8, when we keep count the eights, and feel the exact moment when the note @5/8 (0.625) should come. But this context must exist (before the snippet or in parallel part). It's hard to just image it in five-beat measure out of context.
4/5 of a beat v. 9/10 of a beat v. 7/10 of a beat.
For anyone curious about the division of the measure by note:
1/5 + 1/5 + 9/40 + 1/5 + 7/40
Somehow that actually does add up to 1.
You could technically notate it like this:
1---9- ---7-- ---6-- --4---
Or this:
1---5 ---4 - ---&-- --&---
amazing as always
Okay I'm going to throw in my two cents here and I wouldn't normally do this sort of thing these days honestly I give this order thing up many years ago but that's not a machine that's me on a piano with the Reverb turned on the Reverb is mathematical and hearing a note is just something that people should be able to do if they're going to bother playing a piano I'm happy to replicate then sentence for you I still have the same exact piano that I wrote everything on and it makes a bunch of weird noises that I'm sure people would be delighted to hear or astonished or whatever the hell it is that people are these days but while I think that he is a lovely man and what he's done with this noise is fantastic he definitely did not calculate anything to do with it at all
Oh please. Frank Zappa's band would have no problem with this. Quantum uncertainty is a pretentious analogy. The notes have durations that can be measured. Just write them down. If the musicians have problems with the math, suck it up! The rhythm can be specified, measured and performed.
14:20 .... Space. The final frontier.
These are the voyages of the starship enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds..
Id question the role of notation, then.
Aside from some tenutos and maybe a new anti-tenuto mark.
Rehearse with performers along to the digitally composed audio, if its meant to sound that way. Why sight read if you can ear read.
It sounds like a quintuplet with the last note truncated a little. Personally, I would invent an "inverse fermata". Normal fermata: stretch this note a little. Inverse fermata: shrink this note a little.
validating video for my own process, haha thank you
As a physicist I found this cute hehehe
Btw I have a question: lately I've been moving away from sibelius (into ableton) as a composing tool, because it's midi default sounds are just way too unreal and it kinda blocks me when I have trouble envisioning how some transitions or textures should sound.
Do you use any specific custom sounds for sibelius playback? I tried to customize it a coupled of times but it looked too messy. Cheers from Brazil, love your videos
Note performer 3
I love these unconventional ways of playing instruments!!
Thank you! Interesting video in itself though quite useless in practical terms. I think we all need to listen to E. Varèse's music. Always weird,super modern, visceral, fresh sounding and yet always using regular/normal meter signatures and rhythms of daily usage that performers love. In my view quantum mechanics have nothing to do with notating rhythms and expressing emotions thru sounds. (cheers from Barcelona!)
I'm about a third of the way in and, given perhaps that I am less a musician than a "person who does music," my own solution would be to bracket the measure with a 5 or 5:4 up top and notate it thus: Quarter, quarter, dotted-eighth tied to dotted-sixteenth, quarter, double-dotted-eighth. But I can understand that being a bit visually confusing moment to moment for people who have to actually read it, so the dilemma remains. Still, it's not impossible so much as exasperating and context-dependent.
Edit: After having watched the whole shebang, I think the compromise there was understandable, even if my microrhythm-fixated brain wants to be fussy about it; that generosity thing is definitely important, and it's hard to nail a nuance that small in a way that translates without you either literally being there to explain it in rehearsal or having a silly little note appended to an asterisk or something which will probably be more trouble than it's worth if very precise relationships aren't essential to some greater effect. The essence is that shifty quintuple feel in the nuances of the movement, not the hard and fast notation per se, in the same way that real swing is generally not in strict triplets or dotted notes.
Awesome video. My solution to the notation would be to make a measure of 5/8 with the first 3 quintuplets, then a bar of 3/8 with the last two quintuplets. What do you think?
The first buildings were made of mud brick and were just one story. Later they added straw to the mud and got perhaps a two story building. Then stone and brick and got perhaps seven or eight stories. Later we got steel and glass buildings--up to over a hundred stories. But one thing they all had was a solid and enduring foundation. This idea that progress in music allows you to abandon the solid foundation (discovered over hundreds of years) leads to collapsed structures. Observe this: this zeitgeist of musical progress exists only in countries that are under US military occupation.
What about notes that actually existed in a quantum state where only when you play the piece does a note get chosen. Thus creating two universes one where one note was played and one where the other was.
Obviously not actually quantum but its a cool idea someone could try.
Include enough of these and every play-through the piece would be different (probably) because variations increase exponentially with n options to effectively infinite. You could play with how much this changes the actual piece by changing if it sets the root note or an incidental on a top melody.
Dice roll pieces?
@@jorgepeterbarton hmmm maybe there really are no original ideas anymore :(
@@jorgepeterbarton I just watched 12tone's video and I did actually mean something slightly different.
Rather than arrange different bars it would be notes. The notation would read both notes (in the same way superposition is both states) until it is played out loud whne the musician would choose one (this would be measurement in the quantum analogy).
Xenakis did a tonne of this. Pitches, durations,form and even timbre generated probabilistically
@@bootishshoe reading the guardian article on Xenakis, he seems like a cool dude.
It doesn't seem like he is doing probabilistic sheet music though.
I say you should write it in 5/4 or 10/8 and it becomes "almost" easy
I believe that I have achieved a very similar beat by simply using three-four followed by two-four followed by three-four...and so on...
Surely it can even be achieved using five-four...with emphases on the first and fourth beats?
What am I doing wrong or not understanding?
so like musical notation for digital editing aka some extension of a cut-up technique. This seems like art music being informed by electronic music.
this was tremens interesting: its kind of a swing between the worlds... wondering what Nick Bärtsch would say about it
So where do I find more music like this?
Check for example "Dawn of Midi" th-cam.com/video/iohqPW8XJgI/w-d-xo.html
Dear David, that is very interesting and insipiring video. From my side I would like to recommend a very interesting Swiss composer and musician, Nik Bärtsch, who is also using and implementing a lot of those ideas from your video. I hope it can be interesting for you to discover him and his band (if you don't know) and to have an inspiration too! Thank you!
It looks like some of these rhythms are best suited for sequencers, not humans (fight me!!!).....this is not a bad thing, especially as outboard analogue sequencers (and analogue synths) are experiencing a renaissance (as well as fully digital tools). I can see how to map these rhythms into a Euclidean Circles module (which itself is a great performance and composing companion) or any other sequencer......also, not super into the Quantum Mechanics comparison. Still, love your content man, keep up the good work!
I haven't run the math, but couldn't be much easier of thinking it 10/8 (3+2+3+2) ?
14:04 Exactly, Sir!
So, in regards of the awesome postcard. You have this game called Frederic: Resurrection of Music (there are 3 of them). Sooo, if you are ever wondering: "How does Chopin's ... sounds like on ... instrument/in ... genre, check it out. It's funny as hell and almost good.
Yooo, David!! Check out PBS SpaceTime! I think you’d really dig it, and the frontman has equally impressive eyebrows!
It seems to me that as the level of complexity increases, the intentions (whatevertheyare) of the composer would suffer to the point of collapse, leaving the listener as confused as the performers were left confounded. I don't believe any listener would perceive the .333... difference, and we make noise/music for the listener, not the DAW (those workstations, and Sibelius are both soooo demanding!).