Everyone was wrong about the Strong One (Masked Man) Time Signature
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 พ.ค. 2024
- Patreon: / cadencehiramusictheory
Let's talk about Strong One (Masked Man) and what the REAL time signature is. MUSIC THEORY.
00:00-00:42 Intro
00:42-03:05 What is Strong One?
03:05-06:22 Sync Issues with Strong One (Masked Man) Time Sigs
06:22-8:47 The REAL Time Signature
08:47-12:07 Why is it NOT just 29/16?
12:07-14:09 Another discrepancy
Special thanks to NummyGD and the PK Hack Discord.
Video footage from rhythm game section is from Acai.
Rhythm Hell by Louie Zong.
Tunes used:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...
Bandcamp: cadencehira.bandcamp.com
Soundcloud: / cadence-hira
the literal example of "every music is 4/4 if you don't count it like a nerd."
Does this mean "no music is 4/4 if you count it like a nerd"?
All music is 1/4. Every note just has a different tempo.
1/1 if you count it like an idiot
1/1 if you suck at counting
0/0 if
YOU THOUGHT IT WAS 29/16, BUT IT WAS ME 4/4
“YOU WERE EXPECTING SOMEONE ELSE, BUT IT WAS ME DIO”
YOU THOUGHT IT WAS A TRANSLATION MOD, BUT IT WAS ME DOLPHIN VIRUS!
I have to say, "4/4 with vomit inducing, horrible, puke-summoning Rubato" was not what I expected.
Rubato that gives you car-crash-grade whiplash
It was what I expected.
(I have played the drums for a couple of years, around 4 years ago and I've also played rythm games my whole life).
@@chrisheartman9263I thought I was an alright drummer until I played this game xD Most fun combat system ever
Shogo Sakai made a song so fucked up people are still debating its time signature nearly two decades later. That’s crazy
perfectly 200 likes, nobody like this comment anymore please
NOOOOOOOO ITS ACTUALLY 201
@@xaigamer3129 bros lucky number is 200💀
770 let's go!@xaigamer3129
@@Neo36563 :0 THANK YOU
Feels really in character for a Siivagunner joke to say that the one VGM song that nobody can agree on its time signature about was actually a 4/4 piece.
Makes sense that they'd be the ones to know about it, too, considering they'd have had to actually try and fit this onto a timeline.
What if Silvagunner was right about everything
@@Bird-wz7nxEvery single music is actually a modified version of Grandad
They do upload high quality tips after all
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740me when I tell you about SiIvagunner's other various jokes which aren't just Grand Dad like Snow Halation, The Nutshack, and more recently, Raft Ride:
@@user-AADZ me when I explain why the joke wouldn't have worked with more references like I am Joke Explainer 7000
(I was gonna mention Snow Halation, but it wouldn't have worked as well imo. It would have broken the rhythm, and made it less effective overall.)
I like how you say "verified by the official earthbound wiki" when it's just some fandom page lol
makes sense silvagunner's wiki would know since it's actually full of musicians
I probably should have checked the URL a tad closer lol
Well of course! He only uploads *HIGH QUALITY* video game rips!
The SiIvagunner community unironically packed with goatee musicians
Siivagunner team puts so much effort just to make shitposts and we LOVE it
@@user-AADZYou should check out their mustaches!
This is even more proof of the joke “Everything is in 4/4 if you don’t count it like a nerd”
in this case it's more accurate to say it's in 4/4 if you DO count it like a nerd, it being the tempo.
@@pedrogarcia8706 Its more a showcase on how time-signatures are not real. Meter is a concept of the brain to make sense of rhythm. (Hugo Riemann: System der musikalischen Rhythmik und Metrik. 1903)
Mostly all phrasing is usually divisible by 4. Odd time signatures still mostly have phrases divisible by 4. So technically that quote isn’t truly correct in saying everything is “in” 4/4.
People overthink this stuff.
Or 3/4
doesnt sound like a joke to me, sounds like bs.
I DM'd Shogo Sakai on Twitter asking about the meter of Strong One recently, and he told me he was thinking of Strong One in terms of *additive* time signatures: 3/4 + 3/8 + 1/4 + 1.5/4 (spicy!)
It makes sense when you're focusing on the pulses in the combos driving the time signatures by themselves, but it also affirms the idea that Shogo Sakai *was* thinking about decently "regular"/"clean" meters, and therefore 15/8 and 29/16 kinda fit those conventional vibes.
For even more context by the way, the mp2k/Sappy sound engine -- the engine sent out to GBA devs by Nintendo which was used in Gen. III Pokémon *and* MOTHER 3 -- has a tempo "resolution" of 2 BPM, meaning the next smallest tempo change above 120 BPM Sappy supports is 122 BPM, *not* 121 BPM.
Also, excellent job accounting for the 3:5 16ths tuplet at the end of (Masked Man) ❤
The tempo resolution probably explains the desync.
interestingly, if you add together those signatures, the result is actually 14/8. maybe I just forgot how to get a consistent signature from multiple.
wait a second this completely tracks, masked man version just cuts off the last note so 1.5/4
this means that strong one masked man is just in 7/4 and gets an extra 16th note from subpar tempo resolution
I did not expect to see sorting algorithm man here
@@liquid_dihydrogen_monoxide You'd be surprised how much work I've done on MOTHER 3!
3:42 "It turns the otherwise familiar tune into a counterintuitive abomination."
No spoilers, but that is just... saddeningly appropriate given the Masked Man's circumstances.
I think the whole issue is that we're trying to notate this song with a time signature even though the real, true intent of this song is to make drummers take confusion damage.
Yknow, since following the rhythm that's literally the gameplay mechanic, it forces the encounter to be one against an opponent that you can't get a solid read on.
I think the REAL most accurate way to notate this song is to put a note in front of the drummer section that says "have fun LOL". And put question marks behind the time sig.
If a notation of this song doesn't appear on the "threatening music notation" twitter, then it's not accurate enough.
Psychic Damage is only appropriate, considering the franchise!
Giving drummers psychic damage was not on my 2024 bingo card but frankly i think this is the highlight of the year lmao
Time Signature
Good
---
Luck
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try. It's an interesting exercise
Also according to some other comments, Shogo Sakai *did* claim to actually think in terms of additive time signatures when composing this. Just because something is intended to be weird or jarring doesn't mean we should just assume it defies explanation. That's kind of a cop out
Game dev here. My explanation for the weirdness you're seeing:
Games run at 60 FPS or 30 FPS or whatever, but audio doesn't follow frames. It's handled separately, and constantly gets out of sync with the frames. (I'm making a rhythm game and MY GOODNESS it causes so much trouble.) Recordings of MOTHER 3 will have imperfect timing, but never enough for anyone to detect unless they check - like you did. For gameplay purposes though, it's accurate enough.
Based on your video, it's a safe bet the heartbeat is handled automatically by the code based ONLY on tempo - which explains the quarter notes. Shogo Sakai possibly wrote these songs at 15/8 or 29/16... but converted them afterwards to be 4/4 with appropriate tempo changes. I bet MOTHER 3's team wrote a tool specifically for converting all songs to 4/4, to save time. Which makes sense: This way, every time they revised the music during development, the heartbeat wouldn't need to be manually corrected to match - it's already part of the song!
This would explain why all MOTHER 3 recordings are slightly out of sync, and why technically all battle themes are in 4/4 time signature. It was probably the solution that was the least trouble. Hopefully you didn't pull out too much hair trying to decipher the time signature! There's always multiple ways to solve a problem when making a game; sometimes you just pick one that's good enough.
Scrolled down to say basically the same thing, and well put. The reason this isn't pointed out more often is because the difference that audio processing causes is often so small that it's negligent and goes completely undetected.
@@chupathingy13exactly. Supposedly humans can't detect things faster than 13ms, and a 60FPS game means the frames are around 16-17ms.
But when it comes to audio, we absolutely do hear a stutter, Even if it's a lot smaller and just a little pop or crack. So usually they separate audio from frame processing.
Fun fact, if you've ever had a piece of software crash, and it keeps making the last noise it made, I think this is why. The audio processor is still going, but it's not getting instructions from the rest of the software on what sound/note to play next.
@@kantackistancan confirm from knowledge of nintendo console architecture, this is all exactly it. The GBA streams raw 8-bit PCM audio from the CPU most of the time, unless it's using gameboy emulation features. So all audio playback is at the mercy of the CPU's timing for game code.
It's possible, if not likely, that two recordings from console with different gameplay states wouldn't even sync up 100% over time. With little microseconds of lag every time a button press is registered and it has to branch to its process.
I’ll note that on older hardware this was even more suspect because frequently the audio chip and the cpu were not so separate. Super Metroid on the snes for example offloaded some processing to the audio chip, and thus doors can only open when sounds have finished. This actually made its way into the tool assisted speedrun for super metroid, as a significant consideration for optimisation. I assume the GBA had a clearer distinction between audio and game processing, but it’s totally possible that the audio chip runs slower the harder the cpu works.
It's also possible if not likely that recordings from 2 different GBAs would have slightly different playback speeds. The crystal oscillators that all signal timings derive from are intended for consumer devices, not scientific applications, and have some tolerance for deviation from nominal speed; I wouldn't be surprised if discrepancies of ±0.01% between units at identical temperatures are observable.
So, interesting math note:
You were able to notate Dry Guys using both a non 4/4 time signature and using tempo changes because both represent the same ratio: 2:3.
You can get this ratio by dividing out the common factors from each of the prime factorizations of the tempos until none remain.
In Dry Guys, dividing out the common factors of 96 and 144 leaves us with 2 and 3. And 2x3=6 -> 6/8.
The issue with Strong One and Strong One (Masked Man) is that their tempos don't share many common factors, leaving a lot of numbers to be multiplied together to get a ratio that can represent each song.
In Strong One, from 120, 172, 224, and 80, you can only divide out 2 twice. This leaves 2, 2, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 43. 2x2x2x3x5x7x43=36,120. Thus, the smallest time signature you can accurately represent Strong One with is 36,120/65,536.
In Strong One (Masked Man), from 126, 180, 236, and 102, you can only divide out 2. This leaves 2, 3, 3, 5, 7, 17, and 59. 2x3x3x5x7x17X59=631,890. Thus, the smallest time signature you can accurately represent Strong One (Masked Man) with is 631,890/1,048,576.
Both of these time signatures are very unfriendly to humans, so approximating with 15/8 and 29/16 or using tempos to represent these songs is probably the way to go.
(p.s. The slowdown you mentioned at the end of the video would not change these time signatures, since a uniform slowdown would not change the ratio.)
".../65536"
Wait, that's familiar...
*One google search later*
...That's the same number of integers 16 bits can hold!!
@@Leekodot15
Yes!
Traditionally the bottom number of a time signature will be a power of two, so for these I picked the next highest power of two after each number. I could have picked any power of two, but the closer the two numbers of a time signature are to one another the fewer extremely short or extremely long note lengths you need to notate
And computer storage is also fond of the powers of 2, given that each bit you add to something multiplies it’s number of potential values by 2
I got disgusted when i read “631890/1048576” Great math!
YES, THANK YOU
I agree with your comment 110%.
so tl:dr 29/16 is actually correct?
As a drummer, the video just got more and more horrifying just imaginating having to play that. Very interesting tho !
Felt this as a tuba player. keeping the rhythm is hard enough in normal sane grounded music
this is like how in Master of Puppets the entire song is in 4/4 but then there's that two hit measure that people describe as 21/32
That’s just because…Lars
mother 3's battle system is so cool, the complexity of the music being tied to the difficulty of the battle is so creative and it helps that shogo Sakai is a mad genius with making creative vgm
Gotta wonder about Earthbound 2 on the N64 though.
Still kinda want, in the same way OoT is friggin OoT, but these Zelda 64 scraps are fascinating...
The way it's programmed to handle the heartbeats is fascinating to me, I know that several other games have sound engines on the GBA that use MIDI files in this way (hello everything at Game Freak), so it's unsurprising that they'd use them for this. But I didn't expect the *hard coded* use of quarter notes, that Shogo Sakai and/or a sound engineer assisting him would then have to convert into something the game could then use for its own system. The fact that this also makes the nightmare of Masked Man into 4/4 makes me wonder if Sakai *was* also the sound engineer at the same time he was composer (which would track, as a lot of older soundchip hardware for NES and SNES had the same thing going on) because this is too elegant to be handled by two individual people for how monstrous it is to our ears.
I don't know Mother 3's internals, but as a programmer... I think it's hardcoded and less of a limitation, as being able to effectively listen in for different note types isn't theoretically hard to do if you have access to a full MIDI track on actual hardware. It's more of a "build to scale" thing - Mother 3 has a lot of tracks, like over 200. Not all of them are used in battle, but many of them are or can be at certain times, so your beat tracking system needs to be robust to account for all of them. It was probably just a shortcut and the creation of a 0 volume MIDI track with exclusively quarter notes appended to the end of each bit of music data, that every song then needed to be engineered around after the fact. It's for a similar reason that all the instruments used by the Bash command are in C minor - though that also has both lore reasons and limitations on what kind of battle themes could be composed. Sakai is a wizard.
I think Strong One's variants are supposed to *sound* like 29/16 and 15/8 respectively, and I agree with the conclusion that we can treat them as "approximants" of these time signatures. Less because of the limitations of the GBA, but more because that was the artistic intent to be "just off" of them to make them harder to follow! After all, if we approached Dry Guys *not* as 3:2, musically that makes no sense, even if the game's actual data speaks otherwise. These slight tweaks are intentional because of Strong One's purpose - if Sakai wanted to make them 29/16 or 15/8 as opposed to...whatever this tempo map is, he could've, clearly. (I'm not in the man's head, but yeah lol) He wanted to mess with us a bit :)
...WAIT HUH LOL THE REFRESH RATE JUMPSCARE
Great overview, this was a joy to watch!!
EDIT: Thanks for the like :) Saw a typo I had to fix but TH-cam gets rid of it on edited comments, ah well
I cannot *believe* the thing about the heartbeat tracks all being 4/4 quarter notes and hacking together anything else with tempo changes. What the hell.
My friend just shared this and I said to her, "this game taught me polyrhythms I swear".
I love how everytime you talk about something in music theory you then add that to your outro music because it makes me realize that without you explaining it I am STUMPED
71907/40120 is mathematically equivalent to the 4/4 beat changes. With 71907 beats in a bar, heartbeats 1,2,3 and 7 get 10,030 beats each, heartbeats 4 and 5 get 7,021 beats each, heartbeat 6 gets 5,355 beats, and heartbeat 8 (which gets divided into a triplet) gets 12,390 beats. It doesn't actually matter what the beat denomination is, but if you choose 71907/16384, the tempo (whole note) is the same BPM as the framerate in FPS. I don't know what the other math guy is thinking.
*71907
Okay, but it's not 79107/40120, it's 71907/40120. You added an extra 7200 beats there.
I love how the footage is you beating Lucas up, rather than playing as him 😂
i didn't play mother 3 but i think he gets bodied the first time he meets masked man so it felt appropriate
@CadenceHira Have played Mother 3 can confirm, then again [Masked Man] bodied me too (emotionally)
@@CadenceHira tbh the first time I met him he kicked my ass
I only had one guy left alive by the end
Oh my God this is one of those times where you come across a video and feel like it was made specifically for you and you alone.
This was fascinating, thank you so much
Me as heck... I was the first person I am pretty sure to upload a 16-hit combo of this song LOL
the fan translation has its own dedicated website. using reddit is just asking for malware, lmao.
Idk what you're talking about disappointed, this song being in 4/4 with wild tempo changes is such a great rug pull, and also much less common in the context of avant-garde music, and ALSO more nicely responsive to the affordances of computer-played music. Loved this video to bits! Thank you!
Sadness and Sorrow in that time signature at the end killed meee
What are you talking about it's just 4/4 /s
5:52 Hey, it's me! I added those a long time ago. Quick note about the wiki, it's not official by Nintendo, and even then the wiki and its community have abandoned Fandom ages ago and are now an independent place, WikiBound.
Years ago I was playing with the game's memory addresses and found the address for the current BPM -- I have a video showcasing the value and what happens if you change it. That is where I got the BPM values I added to the wiki from. I do however remember that they never exactly matched real life; I think I vaguely remember checking that Zombeat is internally at plain old 120 BPM but when you actually hear the song the BPM is slightly different. Most likely because of the GBA's clock like you said, but also misc. stuff like limited decimal place calculation capabilities and lag frames.
I have not looked into how the game works very deeply, but I did gather some conclusions back then, and have made use of them to developed a since-abandoned project, PK Rhythm, which mimics Mother 3's combo system. In both Mother 3 and PK Rhythm, the system is pretty much what you describe: whoever made the song specifies BPM changes and then the game just checks if the player's hit is on-beat or not. Both are completely ignorant to the concept of time signatures, off-beats, etc.
I chuckled a bit when I heard “verified by the official earthbound wiki.” =P It’s a fan-run wiki, so it really has no authority to verify anything. They just curate information that’s believed or discovered to be true by superfans.
I mean, for stuff like this, that's about as close as you can get, especially if a source/proof is provided.
At the end of the day, any sort of "official" verification depends on trust of the supposed authority.
ARTSYOMNI!?
What’s insane is that even though the timing in this song is so strange after enough listening the groove starts to make sense! Repetition legitimizes, repetition legitimizes
Repetition legitimizes
Sounds to me like Strong One was written in 15/8 but as they were putting it into the game somebody messed up the tempos, and they thought "hey wait that kinda sounds cool, what if we use that for a harder enemy encounter?" The best creative decisions are often the ones found completely by accident.
Composer: Ho ho, this one's going to throw people off. They think it will be in 7/8, but it's actually in 15/16!
Intern: Actually sir, your calculations are a little off. It's actually a 43875x10^15/64 Time Signature
Composer: Ah it's okay. It's not like anyone will notice 😅
Ah.. I never even thought about changing tempo within the groove of the song. Holy cow that's crazy.
This is insane! And SiIvaGunner gets woven in as well lol
I'm not convinced that the interpretation of "it's 4/4, just speeding up and slowing down" is a useful one from a music theory perspective. Sure, that's how it's implemented in-game, but as you point out with Dry Guys and all the other tracks, you can really do any beat that way, even ones that are obviously intended to be in a totally different metre.
That said, the fact that the ratios make it a good distance from 29/16 is pretty convincing. But you also raise a good point at 11:15 in that it MIGHT have been meant to be 29/16, although the extent to which it's off makes me wonder if it was actually meant to be something different even from that. It does make me wonder what might be a good compromise between the somewhat-off 29/16 and the patently-ridiculous-but-technically-correct 71907/40120 I've seen floating around.
This song is the true embodiment of how it feels to sightread for honor band auditions...
Hahaha the siivagunner wiki was NOT what I was expecting when I clicked on this video randomly, got my sub now
people saying "all music is 4/4 if you don't count it like a nerd" as if changing the tempo multiple times per bar isn't some advanced music nerd shit lmao
9:59 Imagine you're a composer writing for a videogame and suddenly you have to do weird time signature, speed and rythm calculations so that it's percieved as written above
Cadence, as a former musician (I say former because I never get to gig or teach anymore), this is exactly the kind of content that me and so many other aspiring music professionals wanted to make and watch when we were younger. The fact that you are actively researching, making content, and experimenting with music so earnestly means that you are on your way to great success as a content creator and musician. Keep improving, keep learning, and keep writing. Great video!
Edit: my theory is that the creator had that specific music in his head or had recorded It previously and just found some tricky way to aproxímate It with the software that they were using and make It sound similar to what they wanted and It somewhat worked
Hey i just wanted to comment that your videos are super super interesting. I subscribed from another video but since then you published a few more and didnt disappoint at all!
I was JUST listening to this song and counting along and while counting I knew something felt off about it allegedly being 29/16. I feel so validated.
Having ripped a fair amount of MIDI data from games, I can tell you that much of the time a time signature isn't even programmed and it's technically 4/4, even if the music itself is just in 3/4 all the way through. I also actually saw someone point this out about "Strong One (Masked Man)" somewhere, but people just got mad and insisted "well it's still effectively 29/16", which this video demonstrates is false.
Side note: that is not the "official EarthBound wiki" and just a fansite hosted on Fandom (blech). But the SiIvaGunner wiki is edited by people associated with the channel, so that one could possibly be considered official- for SiIvaGunner of course, not EarthBound.
The SiIva wiki is mostly handled by fans of the channel, though with how big the SiIvaGunner team is there ends up being a decent amount of contributors that also write stuff for it and are involved with managing the wiki.
12:07 shit has me on the edge of my seat
Well I'll be damned! I was a little salty to not hear you talking about this in your "weird time signatures in Nintendo Games", but with this whole video dedicated to this specific song, I'm more than happy and, more importantly, completely wrong in my comment on your previous video! I'm sorry for the strife and thank you for making this video! I absolutely love mother 3 and hearing you walk through the technicalities of this song was a blast, please keep up your amazing work!
Now I want to see 8-Bit Music Theory’s reaction to this lmao. Also Adam Neely. This is like landmark musical bullshittery
Me too, especially when 8-bit Music Theory did his video on odd time signatures, he only did Strong One.
Honestly this is such a great video. I know nothing about music stuff but I’m a huge Mother 3 fan and I’ve always thought something wasn’t quite right about that song.
[5:16] you feel like you're going to have a bad time... signature
You know, i just thought of your other video on this game, around a day ago. And then THIS SHOWS UP?!? Love your content!
This helps really illustrate the function of tume signatures. Its so easy to just wonder "why?" as a person who only ever dabbled in music and who was good at learning by ear.
I mean, you show how most people are wrong, but you show how you can be so precise and represent something that feels like ear chaos succinctly on paper and for a machine with a purpose, which is cool
Man I always wondered about this song when I was playing, it was so weirdly out of tune but somehow in-tune at the same time, so I never got the timing right
Great video! Love to see some Mother 3 videos and that little reference to Rhythm Paradise at the end
i remember finding out about the battle songs being 4/4 with different tempos when i dumped the midis for the songs when i wanted to remix them, it was super interesting to hear fate/serious as it was programmed and i remember i talked about it in a random youtube commend like 7 years ago (will never ever find it again though).
that said i don't really think it's very useful to just say "in the end, it's 4/4 but with tempo changes!" (even if it's technically correct) especially considering that applies to literally every battle song in the game. the datamining of the music files and seeing how the tempo behaves surely gives some very interesting insight and it would have helped here, had the game not had that rhythm mechanic. like some other commenter said, shogo sakai clearly had a time signature in mind and i think creator intent should be what matters here. hell, for all we know it might have been his intention to make the song not fit in any steady tempo just to throw the player off even harder (after all it's considered to be notoriously harder to combo on than regular strong one).
if things don't sync up, especially in an old console, that can just be attributed to hardware inaccuracies, just as you said; after all you'll find that even NES games had trouble keeping a consistent tempo at all let alone a tidy whole number one. the fact the song seems to sync up really well at 29/16 at first tells me that 29/16 is a perfectly valid time signature to classify this song and i don't think it's worth diving into why it doesn't *perfectly* line up. lastly i have a feeling that the programmers simply felt like it was way easier for them to program the heartbeats to be in sync with the tempo and just told shogo "hey you'll have to play with the tempo lol sorry" who knows they probably wrote a script for him that generated tempos for him so he didn't have to manually calculate the ratios, but i don't think it was a hardware "limitation" but rather a "this is the easiest thing to code lol".
tl;dr for me this song is still 29/16 and if it doesn't line up exactly at that it can just be attributed to hardware and it's not really that important.
p.s. 5:14 fucking killed me you're hilarious
i think the reason why the heartbeat notes are straight quarter notes with changing tempo is so that the combo sounds of the characters will flow seamlessly-ish into the next combo sound
"The difficulty of the battle, apart from damage and health pools, is also dependent on how cracked you are at rhythm games." *_DICKO MODE JUMPSCARE_*
good catch lol
You can approximately count it as "quarter, quarter, quarter, triplet, triplet, eighth, quarter, quintuplet quintuplet quintuplet" at 123.6 bpm, and it should loop nearly perfectly with the worst note being only 1/50 of a second out of place. In this interpretation, the time signature would be 211/120 (as 3/4 + 2/6 + 3/8 + 3/10), or ~7.033/4, which is only so complex because of the unresolved tuplets.
it's disappointing that this video blew up in less than a week but you only have 33.5k subs, this is great video essay content!
Just found you channel through recommended and I love it. New sub fs
You have a way of talking where I can never guess what or which syllable you'll stress next and as a result I have a fun time listening to your voice.
The outro of this video is HILARIOUS LMAOOO
excellent stuff!! Quickly becoming one of my favorite YT channels!
I may not be the first
I am not the last
When I see Cadence hira
I click very fast
And I may be late
It might be fate
but I see new post
it feels like eating french Toast
This may be one of the most pointlessly pedantic music theory videos I've ever seen on TH-cam. I love it. Thank you for your commitment to quality.
Okay that Rythm Hell part at the end sent me flying, all in all a great one, your video :D
Really great stuff!!! The 29/16 time signature has always felt a bit wrong to me. It's a great approximation, but it always felt like a blanket solution that swept any tempo fuckery under the 3:5-let. The idea of just programming tempo changes every time the heartbeat changes makes far more sense for music that will never have to be played by humans. And for humans, as you said, those complex time signatures definitely capture the "feel" the tracks are going for even if they're not mathematically precise.
My uninformed theory is that the ingame audio is slower because the game's audio logic is also checking for other sounds it needs to play? Maybe GBA memory might be an issue too. Some of the calculations it has to do to change BPM may involve floating point or roundoff errors?
This all reminds me of the method/effect Ludvig Goransson was going for in Oppenheimer - Can You Hear the Music. There's a video of him breaking it down far better but essentially each rising and falling phrase is played at a new BPM based on mathematical relationships (multiply by 1.5 to make eighth notes sound like triplets with no apparent tempo change, divide by 1.5 to go back, but add 20 BPM so the whole pattern accelerates, repeat) and the orchestra is just absurdly talented at following click tracks and instantly changing tempo.
Indie game dev here. Chances are the reason why it's not exact is because you have a variable amount of time that each frame is being processed before it gets to queueing up music. Let's say Frame 1 it starts immediately, then 30 frames later it's time to queue up the next bit of music. Before it gets to the music, it may be processing some other chunk of data such as player input that takes some milliseconds. So then the music gets queued slightly later. If the code is looking at the projected end of a string of notes, the next sections all get pushed out slightly each time this happens.
ur videos are so good, i have nearly 0 music theory experience and enjoy them all
Incredible video! I've never heard this song before this and it's so fun and interesting! After some thinking and messing around I actually found a way to count it that FEELS quite nice. Alternating between 1 bar of 5/4 then 1 bar of 7/12(counting 7 eighth note triplets) :)
This channel never disappoints me. Way to do an insane amount of homework on this one
I cannot express in words how even though I’ve been into music with weird time signatures my whole life, I experienced severe psychic damage after hearing the drum part to this. I can’t even imagine it would sound good played by a real drummer
i listen to Haken and I've heard 23/16 out of them, this confused me
I think the main reason the song in game doesn't line up 100% with the midi data is purely due to:
1. The GBA having inconsistent framerate count with audio. (This is stated in the video)
2. The game may either purposely or unintentionally slow down the song because it has to change the tempo frequently, but it must also keep the heartbeat on track to make sure the timing doesn't desync as the battle progresses.
It seems hard enough to keep track of the songs time signature in one loop, but in one battle it may loop several times. Therefore, there is likely something in place to ensure that the heartbeat doesn't loose track of the song itself.
You almost got a like from me. Out of respect, I watched all the way to the end of the video. That means I heard the abomination playing during your Patreon supporters shout-out. I cannot in good conscience support such atrocities.
I feel vindicated. There was a period of several days where I would spend 30 mins-1 hr listening to this piece at a time, trying to figure out its time signature in light of inconsistant claims, and the conclusion I reached by listening to the music was that it was in either 4/4 or 8/4. 4/4 seems correct to me - there is more emphasis on the fifth note of the tempo cycle than I would expect in 8/4 (beats 1 and 5 seem equal in this piece, where they wouldn't be in 8/4), but I can see the argument for 8/4, being that each measure now contains one full tempo cycle & it is no longer awkwardly split across every pair of measures.
Thank you for making this video. Hopefully this will set the record straight on how this piece works, in a musical sense.
(minor edit improving readability)
This is a great crash course on how time signature and notation kinda isn't real. By which I mean it's not set in stone and you can make up whatever notation you want as long as it works for you.
A typical 4/4 song could be written as 2/4 or 4/8 at half the tempo, or at 8/4 or 16/8 at double the tempo. Or you could write it in 8/4 at the same tempo with double-length measures. Or you could write it in 6/8 and just put measure markers in the middle of the "normal" mesaures. Or you could write it in like 864/4 where the entire song is one measure. Or you could write it such that it constantly changes tempos and time signatures in just the right way to sound like nothing's happening. The music does not change, only the notation.
With a complex song like Masked Man, it makes much more sense to just "feel" it rather than trying to count everything, at least when you're trying to perform the song.
Imagine thinking SIlvaGunner is from "yesteryear". Their April Fools Day event was phenomenal.
Ok, this is what I understood from this piece.
I think the melody was thought of as two groups of three notes. In the first version, the first group is a triplet of quarter notes and the second group is three eighth notes. In the second version the two groups of three notes of the melody have been altered in tempo, leaving the fragments without melody unchanged. The first three notes can always be thought of as a triplet at 120 on the metronome. In fact, this makes it clearer that it is a very small change and is well conveyed by the small difference between 126 and 120. The second part at 126 "without melody" does not come in after the triplet has taken place regularly, but a a little earlier, giving the idea of two "overlapping pieces". After that, the third part at 102 can be seen as a very rushed version of the group of three eighth notes, in fact I would write it as 3 eighth notes at metronome 204, rather than as a triplet.
AAAAAAAA LOOK MOM I'M FAMOUS
Amazing video as always, I can't believe the siiva wiki actually had the correct answer lmfao
Great video! I never heard any of this music before, but this was super interesting.
I also can't get over that Shostakovich-ass Audacious March lol. (From the 5th Symphony, 1st Movement.)
Yeah I noticed too !
Halfway though the vid, I was starting to sniff sound card and CPU clock weirdness. I'm really glad you also thought of that and addressed it because I wasn't expecting it haha
This video was FANTASTIC!!! You’re amazing :) that outro was gold LOL
Id take it as 7/4 and leave it and never worry abt it ever again tbh. It sounds a lot cooler with that kind of meter anyways
SiivaGunner reference!!!!!!!
44 seconds ago is insane
Nice! Good stuff. The reveal of 4/4 is funny as hell. Can't say I'm shocked by it, it's as the old adage goes: "anything can be 4/4."
Oh my god now I need to see you analyze and go insane over Splatoon music, specifically Salmon Run! The in-universe band’s signature style is basically to chop the time signature into a million pieces and glue them back together haphazardly, it’s audial chaos and I love it
It's so cool how different representations in sheet music can give the same sounds! It's also neat how the music is *programmed* can end up very different from how one would write it for, say, actually making it playable for a live band, or comprehensible to laymen otherwise. Like, I doubt you'll have more people able to mentally conjure how rapid sudden tempo changes sounds compared to weird time signatures and odd note notation.
Maybe the added final descrepancy could be from the recording software? Or the audio exporting, since if its done with a diferent number of Hertz in the refreshrate, it touches the speed ever so slightly
As a computer science major, I'd say this may be a case of how time is calculated in the game's programming. To my understanding, some games in the past counted cpu clock cycles to time things right. If you go back far enough, you see games where the programmer had to literally calculate how long each instruction would take to execute, which is why many games in the 80s lacked background music during gameplay (think Galaga and pacman), because you can't predict what instructions specifically will execute, and thus can't time out music. Now, later on, counting clock cycles became a subprocess ran by the hardware itself, and all the programmer would have to do is check how many cycles have passed. However, there remains two problems:
1. The cpu clock on a Gameboy advance only has to be consistent enough to execute instructions. Beyond that, there's no need to make sure all manufactured cpu clocks run at precisely the same speed, which could explain why your recorded audio is different.
2. The point in the code at which the programmer checks the number of clock cycles may differ for the same reason as before: whatever actions the player takes may cause the check to occur earlier or later in the game loop.
Now, in modern computers, we have much more precise clocks, better methods of checking cycles, and can even synchronize with remote atomic clocks. But back in the day, that kind of effort just isn't worth it when the yield is a perfect time signature, especially when the bottleneck is fitting the music in the cartridge itself. So I think your last theory was most likely correct, and you can chalk the unsyncronized nature of your last recording up to either programmer or manufacturer error, not musician. Great video btw!
Edit: I almost forgot, many games synchronize the gameplay to the display refresh rate. Same principle, except instead of counting clock cycles, we're counting frames.
Shigesato Itoi: ok this is gonna be one of Nintendo's darkest characters so we need to make sure we give Music nerds anyuerisms.
Omg this video is awesome, if only I knew music theory better.. subbed!!
i talked to one guy who liked earthbound and TH-cam brought me to this video a week later, wild stuff
Great video! what might actually be going on is that the GBA quantizes the BPM differently (probably only taking integers) and when converted to actual BPM are not an integer value, but something in between. so it might have been written as described in the video but converting it to the GBA mightve turned it into something like actually 126.953 BPM [this is all speculation and extrapolition from how it would work on a SNES]
I have noticed that same song from the same file on different audio players, even on the same device, tend to play slightly slower on one than the other. Part of it may be the format and the program used to play the song itself.
Thank you, now I finally have a video to link when I see people being wrong about strong one's time signature.
"It's not that bad... it's actually worse"
Really fascinating to see how it all works behind the scenes!
I have a feeling it wasn't so much a limitation of the console as much as it was probably easier for the developers to program a combo system that only counts hits on quarter notes, which in turn meant they had to use tempo changes to simulate funky time signatures.
I think the strange slowdown that you are seeing in GB could be just because of cpu processing time with most DAW's taking about 40% of your cpu give or take it could mean that there is a slight slow down in the rendering of the files in garage band playback. How do you fix it. To be honest i have no idea you could try to adjust for the speed in a different daw but im not sure what type of DAW could have such a small time adjustment. BUT i think that because of that your version if correct because it is just a issue on GB and your CPU @CadenceHira
your channel is so cool!! I just watched a bunch of your vids in a row!
Now, we need Stronger One. A song with an actual absurd time signature.
That's a 14 minute video explaining how this extremely cursed sounding soundtrack is... ACTUALLY CURSED!!?!?!?!?!?!
wow that was a fascinating breakdown! subscribed
If someone gave me the 4/4 version sheet music with the funky tempo changes and asked me to play it, I'd quit on the spot. That's obviously not readable to a human, and since we notate stuff for humans to play, and humans don't play in perfect time down to the ms, I'd say the 29/16 version is way more usable.
I sometimes exhange 8th triplets for dotted 16th for a bit of fun, and I wasn't aware of that way of writing em. Neat!
Ive been arguing about this time sig with people online for a while. I love weird time sigs, and masked man is like the poster child of weird time sigs. I also read about the whole heartbeat thing and it really interested me.
The way I see it, there's two ways to argue the time sig of masked man: 4/4 or 29/16, which IMO the correct answer depends on whether it was composed accounting for the heartbeat changes or they just composed in 4/4 then played around with weird slowdown. I reckon the composer did intend it to have the slowdown the way it does and worked backwards, but the console simply couldn't handle the mathematics to make it EXACTLY 29/16. That said, I couldn't find any interviews or anything from the composer and especially given masked man is a variation on the regular strong one, they could've very well composed both in 4/4 and then played around with slowdown not as a stage of composition but as a stage of game design... If that makes sense.
Edit: yeah this seems to align with the point you made in the conclusion of the video before the final discrepancies. bonus note I think NummyGD was one of the people I argued with about the time sigs, as he argued BOTH were 15/8 because masked man was the same base as strong one and just sped up differently but I argued that logic would just make both 4/4 if you accounted for the speedup for both and it's weird to only account for the speed difference between the two.
Well, it could be said that time signatures in general tend to be approximate anyway. Classical music notation was never meant to exactly match the performance (nor the data from the game in this case), and neither using time measures (not talking about the 29:16 though, as it's still kinda manageable) nor precise BPM changes that are impossible to intuit feels satisfactory for a transcript, as like you said - it isn't helpful for performance - but I'd go further and say it isn't helpful for musical analysis, nor for any case in which the staff notation may be needed. I'd treat it similarly to other stuff that such notation doesn't usually notate (and even if so - never precisely), such as timbre or other things that appear only in a recording
That said I'm not a fan of notating it as 29:16 either as it still feels like there is a tempo change in the loop, but I'd probably just eliminate all but one of them by using approximations of the BPM ratio, possibly having a relevant symbol or annotation that the note length is a bit shorter/longer
Definitely true in a lot of cases, especially performance and stuff like you said. I think it's important in this context for two reasons: The tempos/time signatures are programmed in, and there was some level of deliberation in the exactness of timing that I think is worth analyzing, i.e. the feel if dotted eights:quarters is 4.29:3, made to deliberately feel like you're rushing. Also in terms of sync, any mashups or covers of this tune that intend to use the same beatmap need to know the temple cycle or it will desync.
Love this answer! Only thing is I would still argue 29/16 is sensible since the final eighth note in Strong One is effectively "cut in half"; it's the most straightforward musical representation of what Shogo Sakai did with the song's meter, IMO.
The heartbeats being handled in 4/4 quarter notes at different tempos makes sense, since it makes it easier to program in the timings for the rhythm based hits. If you are allowed to be off by 1/16 of a beat, then it makes sense why it's harder to hit them on the fast bits.