polyrhythms, what they are, how to perform them, but also we're gonna try and connect
polyrhythms to other things. So, on my YouTube channel, I have a show
that I'm not calling New Horizons in Music, and this is going to be the first live episode,
I hope you enjoy. That obnoxious thing. Alright, so that was an introduction animated
by Simon Franzmann, really funny guy.
So we're going to start with an introduction. On my channel
I get to explore a bunch of different topics, and one topic I explored recently was something
that was very near and dear to my heart. Something called synesthesia. Now, synesthesia
is the pairing of two or more senses.
And it's something that we actually all do,
especially when we're talking about music, we'll pair adjectives that describe things
in once sense and we'll use it with our sense of hearing,
for example, If you've ever heard
a bright sound or a dark sound or maybe a warm tone or a fat and punchy snare
or a melody might be sweet to the point of cloying These are all terms that describe our sense
of sight and our sense of smell and taste, but not our sense of hearing, but we understand
the emotional impact of those adjectives and we will relate it back to our hearing. And synesthesias like this, except...
Kind of like takes it up to the next level. This is called a cross-modal relationship,
whenever you have senses relating in this way, when you have adjectives with one,
using it as a metaphor for another, and people with synesthesia
really kind of experience this in a very literal way. There's a form of synesthesia
called chromasthesia which basically means that when
you hear a sound, if have chromasthesia, it's a neurological condition, when you hear
a sound you will literally see a color.
And this chromasthesia means that the sound
of a violin might actually sound orange, or potentially sound blue. And this is really interesting to me,
the idea of pairing color and sound. And when you have these experiences
of pairing color and sound, they're called photisms, which I found a really fun word cos it almost
has like a science fiction aspect to it. And, you know, this idea of a photism,
I don't have chromasthesia, I have another kind of synesthesia,
but I do have...
I do pair letters with colors, that's something called
grapheme-color synesthesia. But when people have a kind of synesthesia
where you actually hear a color I found that really interesting.
I really wanted to explore that idea a lot more, I wanted to explore the idea of color and sound
and see how far down the rabbit hole I could go. And turns out I'm not the first person
to think about these things, in fact there's a long lineage of people
who've thought about the relationship of color and sound. One of them was this guy: Alexander Scriabin.
He was an early 20th Century
Russian composer, pretty amazing composer, and he composed a piece of music called
Prometheus, A poem of Fire. And in Prometheus, A Poem of Fire,
you have an entire orchestra playing, but you also have this instument playing, which he calls Luce,
but we know it as the color organ. And with a color organ what you do is a piano,
a normal keyboard on a normal organ, but every one of the keys
represents a different color, and all the keys trigger
a different colored lightbulb. And so when you're hearing Prometheus,
A Poem of Fire, you're not just hearing the music, but seeing the colors.
And so when you have a performance
of Prometheus, A Poem of Fire, you see these colors as if you're a chromasthete,
seeing colors and hearing sound. Scriabin got these ideas of color and sound
from this guy. Isaac Newton. Excuse me.
Isaac Newton wrote the definitive book
on color science, known as... Is titled: Opticks, in 1704. And in Opticks, which, by the
way, is where we get Dark Side of the Moon, the whole refraction of color and light
and getting the colors of the rainbow, In Opticks... He uses a lot of color...
Sorry, music metaphors
to describe the relationships of color. And I found that really fascinating
because he uses phrases like this one to describe which colors go well together,
he says: So, okay, that's pretty cool. And he also says: I found that really interesting,
because these modern Hollywood blockbusters all color grade their films with orange and blue. And we like this contrast
between orange and blue and if you think about this as like,
hey, they're color grading with fifths, it's an interesting idea that we don't really think
about, like we don't really think about intervals with colors, but Isaac Newton sure was.
He was doing this many hundreds of years ago.
And it makes a certain degree of sense,
when you look at this 19th Century color wheel, you see the around them.
And you see that orange and blue are kind of like halfway across from each other. If you start at orange and you go a little bit more
that half way around you get to blue, and you come back around where you started,
you get orange again. Same thing with a major scale: you start with C,
orange, I guess, and you go up a little bit more than halfway
and you get to blue, you get to this nice G which is blue, fifth,
then you get back to orange. Now...
Isaac Newton was thinking about these things
and in the original color wheel, the original definition, how we understand color,
he drew it like this: where there are musical notes
all the way around it. He was thinking the seven notes of the rainbow,
in fact, he defined the rainbow as being seven notes... So, it's kind of the point here, he's thinking
of color and sound as the same sort of thing. And, you know, I wanted to make this
presentation asking this question, this is like the thesis of today, not polyrhythms,
polyrhythms come later in the polyrhythms talk.
I wanted to know if Isaac Newton is speaking
metaphorically when he uses musical terms to talk about color, or is there something more? It depends upon
what the meaning of the word "is" is. So Bill Clinton raises a good point. We need to figure out what the meaning
of the word "is" is. We need to try and take a deeper look
at this color-sound relationship.
But before we do that we have to sort of talk
about the nature of sound and the nature of sound as it relates to music.
And so we're going to put a pin on this we're gonna come back to this Isaac Newton
thing, and now we're going to get into part 2. Pitch and rhythm are the same thing. So, I mean this fairly literally
and I'll sort of explain it to you real quick. 1: Pitch is defined by cycles per second.
So how many times per second air around your ear vibrates per second
is how our brain perceives pitch.
Air will hit the inner-ear in something called
the basilar membrane they'll get converted to electrical signals and the brain will perceive
and interpret that as pitch. So, if something is vibrating 300 times per second
we will hear a note that is at 300 Hz, that's the definition of pitch,
how we understand pitch. So, number 2: there are 60 seconds in a minute. This has nothing to do with music,
that's how we measure time.
But number 3: Rhythm.
And this is how I'm defining rhythm fairly broadly. It say a steady tempo, so basically a rhythm
is a steady pulse... Is determined by beats per minute: BPM, so,
120 BPM, 200 BPM, whatever. It's our understanding of steady pulse
is defined by beats per minute, so, basically...
Rhythm and pitch are the same,
they just occur at slightly different speeds. And this is something
that we kinda instinctually know, I don't really need to explain this to you
but just to give you an idea... If you have a car engine starting up
or a fan starting up, like, these two things you'll hear like a 'whir'
in the beginning, just a rhythmic motion of blades, but eventually they go faster and faster
to the point where there's a hum, an audible hum. And that's essentially
the phenomenon that we're talking about here.
So human pitch perception lies between
20 Hz and 20,000 Hz, this is something that audio engineers
have to deal with all the time in terms of equalization. Basically if something is moving at 20 times
per second or 20,000 times per second regularly, we will hear it as having pitch. This is a fairly kind of common knowledge
sort of thing, if we have like hearing loss, like, it maybe gets down to about 15,000 Hz
or something like that, but that's 'ish' ballpark. What not a lot of people know is that there's
a limit of human rhythmic perception.
And this is very much an 'ish' but it's about 10 Hz,
and when I say rhythmic perception I mean our ability to distinguish between beats,
so if you're playing something really fast like, ridiculously fast, like 10 Hz,
like 10 notes per second... Our ability to distinguish between the notes
starts getting very very blurred. And it's actually... It can get a little bit
higher than this, like maybe upto 12, 13 Hz, but 10 Hz is a good ballpark, so my question is,
anything faster, meaningfully distinguishing beats, my question is: what happens between
10 Hz and 20 Hz? If we hear something
that is at 15 Hz or 17 Hz, what is it? Well, let's find out.
So here's a kick drum. It's gonna slowly speed up - I want you to pay
close attention to the moment that it turns into a pitch. Okay, about now, it sort of has a pitch now,
and you can slowly hear it rise. But there was a moment in there where we didn't
really know what the hell was going on.
It was just this (makes sound)... Whatever. So this chart explains why.
This blue line right here is our ability to perceive the differences
between stimuli, so our rhythmic perception, and the higher it is,
the less we're able to perceive the differences. And the red line is our pitch perception,
and there's this weird netherrealm in there which I found really fascinating, because it basically means
there's a large gap in our perception and you heard that gap,
you were not able to tell what was going on.
So, what does this have to do
with Isaac Newton? And what does this have to do with polyrhythms? Polyrhythms. I need to say that better.
Po-ly-rhythms, okay. Well, not a whole lot but let's put a pin in that. Pitch and rhythm are the same thing
and there's a gap in our perception.
So, part 3. How to play polyrhythms. So, this is the practical, fun part. "Fun".
We're gonna figure out how to actually play
a polyrhythm, and how to play actually really complicated
polyrhythms, we're gonna learn how to play 15:8. It's going to be very simple,
everybody's gonna be doing it. So this is the technical definition of a polyrhythm: The mathematical relationship between
two or more simultaneous, regular events, (rhythms) This is a very dry definition but it's kind of
what we're going to be working with. Basically two things are going to occur
at the same time and every so often they're going to line up.
That's all I really want you to be thinking of.
Not anything in terms of tuplets or quinn-tuplets
or anything like that, it's just 2 separate things which are occurring
at the same time and eventually at some point they both line up
in the cycle. There's another thing that I want you to learn,
or know... And it's the term Composite Rhythm. And that's the sound of both streams
of a polyrhythm occurring at the same time.
So if you listen to the sound of a major chord
or some sort of chord, let's say it's a major chord,
you can pay attention to and listen to the individual component parts
of this chord, like the C, the E or the G, I'm assuming we're in C major, by the way... And you can listen for those things but most
of the time we hear it as a composite, we hear everything together
and we put a label to it. So that's the composite sound of a major chord, I want you to pay attention to the composite
rhythm of a polyrhythm it's essentially the same idea, you wanna listen
to the general feel of the whole thing of it. So I'm gonna basically play 2 metronomes,
each clicking at a different tempo.
And they will have a 3 to 2 relationship.
So the mathematical relationship between them will be 3 to 2, one will be clicking at 150 BPM
and one at a 100 BPM. So this is the 100 BPM one. And this is 150. Both of them together.
There's a composite there. You're not really paying attention
to the individual streams, you're hearing both of them together, and that's what I want you
to really be thinking about here, because that's how we perceive the rhythm. Now we were perceiving
this as kind of 2 metronomes each clicking at different tempos,
each playing quarter notes, cos' that's usually what a metronome is set to. And that's our musical conception of this,
but there's a bunch of other ways that we can conceive of this
particular composite rhythm.
We could think of it as a couple of quarter notes
and quarter note triplets in one tempo, so for every 2 quarter notes you smush
in 3 quarter-note triplets that's one way of doing it. Another way is having a couple of dotted
quarter notes. And like a measure of 3/4 that's 2 notes
per measure, and then 3 regular quarter notes in 3/4,
that's 3 notes per measure. All 3 of these things essentially
are the same thing, they're just different ways of conceptualizing it.
It's different ways of conceptualizing this.
2 Evenly spaced events
in the same amount of time as 3 evenly spaced events. So how do we actually play these things,
how do we conceive of them? Well... I'm afraid we need to use... Math.
So not that much math,
I just really wanted to use that Futurama clip. So, the pen-and-paper method.
This is how I learned and this is how I encourage everybody
to do this, cos' this is so easy. So straight forward and it's a great way of basically conceptualizing really complicated
things in a very straight forward manner. So...
First, we're gonna draw X rows of Y numbers. So, in the case of this 2:3 sort of thing
we're gonna draw 2 rows of 3 numbers. Now... Each one of these rows is gonna
represent a pulse, how we're gonna feel at the heartbeat of this
polyrhythm, and then each one of the numbers is kind of
the sub-division of that pulse, if you want to think about it that way.
So... Grab a piece of paper, draw 1-2-3, 1-2-3,
great, cool. So, that 1-2-3 again, 1-2-3, X is the pulse,
Y is the sub-division. So next we're going to circle every X numbers.
In this case X is 2 so we're gonna go left to right, left to right
in order of how we would read, we're gonna circle 1-2, 1-2, 1,2...
So this is now our map on how to perform
a 2:3 polyrhythm. And this is important, so we're going to go
hand 1 is gonna snap on number 1. Sorry, hand X is going to snap on number 1,
and hand Y is going to snap on the circle, this is why I named it X and Y, so we'll get hand
1... Anyway...
So I'm gonna kind of do it into this... Yeah, there we go. Do it right into here. I'm gonna sort of walk us through this.
So hand 1 is gonna snap on the numbers: 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3...
This hand is gonna snap on all the circles:
1 (2) 3, 1 (2) 3. So both of them together will sound like this: So pretty soon I can get
into this composite rhythm. This is the same composite rhythm
that we were just hearing earlier. The goal of this is to achieve
this composite rhythm, the goal is not to count really quickly
the goal is to feel it.
I'm not counting when I go: I'm just feeling it, man, that's basically all it is.
I'm using the sort of mathematical approach, which we'll do a couple more times
so everybody gets the hang of it. We can do it for anything and the goal of this
is to achieve this composite rhythm. So, what about another one? Let's do something a little bit trickier.
This one's gonna be a little bit harder to feel. But the process is exactly the same
as the first one.
We're gonna do 4:5. Okay, so this means there's gonna be 4 notes
the same amount of time as 5 notes, 4 evenly spaced notes in the same amount
of time a 5 notes. We're gonna do the same process,
we're gonna draw X rows of Y numbers, yeah? Our 4 rows of 5 numbers, cool. We're gonna do that, 1-2-3-4-5.
4 Rows.
And then we're gonna do the same thing we did
the first time and we're going to circle every X numbers. I sped it up to much on the... In quicktime, oh well. So: 1 2 3 4 (5)
1 2 3 (4) 5 1 2 (3) 4 5
1 (2) 3 4 5.
This is 4:5. Sweet. Now hand X is gonna snap on number 1,
hand Y is gonna snap on the circles. And so if we do both of them together: Everybody now.
So that is kinda tricky. It does require a fair amount of practice
to really get into that groove of that thing. But it's not undoable. Or indo...
Yeah, undoable? It's not impossible, that's the word.
Yeah, English is my first language. Okay, so let's do... That's the process.
And we can do that for anything, you can do it for some absurd polyrhythm
that makes no sense whatsoever, you could do like 32:31 if you wanted to,
it's the same process. Now, whether or not you're able to eventually
feel this composite rhythm is tricky, like that question comes down to a lot of
practicing these things, and really doing it over and over again,
and really getting into the feel of it.
Let's do a really tricky one. And this is the one
I mentioned earlier. Let's do 15:8. Okay, we're gonna draw 15 rows
of 8 numbers a piece, and circle every 15th number.
So we're gonna do this for you,
I'm definitely not gonna be feeling it at all, and just gonna be counting it, I'm just gonna be
at the intellectualization stage of things. So I'm gonna go: Okay, that's one cycle of 15:8. So if you go back to the tape
and you sped that up, you would hear 15:8. Now, here's the thing.
I'm not feeling that,
nobody can really feel that, at least on the first couple of practices. It might take many years to be able to feel
that at a fast tempo. So what we can say is the more complicated
the relationship is between X and Y. The longer it takes for the polyrhythm to resolve,
and the harder it is to FEEL.
So... 3:2 Is the same thing or 2:3 is easy to feel.
15:8 Definitely is not. So that was the practical polyrhythm
side of things, that was the point of the talk, that's why maybe some of you came. What does this have to do with Isaac Newton?
Oh my god, okay, we have 3 separate thoughts that we're kinda juggling here.
How to play
polyrhythms: pitch and rhythm are the same thing Isaac Newton really likes his color music.
So we're gonna start tying everything together. Everything is rhythm. So this is the fun part, the really fun part, I think. If rhythm is pitch...
POLYrhythm should equal POLYpitch, right?
If we have a bunch of different rhythms occurring at the same time, it should give us harmony
if we speed it up. It sure does. All intervals and all harmony
are polyrhythmic, is polyrhythmic. Cool, so, this is not that new of a concept.
Honestly, this goes back to Pythagorus of the Greeks,
in addition to giving us the Pythagorean Thearem and laying the basis for modern mathematics,
he also layed the basis for modern music.
And he did a bunch of experiments with this thing
which is called a monochord. And basically what he did is he divided this string,
monochord - one string into different lengths and compared the proportions
of the different lengths to one another. And tried to figure out
what the best proportions were. And it turns out:
simple proportions = sounds good.
That's the simple thing, that's basically the straight
forward way of understanding how music works. Simple proportions = sounds good. Now the exact proportions that Pythagorus used
have changed over the many centuries, millenia, but the ones that we use today, roughly,
the ones that we use today, are these. Major 2nd is 9:8.
That means that if you had
a string length, like, 9 inches long and compared it to a string length
that was 8 inches long they would produce a major 2nd. Major 3rd is 5:4, perfect 4th is 4:3. Perfect 5th is 3:2. Major 6th is 5:3,
major 7th is 15:8.
Where did we see that one? An octave is 2:1. You can do this with chords too, because when
you combine different intervals together you can find the common denominators
between everything then come up with chordal relationships,
so our major chord: is 4:5:6. So, my question is:
what is the relationship of these string lengths to the polyrhythms that we were talking about?
Well turns out it's the exact same thing. Polyrhythms and string lengths end up being
the same sort of proportions and I will prove it to you.
I want you guys, in this next demonstration,
to pay close attention to the feeling of the polyrhythm of 4:5:6.
4 Evenly spaced pulses in the same amount of time
as 5 evenly spaced pulses as in the same amount of time
as 6 evenly spaced pulses. Pay close attention to how the polyrhythm
makes you feel. Then I'm gonna speed it up and like magic
it will turn into a major chord. I might have just ruined it for you,
but let's try it.
So this is a regular kick drum. I'm gonna layer in the polyrhythm. Feels pretty cool actually. When you speed it up: Major chord! Slow it back down.
I always found that funny,
that it's such a triumphant rhythm, the major chord has such a... It sounds like a major chord. And this is the case for any chord, any harmony
any time you have more than one note you can break it down to its polyrhythm. And here's the thing:
Polyrhythms that are easy to feel are easy to hear when they're sped up.
We had a good time listening to... So that means consonance,
the idea of something sounding good, that's kind of an... Over-simplification, but constanance is just
polyrhythms which are easy to hear/feel, that's all it is. Any time that you hear something
that sounds good to you and sounds stable...
It's just a polyrhythm
which is easy to hear/feel. Now, I mean, the term "good/sounds good" is...
I mean it just in the sense of something of something that sounds rested,
there's no tension, maybe tension feels good to you,
maybe tension sounds good to you. So if tension sounds and feels good to you
maybe you need a polyrhythm which creates tension. So, we're going to start with a perfect 4th,
which, if you think about a perfect 4th, there's not a lot of tension to it.
And if you look at the ratio of a perfect 4th: 4:3, that's not particularly complicated.
But if we then listen to a major 7th, that's a fair amount of tension in the interval
of a major 7th: 15:8.
And when you compare the two of them
and we put the two of them layered on, so in the key of C, this would be a C,
an F and a B, it's gonna be a pretty spicey sort of chord. So I want you to listen,
when we do this next demonstration to first where I'm gonna layer in the perfect 4th, so it's just gonna be
this nice constant 4:3 polyrhythm, and then I'm gonna layer in the 15:8.
And then you're gonna hear a cacophony it's gonna be really dissonant,
it's gonna be a dissonant polyrhythm. And then we're gonna speed it up
and you're gonna hear that's the result and you'll hear that dissonance. So...
Feels good. 15:8 Is not gonna feel good. If you really spent some time with it
you'd be able to hear it maybe but ah god, it's hard,
it sounds like popcorn going off. And when you speed it up: So, polyrhythms that are hard to feel
are hard to hear when they're sped up, so dissonance is just polyrhythms
that are hard to hear/feel.
We like sort of the juxtaposition
of tension and release. We like the release that comes from being
able to hear when the polyrhythm resolves like in the major chord: We like to hear the beginning of that phrase: But we also like it when there's tension because then it makes
those moments of resolution so much sweeter. And we just heard it play out on two planes:
we heard it play out on the rhythmic plane, and then also on the pitch plane. And I found that really interesting
when I was first getting into this stuff one book that sort of illuminated a lot of things
for me was this book by Henry Cowell: New Musical Resources.
And he talks about something
called Tempo Scales in this book. It's a very influencial book for a lot of different
thinkers of the 20th Century, including Conlon Nancarrow,
who's a pretty amazing... If you don't know Conlon Nancarrow, it's probably
the most insane music you'll ever hear. But he was very influenced by this book
and the idea of tempo scales, polyrhythms, BPMs and notes are all the same,
there's this chart in this book where he basically says, this is the ratio from C,
these are the tones of the Chromatic Scale, these are the equivalent BPMs -
all of them are the same, we just think of them slightly differently
depending on our musical needs.
And, you know... Here's the question though:
what does this have to do with Isaac Newton? We're getting there guys,
we're getting there. We're building an argument from scratch,
that everything is the same. Essentially, the point of this lecture
is that everything is everything and Isaac Newton is the key to it.
So we just figured out that polyrhythms are pitch and rhythm is harmony and there's all sorts
of things we talked about, but you can kind of, you heard everything so far, so I'm gonna
kind of like take those ideas and build on them a little bit.
So... Part 5. It gets crazy now. You didn't think everything else was crazy?
Oh, it gets a lot crazier.
What happens when we speed a rhythm/pitch up
beyond 20,000 Hz? So in the beginning we had the rhythm over here
and then we sped it up and there was like
this weird netherrealm in perception where we didn't know it was happening,
and then we had pitch. And this is the audiable spectrum
of human hearing. What happens if we go faster than that?
Is there another sort of phenomenon that happens we have two sort of ways
of experiencing the world and experiencing sound, we had rhythm,
we had pitch, what happens over here? So, erm... Let Samual L Jackson explain: Hold on to yer butts.
So we have an octave. This is an important thing,
it's called Octave Equivalence. When you have a pitch, like at 440 Hz,
the international standard for A. And it is 440 Hz, be clear about that.
So, when you have that and you...
Let's listen, that's 440 Hz. If you multiply that frequency by 2
this is also A. And that's a pretty instinctual thing.
We hear them as being both the same, like, one's higher but it's kind of the same thing
it's like going all the way around the color wheel and getting back to where you started,
it's just higher somehow. So we can keep doing that.
I'll turn it down just a little here. This is also an A. This is also an A.
All of these pitches are also A, we keep going higher and higher.
What about this one? That's pretty high, that's 7040 Hz,
that's also an A, and then this one is gonna be
really, really high. OK, sorry about that, guys.
This is kind of at the highest echelon
of what we could probably expect for pitch perception, in fact, this is so high
I didn't hear that for myself, as being too pitched,
cos' I've had hearing damage like, playing loud music for too long. So this is kind of at the upper-range
of my hearing. But then we have this note,
we didn't actually program, because nobody here
would be able to hear it. This note, we can't hear,
this is beyond our range of hearing, that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist,
just that we don't perceive it as having pitch.
It's still an A, according to our definition
of octave equivalence. It still exists in the real world,
as your dog will be able to tell because this is the register of dog whistles. It's just that we can't perceive it.
Our gap on our perception has kind of like gone off the high end. So there's
a gap in the perception between rhythm and pitch, and now there's gonna be a huge gap
in our perception of this phenomenon...
Of waveforms. And we can keep doubling it.
Each one of these frequency numbers is still an A - these are all octaves of A. Eventually, when we just keep going
higher and higher, and I didn't actually do...
This is not the right number, but... I forgot to keep pressing enter on this,
but anyway...
Let's pretend that's a high number.
It is a high number. Eventually you get to a pretty ridiculous place. When you get to vibrations occurring
at trillions of times per second you get into Mr. Isaac Newton's realm
the Visible Light Spectrum.
So when we're in this visible light spectrum,
remember, every multiple is still an A, we can calculate the color of A.
Turns out A is orange. This is a great slide, I love this slide.
I got this from FrankJavCee who's another YouTube person. This gives the calculations of all the pitches. What we use today.
Just up 40 octaves.
So when you're talking about these colors, you know, A literally is orange.
And if you think back to Isaac Newton's orange or blue or fifths, well check it out.
A is orange, E is kinda this indigo-blue sort of thing, depending on...
Yeah, indigo-blue sort of thing. He was right. But he was, you know,
maybe not thinking in terms of tetrahertz because he didn't have the ability
to measure that precisely. But maybe intuitively he was right.
He understood that A and E are fifths.
Now this is a really exciting revelation
that I had and wanna share with you guys. Because, once we make this connection
between color and sound in this literal way, not just a synesthetic way,
because individual with synesthesia will have different synesthetic experiences
to different colors, this is literally what A is: orange.
A is orange. We can not analyze visual media
based upon the notes in the chromatic scale. And this is a really exciting sort of thing.
Because we can take a look at this: Van Gogh's Starry Night...
And we can analyze it musically.
So we got this yellow sort of thing, the yellow moon and then it's fairly blue
and yellow, we can say. Maybe some different shades of blue,
so we can check out our organization of this thing and we can see that, hey, yellow is a B-flat, and then we have these couple shades of blue,
let's say in between D and E-flat. So we got B-flat, D and E-flat.
All really consonant intervals, there's a consonant polyrhythmic ratio
between them, between B-flat and D, it's a major third,
that's a 4:5 polyrhythm. 4:5 Relationship in the frequency in tetrahertz,
in the visible light spectrum.
And the same thing with B-flat and E-flat,
it's the perfect 4:3 polyrhythm, 4:3 relationship in the visible light spectrum.
So, if we're gonna put a song... To this particular piece of artwork,
it would be the Violent Femmes' Blister in the Sun. B-flat, D, E-flat, D, B-flat. We're getting pretty far out there guys,
thank you for being here with me on this journey.
But this is a... That's the song that goes
with this piece of artwork. At least if you analyse the color harmony
in terms of music. Let's do another one.
Let's do Picasso's "Night Fishing at Antibes". Wow, there's a lot of color in this one.
There's a lot of things we can say about this one. 1: We immediately understand that this somehow,
on an instinctual level, not just for form and everything,
this is a more dissonant painting. There's a lot more stuff,
there's a lot more colors going on.
In the upper-center area... There's kind of this red, yellow and blue thing
at the very top. And that's kind of where my eye is immediately
drawn to when I'm trying to make sense of this. Red, yellow, blue.
And if you try and analyse
the color harmony of that that's G, B-flat, D - that's a G minor triad
that Picasso has given us, so that's kind of like this consonant sort of realm
in this piece of artwork. But there's this bunch of other areas
where we see blue and green right next to one another. And remember from Isaac Newton, he said that
blue and green don't really go well together in this sort of sense, and you can kinda get the
sense that blue and green create this sort of like tension here. And there's a lot of blue and green kind of
smushed next to one another in this particular painting.
There's all sorts of different colors.
And if I was trying to make a sort of
musical analysis of what this painting would be, I would say this is kind of like atonal music
or serial music. Music which requires a lot of attention
to be payed to it. Now, when we were talking about 15:8,
and the dissonant polyrhythms... I'm not saying it's impossible to feel,
it just requires a lot more work, you have to work really hard to understand
what 15:8 actually feels like and what it actually means.
So, I'm not the first person to make this
connection between this style of artwork and twelve-tone music. This guy was: Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky was a turn of the 20th Century artist who made these connections
and he liked to compare... He was a contemporary of Schoenberg
who was the inventor of the twelve-tone system.
And he liked to compare his artwork with the thoughts that Schoenberg was doing
at the time, trying to liberate music from tonality. And so, it's a really fascinating sort of experiment
in color and sound and he was definitely thinking along these lines
when he painted this guy. So... We've sort of reached the conclusion
of this Isaac Newton side of things.
So to recap: pitch, rhythm and apparently color
are all kind of the same thing. And we can use those ideas to analyse artwork
if we wanted to. That's a fun sort of thing that we can do.
And I like doing that. We can take this even further.
Alright, this is where it gets even further out. Harmony of the Spheres. This is an ancient
subject, an idea that the Ancient Greeks had which basically said that the orbits of the planets
represented a sort of celestial music, a celestial harmony. And they meant it fairly metaphorically.
They didn't literally mean that it was music, but they meant it in the sort of higher order, like this higher order
that we couldn't hear this music, but it was still music nonetheless.
And these ideas have influenced
a lot of astronomers across the ages. Including this guy, Johannes Kepler who wrote this book: Harmonices Mundi where he came up with this really interesting,
and I find this really fascinating, he came up with this chart of the songs
that all the planets sang, quote on quote, I think was the term he used. And he did it by measuring the speed at which
each one of these planets moved at its fastest to the speed at which they moved
at its slowest. So for Saturn, for example, you see
you have a G going up to a B.
And returning down to a G
and so for him he was measuring the ratio of 5:4. In terms of that was Saturn's polyrhythmic ratio
in terms of speed, how fast it was moving how slow it was moving.
Each one of the planets has an associated song. And also here, the moon also has a place.
Good on the moon. All of these planets were discovered in his day
but there's of course more planets and planetoids and asteroids which also
have "songs" that they sing.
There's a more modern understanding of this
which is called Orbital Resonance. If you take a moon as its orbiting planet
and it takes maybe every 4 months to rotate around a given planet. And you have another
moon that rotates every 2 months, they form a 4:2 relationship, or a 2:1 relationship. And the point at which they're both in the same
place is called the point of orbital resonance.
And that point keeps those bodies
in the same sort of orbit. And there's a whole bunch of different examples
of this, this is one example: Ganymede, Europa and Io
for this sort of tripartite system around Jupiter in this sort of orbital resonance
so you can see the little flashy guys, that's when they're being reinforced. There's a bunch of wikipedia entries of known
populations of resonance, we got 2:3 resonances, we got a bunch of those,
we got 3:5 resonances, which are either major 6,
we have 4:7 resonances which is at an interval
called the Harmonic Seventh. We got a whole lot of them.
They're just
populating our solor system in the outer... Outer parts of our solar system. I'm gonna kind of, yeah, skip around a little bit. Are these polyrhythms? Is orbital resonance, is harmony of the spheres,
is light...
Are these polyrhythms, the relationships between these two things?
And I intentionally made this definition very vague. Because yes, according to this definition
all these are are X evenly spaced events in the same amount of time
as Y evenly spaced events, that's really the crux of the whole thing. And... I want to kind of contextualize
what the hell we just covered because we just covered a lot of things,
we basically just said polyrhythms are everything.
And it's basically what I wanted to get across
to you guys, but there are two main astericks
as I wrap this thing up: 1: this whole basis of speeding up polyrhythms
and turning them into harmony is not literally always going to happen
because that was a form of JUST intonation, JUST intonation is the system where we have
simple mathematical relationships between two notes.
Today we use Equal Temperament. Where those simple relationships are skewed
ever so slightly and the reason why they're skewed is a little bit
beyond the scope of this presentation, but just know that the math is almost there,
it's not 100% there but you still heard the major chord and it's the same thing for a lot of different kinds
of polyrhythms and music. So just know that today
we use equal temperament but you just heard examples of JUST intonation. More importantly:
technically light is EM radiation and not a compression wave like sound.
So, no, technically speaking,
when you speed up a pitch it's not gonna turn into light. It never is
because sound is a compression wave, it needs a medium through which to propagate
and light is a form of EM radiation so they're two different things,
technically speaking. So, to answer Mr. Isaac Newton's question: or to answer my question
about Mr.
Isaac Newton... Is he speaking metaphorically when he uses
musical terms to talk about color? And yes, he is speaking metaphorically. But. Metaphor extends perception.
So, this is kind of the crux of the whole thing.
Metaphor extends perception: our ability to take these ideas about polyrhythms
and apply it beyond what we can acually hear and we can understand them through metaphor,
we can extend our perception of the world a little bit more. So I'm gonna leave you with this question:
Do polyrhythms need to be explicitly heard/felt as sound to be music? Because we could analyze these paintings
in terms of the color relationship, in terms of the sound relationships. And we felt the ideas
of consonance and dissonance. We almost, I guess we could even say,
we felt the idea of a G-minor triad maybe there.
We could use these sorts of musical ideas to understand these visual mediums.
And I just wanted to leave you with that question
because it doesn't need to be answered, like, yeah, maybe technically it's not music
but you can still use musical ideas, or maybe it literally is music, who knows. We can use these musical concepts... And feelings and intuitions that we all have
as musicians or music lovers or sound designers, and we can use it
to analyze any other form of art. This is really exciting to me.
Making these connections between things
because now my musical mind can take a look at a Van Gogh and say, ha!
That is Blister in the Sun, or whatever. It's a fun way of making connections because you can understand the world
around you a lot better. We can make connections between things
that are our immediate PERCEPTION cannot. So, I'm gonna leave you with this sort of idea.
When people resist the idea of learning music theory, or thinking critically about something
that they are really passionate about because to them,
the magic of it is in the mystery of it...
I want to leave you with this idea that
thinking critically for me is the magic in learning about music.
Because you can... It... You can extend what it is that you know
and what you hear way beyond what you think you know
and what you hear. And you can only really do that
through critical thinking and I hope I gave you some ideas
to chew on here.
And thank you, everybody, for attending
this live edition of New Horizons in Music.
And until next time....
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