Thanksgiving

A thanksgiving experiment, which turned out quite nicely, I think.

This is a piece I put together over the Thanksgiving long weekend. I started by trying to jam weird time signatures into the OP-1 (which is kinda inherently set up for 4/4), initially for the 1-minute song challenge. Because 100bpm is nicely divisible by 5, and I hadn't written anything in 5/4 before. This led to talking a bunch with my partner (a real classical musician) about how, in fact, nobody does 'five-on-the-floor' and that five is usually expressed as 2+3 beats or 3+2 beats. (And had a great time watching Brad Neely's video on 'polyrhythmic synth jazz.')

I ended up just thinking about different ways to making small numbers add up to eight. And ended up with a suddenly much better understanding of how time in music works as a result. The piece ended up being about five minutes instead of one minute... As such, I think it probably qualifies for the 'do something that scares you' challenge, for the pushed boundaries at least.

• play
• pause
• min volume
• max volume

posted by kaibutsu (1 comment total)

I love to experiment with differently time-signatured rhythm loops in the same bpm, and see where the patterns converge or conflict. It really brings out the idea of how music is really just playing with fractions, in the rhythm alone; and it points to more complex math which I studied in high school but have since forgotten, when it comes to waves and logarithms – frequency, amplitude, things like that. My friend Boris did a couple of pieces like that a while ago, which he named after ants.

Anyway, sounded like a fun thing to work on. And it sounds nice!
posted by not_on_display at 12:10 AM on December 24, 2016