So this talk is not just going to be about 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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