芸外　- Gei Guy dot com

So I finally finished notating Polyrhythm’s, well, polyrhythmic passage. It took me forever because everything takes me forever because I am in the middle of about 15 projects at the moment. Nothing new really. But, here’s the gist of it. I’ll paraphrase my previous post (which has been edited slightly):

“We have a constant five note pattern repeating in 4/4 time with the word 「ポ・リ・リ・ズ・ム」. This repeats over and over in rhythmic dissonance until it loops enough times to come in line with the main pattern again. So if we stretch the timeline of the passage, we see multiple four beat bars, 16 of them when counting by eighth notes. This makes a total of 64 beats cut into small 4 beat chunks 16 times. Still with me?

Okay, now consider the aforementioned 5 beat 「ポ・リ・リ・ズ・ム」 phrase which repeats 9 times for a total of 45 beats. Add to that 6 repetitions of 「リ・ズ・ム」, a 3 beat phrase creating a total of 18 beats and a grand total of 63. Well, there’s a beat missing so we fill it with the first “ポ” of the next series of 「ポ・リ・ル・ウ・プ」 passages.

This puts us in a unique situation. We now start the loop over beginning at the second beat of the 5 beat passage (リ) meaning that our first passage is a 4 beat occurrence. So, we start at 4 then add 5 repetitions of the full passage for a total of 29 (25 + the first 4 「リ・ル・ウ・プ」). Then we go into our 3 beat sequence again for 5 repetitions giving us a total of 15 + 29 or 44. At this point we just hit single beats 14 times, but these beats are matching the underlying polyrhythm which is striking on every third 16th note. Since the last 14 beats are spaced differently than the other 44 beats of the passage, the math doesn’t exactly add up like we would expect, but it does work due to this spacing. Listen for it. In the first 「ポリリズム」 chorus these 16th note accents are only heard in the synthesizer stabs. In the second 「ポリルウプ」 chorus the beat begins following it on the bass drum for a killer effect. This passage is why I decided to take an active interest in Perfume.

Here’s the notation for those interested. Top two staves are a piano; treble clef has got the voices (ポリリズム、ポリルウプ), bass clef has synth stabs. The third staff down is bass and drums are on the bottom.

[NOTE: Forgive the confusing nature of the drum part. I had to work within the confines of what the MIDI sequencer was capable of. It's not exactly as human readable as I would like]

Here’s a fun fact: the name of the software used to create the above embeddable notation is NoteFlight. HA! Have a fucking NoteFlight Motherfucker!!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 5:05 pm by delrey28 and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.