Summary: Sungazer wrote a song that is simultaneously "as fast as possible" and "as slow as possible", but when they played it live, the audience just split the difference and grooved at a perfectly medium pace.
I believe you meant Sungazer because I was trying to remember such a song by the technical death metal band Stargazer, which honestly doesn't seem implausible.
@@rohitchaoji Oops, my bad! Thank you for pointing out my mistake. Im'ma edit my original comment. This will probably make your reply very confusing to future readers, but such is the Wonder of the internet...🤩🤩🤩
@@rohitchaoji i believe you meant the original, unedited comment because i remembered such a malaprop by the future philosopher-king Mark O, which honestly strikes me as within the realm of possibilities. That will probably make this reply Wonderful for future intarwebs trying to figure out how Mark O became Benevolent Overlord of Earth :)
Got nothing to do with being metal. I'm a pop rock musician and I listen ABBA to Zappa. Death metal, jazz, classical, Snarky Puppy, 80s, I got a super eclectic taste but I'm not a metal musician.
My daughter takes ballet. A few years ago, her class was involved in a dance that was rather slow (not quite a largo, but nearly so) for a group of seven year olds. This age group / level does this dance every year, and every year they have oodles of trouble slowing their little, performance-excited bodies down to follow the tempo. Inevitably, what ends up happening is, by about halfway through the piece, each dancer in the group ends up anywhere between one and four measures ahead. All except the one dancer who is DETERMINED to keep the beat regardless of the rest of her fellow dancers jumping ahead. Unfortunately, she ends up looking like she's fallen behind, rather than the other way around. They're seven. It's adorable. 😍
...wow - okay, so, that actually makes me wonder: if you think about your legs as pendulums, the shorter the pendulum, the faster it wants to swing. Is dancing so slowly hard because they're young and still learning ... or is it _also_ hard because their bodies are smaller and naturally swing faster? I'd love to see studies relating the lower end of rhythmic perception with leg length, see if something's there.
Man that sounds like torture. Like when you're on coke and you have to go outside to withdraw more money to buy more, and you're just overflowing with energy but you have to stand as still and calmly as possible to not draw attention. Kids obviously don't need drugs to be like that, they're just like that at all times. Like, just let em dance! I suppose it's probably a good way for them to learn to be more in control of their energy. When I was a kid I did karate, from about age 7 as well funnily enough, and it taught me that. So often you were told to just hold the position and not move at all. Even when you were on one foot. That learning to balance properly and learning to control your energy and be rock solid, is really good for kids. Karate is basically like ballet anyway, except less dangerous. The injuries in ballet are pretty gruesome. But there's a reason quite a few MMA guys take ballet (and Arnold Schwarzenegger also did ballet, to help win bodybuilding competitions). It's all the same sort of movement. And it's all about balance. And for young kids, it's great to help them learn how to not act out and sprint around constantly, cos they learn how to stay calm and controlled energy-wise. Really every kid who doesn't have a disability should do one of these things. Not just for the exercise factor. I just can't imagine many boys wanna take ballet, which is why you have to trick them and make them do karate instead, and they have no idea how similar the two things are. And when you're a kid taking karate, the vast majority of the time you never actually fight each other, so it's not like your kid will get beat up a lot. They sometimes make you do kumite, i.e. fighting tournaments, but you're not allowed to really hit each other, you have to lightly tap each other with your fists, and you score points when you do, and you get disqualified if you actually hurt them. That's why ballet is more dangerous funnily enough. My sisters both got some really nasty injuries from ballet, including both of them breaking their legs, along with getting really gnarly looking feet. But they don't regret taking ballet, they loved it.
@@Packbat Well, it would make some sense - a newborn's resting heart rate is around 100-120 bpm, and it slows down gradually to an adult heart rate of around 60 or so around the teen years.
@@duffman18 I don't know much about martial arts, but I definitely agree that - in the U.S. at least - we need a lot more boys learning dance. Our daughter's school has three boys, and apparently the other dance school directors in the area are jealous of that, because most of them have none.
I actually think that a group of ppl COULD feel slower pulses like that better than individuals. It’s kind of like how if you ask people to count the number of jellybeans in a jar, individuals could be really far off, but the average will be spot on most of the time
The idea of the three different psychological tempos going by simultaneously is so fucking sick. This kind of thing is EXACTLY what I follow Neely and Crowder for.
Haven't seen the explanation yet, but I'm guessing 4/4, 3/4(ish) and 19/16. Edit: 2 for 2 I'm on a roll Also the fact that the two tempos happen to be the low extreme, high extreme and exact middle ground.
My kids (6, 4, and 2) tend to try and dance at whatever the fastest subdivision of the beat is. If the groove is 4/4 at 120 bpm, but then the drummer starts putting 16th notes on top of that, they will try to dance to the 16th notes. It’s pretty hilarious.
Your uploads bring back any lost spark I've had towards music and composition... So much so that (despite local naysayers) I've decided to change careers mid-life away from hard labour and towards music. It's going to be a hard road, but it feels good to scream it into the void below Adam Neely's window. I hope the industry keeps your heart full! Thank you Adam.
@@devospanko What you're doing is braver than most. That's bold and the risk of allowing something you truly adore to *become* your job, but not have it feel like a job . . . I imagine that's a joy like no other. There truly are no rewards without risk. That said, I subscribed, I will watch your videos, and I hope to support your passion along the way. Reading how you feel has truly made my day and now you've inspired me to pick up my guitar after 2½ years.
I personally often describe Adam in my head as "funny jazzy meme bass youtube man" but it can pass us how creative, intricate and thoughtful the man can be Thank you for yet another insight on unusual musicallity and for sharing your thoughts with us, Adam
Something does not feel quite right here, I feel like the argument is flawed. The video starts with the definition of the "indifference interval" and concludes with people on the concerts gravitating towards the "wonky 3/4" which turns out to be around the tempo of the indifference interval. But correlation does not mean causation. I'd question the suggestion that they do so because it's the most natural or something. They do so, because Shawn pushes them there by enforcing the wonky 3/4 with the kick drum - they just follow him. The melodic lines and patterns also revolve around that pulse. It says more about you as the group finding the most appealing way to divide those 19-tuplets - you made 3 groups out of it - and hence your own gravitation towards the indifference interval, rather than about the listeners and their preference - the latter is just a consequence of your own choice, not a law of nature. What I'd love to see is how people would react if those 19-tuplets were divided into a greater number of subdivisions, one that is more far away from 100 BPM: what if the kick played every 5 "sixteenths", resulting in a wonky 4/4 in quintuplets with last group a sixteenth short? What if the kick played every 4 "sixteenths", with wonky 5/4 and last beat 1 short? What about series of 5 triplets followed by 4 notes? I'm very curious how the listeners would count this if the kick would follow any of those patterns. I'm pretty convinced they'd just follow the kick drum, because this is what we as listeners are conditioned to follow, and it does not really matter if it fits the indifference interval or not, and whether the resulting pulse is a compromise between extremities or not. Unless of course you have experimented with different divisions of those 19-tuplets - if so, and if you rejected 4, 5, 6 subdivisions, I'd be very happy to learn why you chose 3 instead, and whether it was because it felt best, or for some other reason.
Yes, that's basically what Yee is saying. He rides along with Crowder's kick drum in "3/4" and anticipates the hesitation at the end. It's pretty much the way pure feel musicians play songs like "Whipping Post", (including BTW Gregg Allman, who wrote it).
Ummm please don't .mix tempos or layer double time if you have any fucking respect for your work don't make it easy for the donkeys we call performers make it challenging for them so the audience can be brutalized with your genius!
To be honest when I saw sungazer do this tune, I immediately started subdividing to keep the tempo. Before you guys started playing the fast notes I was naturally counting each beat as a measure of 6/8. I suspect given the nature of that band and the people who come to see it(probably way more musicians than your average audience), you'd get very different results if you tried the same slow counting exercise at an average pop show.
This is exactly what I did while watching the video! At the start of the "One! Two! Three! Four!" I was already bobbing along in 6/8. After getting to the later section explaining the not-quite-3/4 it made a lot more sense. Would definitely be curious to see what results you'd get from a different type of crowd.
Hi Adam - regarding how crowds make it easier to count slower rhythm- I think this is just the effect of crowd synchrony that happens in a lot of similar situation. If everyone sort of feels the rhythm but either rush or drag, on the total they even out and people tend to gravitate towards the correct felt average. This is I think kind of how singing crowds sound much more in tune than any single individual in them. This dynamic is actually kind of well described mathematically, in what is called the Kuramoto model and the work of Steven strogatz.
If songs are too slow or too fast you can always walk on the subdivisions, or even at tuplet intervals which can be really satisfying when you find the right song for it
Have anyone researched whether the feeling of uneasiness scales with a person's height? Are kids more comfortable with faster tempos because of more steps per walking distance?
"As long as you can find the "one", you can groove to the beat." - Don Ellis As a player who has often struggled with "Brilliant Corners", I can attest to that.
With the crowd, it might be a "wisdom of the crowds" thing, where people's internal metronomes are off, but in random directions, such that collectively, they "tick" more in time.
Doom Metal is genre that plays a lot with these extremely slow tempos, this video reminded me of the 2017 Bell Witch's "Mirror Reaper" album which experiments a lot with time, in it we kind of pay more attention to the space between notes than the normal progression of notes. Great video!
Feeling asymmetric pulses isn't wild in plenty of music. Seeing teenagers clapping 7/8 (7/4 etc) and dancing in a park in Istanbul was a stark reminder then idential pulses isn't a default for all cultures. 👍
Adam, i think you're a genius. You point out angles I never thought of. And thinking is all I do, so it's not for lack of opportunity. As a musician with a good ear and lots of musical curiosity at times (...), I have done loads of space cargo ships full of thinking about the organic and the mathematical and the many other aspecs of music. I am from 1956. And yet you have been feeding me so much information, inspiration and ideas, that I am re-inspired again and again by your - what I would call expansion of the musical universe. Others do so too, but you seem to be so curious, I wonder what you put in your coffee, sometimes. Thanks again!
One thing I think that's neat: whereas many genres have a kind of standard tempo range, within metal there are extremely fast subgenres (grind and death come to mind, having tempos near 300 bpm) all the way down to funeral doom, with tempos below 50 bpm. I know jazz and avant garde stuff also spans just about the whole spectrum, but I think it's neat that metal, a less traditionally respected genre also does it.
I read once that 100ms is also the threshold below which things appear to be visually instantaneous. For instance, if you click a button on a computer screen and the screen is redrawn in less than 100ms, it appears to be an instant response. Above 100ms, we can perceive the difference between stimulus and response. Wonder if that’s related?
100ms is different than 100bpm, keep in mind. 100bpm is one beat per 600ms if my math is right. But generally with web animations you want to do 250 or 300ms depending on a couple things. There's probably some relationship but 100 isn't a magic number.
The psychology of that stuff is weird. The other guy is right, the slightest recording latency in your DAW will throw you off. I find you can get away with up to ~60 ms stereo delay before a track starts to sound out of time with itself and obviously doubled, but 1 ms has a very noticeable effect.
yeah in video games inputs, 100ms is considered the acceptable response threshold, beyond which the lag is noticeable by anyone. though hard code players do feel it "sluggish", compared to roughly 60ms which is what AAA shooter fans expect (and which is the minimum possible with current, non-specialised, hardware and game engines)
The second half of Leprous - The Sky is Red kinda got me in a similar liminal rhythmic space. It's not THAT slow, but it's also in 11/4 and was really difficult to wrap my head around when I first heard it in a concert.
The Contortionist's Language did that to me in concert. First time I'd heard that album (and anything by them since 2012) was live, and I've never had such fun as a musician at a gig.
@@christianromano8601 And it's actually 11 minutes and 11 seconds long (plus 10 seconds of fading out after the last note). This song is a masterpiece!
There's and IDM genre called Breakcore that plays with the idea of fastness and slowness at the same time. Maybe not touching the 33 bpm, but still, the combination between really fast drums and calm harmonic progression make this amazing to listen to. The drumming also tends to vary a lot and be complex. Here are some songs. Give it a shot. Goreshit - Burn this Moment Into The Retina Of My Eye Goreshit - O'er the flood Acrnym - Knife Ruby My Dear - Anémone Ruby My Dear - Charade
Oh, I'll have to check this out - I've always been fascinated by "double tempo" electronic tracks, but never managed to narrow it down to a genre. Thanks for mentioning this!
I feel Threshold in a 6/8 kinda way like that wonky last “3/4” bar to me feels like the middle of a slow 6/8 feel with the triplets going by. The way you make me think about the music I listen to is incredible. Keep doing what you do Adam, and maybe make more jazz school please :)
I absolutely love the idea that processing music in a group setting might allow individuals in that group to process deeper or more thoroughly than as individual listeners. What a beautiful concept!
What your in Sungazer ! Threshold has been my jam for the last few months there’s so much raw emotion almost nostalgia or longing and depth to the song. Thank you for being a part of something that has improved my life.
I need to watch it again to actually understand what happened. It's just mind blowing to me how you even thought of composing a song like that. I learn something new every time I watch your video.
Your song Threshold feels like 3/4 at basically exactly 100 BPM to me just with an extra like... 1/5th of a beat sometimes? I honestly hadn't considered it wasn't in 3/4 as I thought you were doing some avant garde swing on a straight forward 3/4. When you play it do you feel it in 3/4 with a little more sometimes or do you actually count some divisions of 19? I've been listening to your album a lot; probably a couple times a day since it came out. Just wanted to say thanks for creating it.
7:32 That was my first "instinct" - to just feel it as a lopsided 3/4. I recently did a cover on my channel of "Clarity" by Mouse on the Keys (which is in 11/8) but when I talked about it to my friends it felt more natural to feel it as a 12/8 with just a little lopsidedness to take away an eighth over time in the groove. Playing it still required the counting, but for listening only imo it's easier to fall into the "approximate" rhythm
Your content fuels my musical interests especially when I would otherwise be too busy with uni and what not. Also when I'm not busy, but this is something that is great even when I only have a few minutes. Thank you for making content! It's very good.
For those wondering why Adam Neely is driving with his glasses on so weird, it is probably because they are an old pair. You can get a sharper image out of old glasses with an out of date prescription by tilting the lenses forward like he has them. Driving long distances and wearing contacts for a long time can make the eyes sore, doubly so when done at the same time, so if he can get a sharp image out of old glasses he may as well wear them while driving since nobody is going to see most of the time.
I was at a Tera Melos show a few years back, they play a lot of odd meters. There was a pit, people were dancing. This was a Monday night. People find a way to move to stuff they like even if it's not in a standard dance time signature. Independent of time signature, if I'm trying to move to a song, I personally, I tend to half/double time a tempo so it falls between 60-120 ish.
I have this running theory that adam neely was basically an average music student, and then just kind of found his stride making vids, and then the old adage "the office makes the man" kicked in, and he just became THE source for really interesting content that I resent liking as much as I do, because it could have been me but i am lazy and undisciplined. Love you adam
4:53 I did my undergrad thesis on the liminality of when people stop perceiving 2 notes as separate events and begin to hear them as one. We found that when the notes are part of a steady rhythm (something you can groove to), the threshold actually changes - people become more sensitive to the difference. We also found that the effect didn't hold up when done with tactile vibrations (vs sound). So the perception of time actually changes not only based on the context or entrainment, but also based on what sense you're using to process it.
never heard of liminality before but wow i'm in love with the concept! the fact you have a whole album of it coming out??? 😍 what i'm hearing is that Sungazer make dissociation music. that's why i have this on repeat right now 🥰
When I think of what liminal music would sound like, I think of Everywhere At The End Of Time. Which is the creepiest music ever made. It takes familiar every day things and distorts them and gives them an uncanny valley sort of effect that makes it extremely unsettling, exactly like the photos of liminal spaces do. With liminal spaces, it's every day rooms and hallways and objects that just seem wrong and out of place somehow, but you can't pinpoint what it is. With Everywhere At The End Of Time, it's using typical big band style music from the first half of the 20th century but making it sound like it's all slowly degrading, because the album is all about how alzheimers feels. I know Adam's definition makes a lot more sense as what "liminal music" really should be like. But just listen to even the first couple of minutes of Everywhere At The End Of Time and you'll hear exactly what I'm talking about
King Gizz have a song called perihelion, Leprous release an album called aphelion, sungazer release an album called perihelion. I guess it's a science-y way of describing concepts or people as being (closest, fastest, most influential - perihelion) or (farthest apart, slowest, least influential - aphelion). Interesting.
Interesting interpretation. When I look at (peri|ap)helion I notice first "helio," so we have "thing close to sun." As album/song titles, this makes me think less of personal connections, and more of a connection between a body and an ideal, or a grand figure, or some sort of brilliant entity, a "sun." Perhaps this represents a striving, an optimistic title, or perhaps it's an uncomfortable situation in the glare and heat. Going with "aphelion" instead it may mean a solitude, a wallowing, a darkness (on-the-nose, yes), or perhaps also a shelter from the blaze. Or perhaps it's just "ooh cool science word."
You need to check out some of the extreme ends of this in metal-- I suggest "Mirror Reaper" by the band Bell Witch (slow end), and anything off the album "The Lucid Collective" by the band Archspire (the very fast end). Thresholds can be very adaptive based on experience/ immersion variables in such an environment. Two bands that also brilliantly utilize the liminal concepts are Between the Buried and Me (their album Colors for example), and The Contortionist (their album Language I is prime for this, check them out too).
I've always struggled with the rhythm on a handful of BTBAM songs, and this just lit a light bulb for me. I always recognized they sometimes use some unique time signatures and tempos, but I never realized _how_ strange some of the time signatures and tempos they use may be... Like, Mirrors? Seems like there's something going on with some dragging notes sometimes? Not to mention the time signature changes that they like to throw in... I was going to try to break it down, but I don't know enough music theory to nail this down...
@@mrahzzz Check out the channel literally titled "Metal Music Theory", that guy dives deeeep into the meat and potatoes and it's super informative/ helpful. Yeah BTBAM are some amazingly good songwriters/ composers, just impressive stuff that I also don't have a full grasp of at times.
Some years ago, I watched a series of videos that attempted to delve into what makes music, music from a scientific perspective. Part of the series talked about tempo and explored some of the same thing this video does, like how extreme can you get with rhythm before you stop considering it music? Well one idea that was explored was that it was connected to the average heart rate of humans. Rhythms we would consider music don't stray extremely far from what could be considered a natural human heart rate. That certainly seems to work with the lower perceptual limit that you showed here at 33 BPM. A 33 BPM heart rate is on the extreme low end for humans. There was also exploration of what could be considered music to different species, because their sizes would lead to different average heart rates for the species, so music to a blue whale would be different to music for a cat. Anyway, I think that could explain variability in the "indifference interval" between people and also why younger musicians are more prone to rushing their playing, while older musicians are more likely to drag along, as heart rate decreases with age. It would be interesting to see studies on this while taking individuals resting heart rates into account.
I love how the musical experiments were baked into the title and concept of the song, that's so cool. And yeah I felt it in the middle way in terms of fast and slow beats.
No matter the topic you always make them interesting Trumpet player who has minimal to zero knowledge on proper musical stuff and you’ve managed to grab my interest and hold it for several months now, if not a year Keep up the quality content, Adam!
So I totally listened to “Threshold” last week when you posted it, and regrettably found it odd and uninteresting, UNTIL seeing this video today and now that I know what is going on, I find it fascinating and very satisfying to listen to. You should do a video on other songs like this that may seem unremarkable or unpleasant to listen to, unless you really understand some underlying principle.
Inculturation's very powerful. I'm still blown away constantly by the fact that sound isn't music until I interpret it as being music - and anyone else around me hearing the same sound is uniquely converting those sounds into their own personal interpretation which is distinct from my own.
On the neuro side, this definitely has me thinking about the motor cortex and event -related desynchronization in the mu frequency band (8 - 13Hz, motor/SMA) The mu rhythm is attenuated/desynchronized to attend to the immediate event - with physical or imagined motor activity and is modulated by congruency of the objects attended to (more congruent > higher power in attenuation) - important stuff when we learn new things, across domains. We latch on to what’s most congruent to us based on prior knowledge, so a tune like Threshold is cool because it gives the listener many options for finding congruence as you so beautifully put it (4/4, tuplets, groupings). It’d be cool to look at mu rhythm desynch/attenuation and the correlation between natural motor responses to the tune and the different levels of rhythmic auditory objects and their associated congruency. I’m just daydreamin’ but there be something interesting there.
Because of your analysis of too fast/too slow, I took this concept and applied in my recent album, A Night of Ephemeral Transcendence. In the track “Ephemeral Transcendence”, I have the tempo set at 24bpm and the meter at 12/4. One reason for it was because I shift to different chord sequences and I wanted them to be at the same length regardless of how many chords were played. But the main reason was I wanted to create a space that was beyond this one where time can lose meaning, i.e. a minute becomes an hour or an hour becomes a minute. Think of it as manually creating a PaulStretch effect =]. What’s interesting that the first part of the track had a sound which had a high melodic figure. In any other tempo, it would have been a nice little melodic frill. But playing a chord at 24bpm, it creates an unintentional groove at … 96bpm (close to your indifference interval).
An eye-opener for me in realizing the fact there is some slowness threshold is when I took some guitar group lessons where some people were absolute beginners in any musical instrument and the focus was just on finger placement. The teacher made us strum so slowly I completely lost track of where were in the song (or even what song we were playing). Glad I switched to drums with just one friend who's at a very similar level and a teacher who feels exactly how we are experiencing music and how to push us in interesting ways 🧡
My only objection to any of this is calling it the Indifference Interval, when the one thing almost every human is least likely to feel towards music at this speed is indifference. Our most obvious source of rhythm, the heart, varies wildly from person to person as well as with each individual's current mood and physiology, whereas the vast majority of humans have legs of similar enough length and so about 100bpm apparently just feels "right", regardless of our cultural background or previous musical experience. That's kinda mind-blowing, really! It's also making me *really* want to try and imagine and compose a hypothetical alien's music based on a simulated walking gait. What would this Indifference Interval sound like for a species that has three legs in an isosceles triangle-based pyramid configuration? What about a different terrestrial species like an insect or a cephalopod? This definitely bears further study!
Also: the crowd counting 'three' and 'four' (you were feeding them one and two) at 3:46 are *not* feeling it together, the earliest and latest threes and fours they speak are spread out by *at least* 500 ms
I read once that humans started walking at the same time as others to reduce noise while they go around, which might be the origin of rhythm, although I don't remember the source, so it could be false
This explanation offers such a neat insight into the logic behind this song! Very fun to participate in live. I think I was trying to feel the slowest tempo since that’s how you initially prompt the audience to count to 4
This is amazing. I'm really into a band called Consider the Source, and I've noticed multiple times how different everyone grooves to their music live.
There's a great Finnish post-prog band Saimaa whose bandleader-guitarist has introduced a song that goes in 6/4 as "this next song has a bit weirder rhythm... 1... 2... 3... 8... 13... But on the upside, it frees up all the people who don't have any sense of rhythm". I think that's a great way to think about weird rhythms with regards to the audience.
@@user-bf6gz8ej4o yeah the sound quality is bad but the band is fantastic, there's like 12 talented musicians on stage having fun whilst doing some really complicated stuff, without actually sounding all that complicated (compated to many traditional prog rock bands like King Crimson or Jethro Tull)
The 10 millisecond limit is interesting to me as a linguist and trained phonetician. We also mention that the smallest perceptible difference for distinguishing speech sounds is about 10 milliseconds. For instance, the difference between an initial /b/ and /p/ in English is about 20 milliseconds of voicelessness in the start of a following vowel. If you have two sounds where the difference in that voicing delay is less than 10 ms, you won't hear the difference.
Finally! A word to describe this feeling of being slow and chill but also fast paced and energetic. If anyone wants some more music with this kind of vibe, I recommend Little Light by Geshem, Good Morning Mr. Wolf by Patrick Watson, anything by the Dead Pirates, or Troubleman by Electric Guest. If you have more recs, please do let me know! I find that for me, it not only links with walking (tho I would sometimes walk around the city to this kind of music pre-lockdown), but it also matches a kind of mental state. It sometimes feels like this liminal music is what it's like being in a depressive mental state but a physical high-energy state, and music like this can really help to work through those states healthily imo
I’m a “classical” pianist. I must say the fundamental experience of music:”sound organized in time”, for those that learned music from the score, experience the “passage of time” quite differently. It seems us classical folks treat “classical music” like museum pieces, rather than something that is alive. (At least from my own experience!) I am forcing myself (but with pleasure!) to comp any music I hear, and boy is it difficult; it seems that intent and intense listening and copying is at the essence of any natural music learning. It’s like babies learning languages: they imitate and learn by audiating what they hear and see, rather than learning from textbook grammar 101. I always wondered why classical musicians seldom or never talk about “grooving”. It’s so strange how rhythm is taught. So in essence, I am just trying to break out of the habit of learning music the “textbook” way. Thanks for the continuous inspiration! I wanna see audiences at “classical music” concerts groove like your audiences! Keep pushing the liminal boundaries 🤓😎😆
I had a similar thought that 120(ish) is the most common for pop songs. I was surprised to learn that 100 is "indifference." I'm going to have to listen to a list of 100bpm songs now
Your discussion about time was interesting because I definitely feel like time has been simultaneously dragging and flying by way too fast since the pandemic. Like, I started at a new job in October of 2019, and I was only there for about 6 months before the pandemic changed everything, I spent a couple of months laid off until they eventually brought me back before the end of the summer, and we’ve been wearing masks and following COVID guidelines ever since-and until I did the math and realized exactly how long it’s been, it hasn’t felt that long, so time has been flying by, and while time felt fast before I would’ve sworn that I’d been there longer pre-COVID that I actually was. It’s strange to think back to that 6 month period, because and it feels like it was so much longer and yet as fast has time has flown since COVID guidelines went into effect, it hasn’t flown fast enough to bring them to an end. There was a month when they eased up and allowed vaccinated people to go unmasked, but then Delta surges rolled that back. So, it’s interesting that your band found a way to express that sentiment musically, rather than lyrically; and I just wish that things could be more like they were pre-pandemic sooner rather than later. This entire time has felt like an awkward pause, like a moment of silence that seems like it goes on for way too long and you’re just dying to break the silence and go back to what you were doing, even if it wasn’t that different. It’s the waiting in anticipation of something for an indefinite time that’s the worst. You can’t even make plans for afterwards because you don’t have a clue when that will be, and you’re just stuck in limbo-or a liminal as you’ve mentioned.
Threshold is what we refer to as a sway beat. Stepping to a sway beat will make you feel awkward. Instead, you'll sway you shoulders with an abdominal dip between, almost a triangular pattern of movement but much more liquid like. Feet will have to adjust by either double time or halftime.
"In a large group of people you could lower the limit for rhythmic perception, and make music that is even slower and the larger group would be able to feel it en mass more" and yes. If crowbar or any sludgemetal band is in town, check that out. The audience regularly feels very slow tempos and usually in a large (ish) group
h y p e r t u p l e t s
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I like phasing like Steve Reich for example
put the link for an extended version
Avec toi on en apprend de ces choses !!
J'ai un peu de mal avec l'anglais mais ça ne m'empêche pas de te suivre sur ta chaîne.
I would like to see what you have to say about the extreme rhythmic tempo of Grindcore.
HYPEtuplets!
"Mommy, someone is walking funny outside."
"Don't look, sweetie."
Lmfaooo
The pandemic has affected people in unexpected and terrible ways.
you might become a musician
Well sir, I have a silly walk and I’d like to obtain a government grant to help me develop it.
He's a member of the Department of Silly Walk.
Summary: Sungazer wrote a song that is simultaneously "as fast as possible" and "as slow as possible", but when they played it live, the audience just split the difference and grooved at a perfectly medium pace.
I believe you meant Sungazer because I was trying to remember such a song by the technical death metal band Stargazer, which honestly doesn't seem implausible.
@@rohitchaoji Oops, my bad! Thank you for pointing out my mistake. Im'ma edit my original comment. This will probably make your reply very confusing to future readers, but such is the Wonder of the internet...🤩🤩🤩
@@rohitchaoji i believe you meant the original, unedited comment because i remembered such a malaprop by the future philosopher-king Mark O, which honestly strikes me as within the realm of possibilities. That will probably make this reply Wonderful for future intarwebs trying to figure out how Mark O became Benevolent Overlord of Earth :)
An even more brief summary: "Listen to my band's new song"
Cumgazer
Adam Neely's Ministry of Silly Walks
Dude! You're here too? Amazing how eclectic and open minded metal musicians are. Interesting shit
Got nothing to do with being metal. I'm a pop rock musician and I listen ABBA to Zappa. Death metal, jazz, classical, Snarky Puppy, 80s, I got a super eclectic taste but I'm not a metal musician.
@@svenjansen2134 I'm ABBA to ZZ TOP. 😎
I couldn't respect myself if I didn't walk to the tempo of my music
@@svenjansen2134 opposite😮d overindulgence je IPL j bill😅y kl😅
Watching Shawn use a calculator to divide 600 by 6 was a moment I felt deep in my soul as a college student.
be tripple checking on those tests
*Adam Neely:* “Most people find a tempo of 100BPM to be not too fast and not too slow.”
*Rhythm gamers:* _[WALKS AGGRESSIVELY AT 340BPM]_
hell yeah speedcore walking **dies**
The gays: *begin walking at 180 bpm*
(Don’t cancel me I’m a lesbian)
?
-can u explain the jokr-
@@jerecakes1 gays walk fast, especially caffeinated gays
that brought up more questions than answers but thanks anyway hahah have a gud day m8
My daughter takes ballet. A few years ago, her class was involved in a dance that was rather slow (not quite a largo, but nearly so) for a group of seven year olds. This age group / level does this dance every year, and every year they have oodles of trouble slowing their little, performance-excited bodies down to follow the tempo. Inevitably, what ends up happening is, by about halfway through the piece, each dancer in the group ends up anywhere between one and four measures ahead. All except the one dancer who is DETERMINED to keep the beat regardless of the rest of her fellow dancers jumping ahead. Unfortunately, she ends up looking like she's fallen behind, rather than the other way around.
They're seven. It's adorable. 😍
...wow - okay, so, that actually makes me wonder: if you think about your legs as pendulums, the shorter the pendulum, the faster it wants to swing. Is dancing so slowly hard because they're young and still learning ... or is it _also_ hard because their bodies are smaller and naturally swing faster?
I'd love to see studies relating the lower end of rhythmic perception with leg length, see if something's there.
Man that sounds like torture. Like when you're on coke and you have to go outside to withdraw more money to buy more, and you're just overflowing with energy but you have to stand as still and calmly as possible to not draw attention.
Kids obviously don't need drugs to be like that, they're just like that at all times. Like, just let em dance! I suppose it's probably a good way for them to learn to be more in control of their energy. When I was a kid I did karate, from about age 7 as well funnily enough, and it taught me that. So often you were told to just hold the position and not move at all. Even when you were on one foot. That learning to balance properly and learning to control your energy and be rock solid, is really good for kids. Karate is basically like ballet anyway, except less dangerous. The injuries in ballet are pretty gruesome. But there's a reason quite a few MMA guys take ballet (and Arnold Schwarzenegger also did ballet, to help win bodybuilding competitions). It's all the same sort of movement. And it's all about balance. And for young kids, it's great to help them learn how to not act out and sprint around constantly, cos they learn how to stay calm and controlled energy-wise. Really every kid who doesn't have a disability should do one of these things. Not just for the exercise factor. I just can't imagine many boys wanna take ballet, which is why you have to trick them and make them do karate instead, and they have no idea how similar the two things are. And when you're a kid taking karate, the vast majority of the time you never actually fight each other, so it's not like your kid will get beat up a lot. They sometimes make you do kumite, i.e. fighting tournaments, but you're not allowed to really hit each other, you have to lightly tap each other with your fists, and you score points when you do, and you get disqualified if you actually hurt them.
That's why ballet is more dangerous funnily enough. My sisters both got some really nasty injuries from ballet, including both of them breaking their legs, along with getting really gnarly looking feet. But they don't regret taking ballet, they loved it.
@@Packbat Well, it would make some sense - a newborn's resting heart rate is around 100-120 bpm, and it slows down gradually to an adult heart rate of around 60 or so around the teen years.
@@duffman18 I don't know much about martial arts, but I definitely agree that - in the U.S. at least - we need a lot more boys learning dance. Our daughter's school has three boys, and apparently the other dance school directors in the area are jealous of that, because most of them have none.
That's me when a group starts clapping in unision. Keep the beat, fools!!!!!
Adam walking at 180 BPM is my spirit animal.
Also @ 9:19 Adam Driver makes an appearance. I’m sorry. I’ll leave now.
You are the yin to my yang cause 60 was perfect, i guess i like strutting
offensive appropriation
Graeme McDonald same. and those finger guns were the cherry on top
Marching band be like
"you could also think of this as just a really fast 19/16"
Oh, yeah, thanks Adam, that really helps.
I love that adam’s band can create such musically complex songs, but not in the sense where you feel drowned in music theory
I actually think that a group of ppl COULD feel slower pulses like that better than individuals. It’s kind of like how if you ask people to count the number of jellybeans in a jar, individuals could be really far off, but the average will be spot on most of the time
Jean-Michel Basquiat's quote "Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time" seems applicable here :)
But music is art
Yes, but art that decorates time🤔✌
That's really a good way to put it
Love this quote… never heard it before, and love it.
Sounds a lot like Frank Zappa's "We all get a piece of time and we get to decorate it" quote
The idea of the three different psychological tempos going by simultaneously is so fucking sick. This kind of thing is EXACTLY what I follow Neely and Crowder for.
Haven't seen the explanation yet, but I'm guessing 4/4, 3/4(ish) and 19/16.
Edit: 2 for 2 I'm on a roll
Also the fact that the two tempos happen to be the low extreme, high extreme and exact middle ground.
@@oscargill423 ok
My kids (6, 4, and 2) tend to try and dance at whatever the fastest subdivision of the beat is. If the groove is 4/4 at 120 bpm, but then the drummer starts putting 16th notes on top of that, they will try to dance to the 16th notes. It’s pretty hilarious.
so if you were to play some metal with a crazy fast double kick, would your kids just start vibrating? :p
@@essie23la they would start floating
@@essie23la Just have them listen to Archspire XD
@@essie23la They turn into FNF mod characters.
Please make a video of them dancing to some Meshuggah shit
"If you slow your walking down to a certain point, you stop feeling it as a rythm".
*Laughs in doom metal*
*Then cries in doom jazz*
I was certainly thinking of Skepticism when that part came up.
They don't laugh, in doom metal
I like how Sungazer is more of a psychological experiment than a band really.
Feel the 19...
Pro tip: make sure the 19-tuplets and the quarter notes are in the SAME METER
Thank you
Well done, sir.
Wut?
Oh I just understood what i read. It was fairly genious! 🤣 Kudos to you!
Yes! Words! I got it
"You could also just think of this as a really fast 19/16"
No, no I don't think I will.
38/38 doesn't sound much better.
And for videos like this is why I am a subscriber.
Alohaaaa!!!
How's it?
Yahooo
Mister Geebz hello
A meeting of the greats!!
Your uploads bring back any lost spark I've had towards music and composition... So much so that (despite local naysayers) I've decided to change careers mid-life away from hard labour and towards music. It's going to be a hard road, but it feels good to scream it into the void below Adam Neely's window. I hope the industry keeps your heart full! Thank you Adam.
Good for you 👏
Holy shit! How's the career-change going?
@@averydoesstuff I'm not rich with currency, but my heart has never been more full! I had no idea how much life I was missing!
@@devospanko What you're doing is braver than most. That's bold and the risk of allowing something you truly adore to *become* your job, but not have it feel like a job . . . I imagine that's a joy like no other. There truly are no rewards without risk. That said, I subscribed, I will watch your videos, and I hope to support your passion along the way. Reading how you feel has truly made my day and now you've inspired me to pick up my guitar after 2½ years.
@@averydoesstuff I'm honoured! I'll do the same and keep you in my thoughts throughout my work!
I personally often describe Adam in my head as "funny jazzy meme bass youtube man" but it can pass us how creative, intricate and thoughtful the man can be
Thank you for yet another insight on unusual musicallity and for sharing your thoughts with us, Adam
“As you can see, the rhythms are slowly unbuttoning my shirt, I’m helpless against it.”
what on earth are you quoting 😂
split brain corpus callosum
Do you think the rhythms would mind if I helped?
quote goes hard tbh
Only legends can truly transcend the human desire for patterns and begin to see music in 1/1 time lol
Only if it's played only in C
you can count in 1, and second comment, yes C scale is the base. (with couple minor flats thrown in)
🙋🏻♂️
"Can Music save Your Mortal Soul czcams.com/video/-uexjy4sWu4/video.html
"Try walking along to the BPM of your music"
Speedcore and Extratone listeners: Time to tap into the *_SPEEDFORCE_*
gotta go fast
terrorcore
kobaryo and camellia rn
hypertone ;c
Tech Death fans be running
0:42 You don't have to walk to fast music, you have to run, run quickly! I love Happy Hardcore for that.
Something does not feel quite right here, I feel like the argument is flawed.
The video starts with the definition of the "indifference interval" and concludes with people on the concerts gravitating towards the "wonky 3/4" which turns out to be around the tempo of the indifference interval. But correlation does not mean causation. I'd question the suggestion that they do so because it's the most natural or something. They do so, because Shawn pushes them there by enforcing the wonky 3/4 with the kick drum - they just follow him. The melodic lines and patterns also revolve around that pulse. It says more about you as the group finding the most appealing way to divide those 19-tuplets - you made 3 groups out of it - and hence your own gravitation towards the indifference interval, rather than about the listeners and their preference - the latter is just a consequence of your own choice, not a law of nature.
What I'd love to see is how people would react if those 19-tuplets were divided into a greater number of subdivisions, one that is more far away from 100 BPM: what if the kick played every 5 "sixteenths", resulting in a wonky 4/4 in quintuplets with last group a sixteenth short? What if the kick played every 4 "sixteenths", with wonky 5/4 and last beat 1 short? What about series of 5 triplets followed by 4 notes? I'm very curious how the listeners would count this if the kick would follow any of those patterns. I'm pretty convinced they'd just follow the kick drum, because this is what we as listeners are conditioned to follow, and it does not really matter if it fits the indifference interval or not, and whether the resulting pulse is a compromise between extremities or not.
Unless of course you have experimented with different divisions of those 19-tuplets - if so, and if you rejected 4, 5, 6 subdivisions, I'd be very happy to learn why you chose 3 instead, and whether it was because it felt best, or for some other reason.
I don't understand a shred of what you wrote but it sounds interesting and the creator of the video should definitely try it 😂😂
@@petatheoak6051 I think I understand the concepts but couldn't translate them into practice.
I enjoy the scepticism though.
Yes, that's basically what Yee is saying. He rides along with Crowder's kick drum in "3/4" and anticipates the hesitation at the end. It's pretty much the way pure feel musicians play songs like "Whipping Post", (including BTW Gregg Allman, who wrote it).
It's bc this video is to promote sungazer:P
@@fzxfzxfzx And bumgazer too!
Damn, now I'm going to have to write another string quartet exploring some of this stuff.
Yes please
please make it a real parts quartet (Violin, Viola, Cello, Double Bass) ! :3
String quartets are your go-to super-power :-)
And there will be four movements and all of them will be in andante tempo :D
Ummm please don't .mix tempos or layer double time if you have any fucking respect for your work don't make it easy for the donkeys we call performers make it challenging for them so the audience can be brutalized with your genius!
To be honest when I saw sungazer do this tune, I immediately started subdividing to keep the tempo. Before you guys started playing the fast notes I was naturally counting each beat as a measure of 6/8. I suspect given the nature of that band and the people who come to see it(probably way more musicians than your average audience), you'd get very different results if you tried the same slow counting exercise at an average pop show.
This is exactly what I did while watching the video! At the start of the "One! Two! Three! Four!" I was already bobbing along in 6/8. After getting to the later section explaining the not-quite-3/4 it made a lot more sense.
Would definitely be curious to see what results you'd get from a different type of crowd.
Hi Adam - regarding how crowds make it easier to count slower rhythm-
I think this is just the effect of crowd synchrony that happens in a lot of similar situation. If everyone sort of feels the rhythm but either rush or drag, on the total they even out and people tend to gravitate towards the correct felt average. This is I think kind of how singing crowds sound much more in tune than any single individual in them.
This dynamic is actually kind of well described mathematically, in what is called the Kuramoto model and the work of Steven strogatz.
It's pretty much the "wisdom of crowds" thing. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd
Yes! Veritasium posted a video about it not long ago:
czcams.com/video/t-_VPRCtiUg/video.html
I have always walked at almost exactly 120bpm. Tested it many times over the years, and it is really consistent.
Same! 120bpm walking speed. However when I'm with other people I slow down to stay along with them
If songs are too slow or too fast you can always walk on the subdivisions, or even at tuplet intervals which can be really satisfying when you find the right song for it
As a marching band kid, him not stepping on his left foot on one and three made me uncomfortable
left left left right left
Left, left, left, left, I left because I thought it was right, right, right, I thought it was right so l left, left, left, left.
Ew gross, marching bands lead with the left?
@@ArrogantDan yeah, so that their right steps land on the downbeats
@@ArrogantDan the cadets lead with their right lol
Adam: "Try walking to different BPMs."
*Marching band intensifies*
Sure, but you actually have other queues that you use to form a tempo! :)
"So is this piece Largo, Presto, or Moderato?"
"Yes."
Larpomo
It's Andante-
but you've got pebbles in your shoes that get stuck under your feet every third step...
Have anyone researched whether the feeling of uneasiness scales with a person's height? Are kids more comfortable with faster tempos because of more steps per walking distance?
interesting concept
amazing reasoning
It's more about the steps per second.
Though, kids usually walk at the speed of the accompanying adult, so your point still stands!
Interesting
fascinating idea
"As long as you can find the "one", you can groove to the beat." - Don Ellis
As a player who has often struggled with "Brilliant Corners", I can attest to that.
With the crowd, it might be a "wisdom of the crowds" thing, where people's internal metronomes are off, but in random directions, such that collectively, they "tick" more in time.
They're in sync with the ONE, but flamming wildly on the FOUR... ;-)
Like a... Marco Polo simulation? :)
Joe Abercrombie?
Doom Metal is genre that plays a lot with these extremely slow tempos, this video reminded me of the 2017 Bell Witch's "Mirror Reaper" album which experiments a lot with time, in it we kind of pay more attention to the space between notes than the normal progression of notes. Great video!
Feeling asymmetric pulses isn't wild in plenty of music. Seeing teenagers clapping 7/8 (7/4 etc) and dancing in a park in Istanbul was a stark reminder then idential pulses isn't a default for all cultures. 👍
true
.. but then came 7/12 ... 😱
Adam, i think you're a genius.
You point out angles I never thought of.
And thinking is all I do,
so it's not for lack of opportunity.
As a musician with a good ear
and lots of musical curiosity at times (...),
I have done loads of space cargo ships
full of thinking about the organic
and the mathematical and
the many other aspecs of music.
I am from 1956.
And yet you have been feeding me
so much information, inspiration and ideas,
that I am re-inspired again and again by your
- what I would call expansion of the musical universe.
Others do so too, but you seem to be so curious,
I wonder what you put in your coffee, sometimes.
Thanks again!
10/10 comment fr
Mind blown. Yes. My relationship between progressive music and music in general will be forever positively changed!
One thing I think that's neat: whereas many genres have a kind of standard tempo range, within metal there are extremely fast subgenres (grind and death come to mind, having tempos near 300 bpm) all the way down to funeral doom, with tempos below 50 bpm. I know jazz and avant garde stuff also spans just about the whole spectrum, but I think it's neat that metal, a less traditionally respected genre also does it.
I read once that 100ms is also the threshold below which things appear to be visually instantaneous. For instance, if you click a button on a computer screen and the screen is redrawn in less than 100ms, it appears to be an instant response. Above 100ms, we can perceive the difference between stimulus and response. Wonder if that’s related?
100ms is different than 100bpm, keep in mind. 100bpm is one beat per 600ms if my math is right. But generally with web animations you want to do 250 or 300ms depending on a couple things.
There's probably some relationship but 100 isn't a magic number.
@@Vedgy the 100ms comes from the “upper rhythmic threshold”
Try playing with your interface at 100ms latency. Visually maybe, but audio wise, absolutely not
The psychology of that stuff is weird. The other guy is right, the slightest recording latency in your DAW will throw you off. I find you can get away with up to ~60 ms stereo delay before a track starts to sound out of time with itself and obviously doubled, but 1 ms has a very noticeable effect.
yeah in video games inputs, 100ms is considered the acceptable response threshold, beyond which the lag is noticeable by anyone. though hard code players do feel it "sluggish", compared to roughly 60ms which is what AAA shooter fans expect (and which is the minimum possible with current, non-specialised, hardware and game engines)
The second half of Leprous - The Sky is Red kinda got me in a similar liminal rhythmic space. It's not THAT slow, but it's also in 11/4 and was really difficult to wrap my head around when I first heard it in a concert.
That and the fact the title has 11 letters over 4 words.
@@christianromano8601 nice observation. Very clever.
The Contortionist's Language did that to me in concert. First time I'd heard that album (and anything by them since 2012) was live, and I've never had such fun as a musician at a gig.
@@christianromano8601 And it's actually 11 minutes and 11 seconds long (plus 10 seconds of fading out after the last note). This song is a masterpiece!
The Sky is Red was such a phenomenal experience live! Looking forward to their 20th anniversary tour!
I absolutely love videos like this that view music as something more than just pretty noise.
Never stop being you Adam
There's and IDM genre called Breakcore that plays with the idea of fastness and slowness at the same time. Maybe not touching the 33 bpm, but still, the combination between really fast drums and calm harmonic progression make this amazing to listen to. The drumming also tends to vary a lot and be complex. Here are some songs. Give it a shot.
Goreshit - Burn this Moment Into The Retina Of My Eye
Goreshit - O'er the flood
Acrnym - Knife
Ruby My Dear - Anémone
Ruby My Dear - Charade
Oh, I'll have to check this out - I've always been fascinated by "double tempo" electronic tracks, but never managed to narrow it down to a genre. Thanks for mentioning this!
dropdead by Frums does something like this too
it's at 50 bpm but feels a lot faster
I feel Threshold in a 6/8 kinda way like that wonky last “3/4” bar to me feels like the middle of a slow 6/8 feel with the triplets going by. The way you make me think about the music I listen to is incredible. Keep doing what you do Adam, and maybe make more jazz school please :)
I absolutely love the idea that processing music in a group setting might allow individuals in that group to process deeper or more thoroughly than as individual listeners. What a beautiful concept!
Its been different experience for me
The pacing of this video is perfect. Adam is one of the best music teachers on youtube.
What your in Sungazer ! Threshold has been my jam for the last few months there’s so much raw emotion almost nostalgia or longing and depth to the song. Thank you for being a part of something that has improved my life.
CPR - "Stayin' Alive" and "Another One Bites The Dust" 100bpm. Eek.
...ah, myth! Neither.
110BPM
First I was afraid, I was petrified...
Edit: Chest compressions between 100 and 120, so they fit, um, more or less, to the average bear?
Stayin' Alive is 104 bpm, isn't it?
I need to watch it again to actually understand what happened. It's just mind blowing to me how you even thought of composing a song like that. I learn something new every time I watch your video.
What blows my mind is he found enough like-minded individuals to form a band
So...after math rock we have math jazz?
Jokes apart, this is intelligent music. Being smart and full of meaning. Amazing, Adam!
That just gave me a really bad idea
Never Meant but Giant Steps
@@jazz9128 tf do you mean this is the best idea
Not only are you a fantastic musician, but you are also a fabulous teacher and video editor! Such fascinating stuff, and I never felt confused once
Your song Threshold feels like 3/4 at basically exactly 100 BPM to me just with an extra like... 1/5th of a beat sometimes? I honestly hadn't considered it wasn't in 3/4 as I thought you were doing some avant garde swing on a straight forward 3/4. When you play it do you feel it in 3/4 with a little more sometimes or do you actually count some divisions of 19?
I've been listening to your album a lot; probably a couple times a day since it came out. Just wanted to say thanks for creating it.
7:32 That was my first "instinct" - to just feel it as a lopsided 3/4.
I recently did a cover on my channel of "Clarity" by Mouse on the Keys (which is in 11/8) but when I talked about it to my friends it felt more natural to feel it as a 12/8 with just a little lopsidedness to take away an eighth over time in the groove.
Playing it still required the counting, but for listening only imo it's easier to fall into the "approximate" rhythm
Always a treat when an artist I enjoy puts out an companion breakdown of why I can *almost* comfortably feel his band's disorienting new song
Fascinatingly well done composition, is this officially "math rock"?
it has nothing to do with math rock
👨🏾🚀🔫👨🏾🚀 always has been
Is Math Jazz a thing?
Math rock *wants* to be this.
I absolutely love the fact that some bands think about things like this when writing their music.
Your content fuels my musical interests especially when I would otherwise be too busy with uni and what not. Also when I'm not busy, but this is something that is great even when I only have a few minutes. Thank you for making content! It's very good.
For those wondering why Adam Neely is driving with his glasses on so weird, it is probably because they are an old pair. You can get a sharper image out of old glasses with an out of date prescription by tilting the lenses forward like he has them. Driving long distances and wearing contacts for a long time can make the eyes sore, doubly so when done at the same time, so if he can get a sharp image out of old glasses he may as well wear them while driving since nobody is going to see most of the time.
Thank you for that comment, I always thought my glasses were incorrect for me, when I noticed that they worked better that way
"It's all in 4/4 man" is what gets me with Meshuggah
I was at a Tera Melos show a few years back, they play a lot of odd meters. There was a pit, people were dancing. This was a Monday night. People find a way to move to stuff they like even if it's not in a standard dance time signature.
Independent of time signature, if I'm trying to move to a song, I personally, I tend to half/double time a tempo so it falls between 60-120 ish.
Same with Between the Buried and Me, or Genghis Tron, back in the day. Plenty of examples that agree with you!
I have this running theory that adam neely was basically an average music student, and then just kind of found his stride making vids, and then the old adage "the office makes the man" kicked in, and he just became THE source for really interesting content that I resent liking as much as I do, because it could have been me but i am lazy and undisciplined. Love you adam
4:53 I did my undergrad thesis on the liminality of when people stop perceiving 2 notes as separate events and begin to hear them as one. We found that when the notes are part of a steady rhythm (something you can groove to), the threshold actually changes - people become more sensitive to the difference. We also found that the effect didn't hold up when done with tactile vibrations (vs sound). So the perception of time actually changes not only based on the context or entrainment, but also based on what sense you're using to process it.
This is cool!
What a complicated and indepth study for an undergrad thesis!
never heard of liminality before but wow i'm in love with the concept! the fact you have a whole album of it coming out??? 😍 what i'm hearing is that Sungazer make dissociation music. that's why i have this on repeat right now 🥰
When I think of what liminal music would sound like, I think of Everywhere At The End Of Time. Which is the creepiest music ever made. It takes familiar every day things and distorts them and gives them an uncanny valley sort of effect that makes it extremely unsettling, exactly like the photos of liminal spaces do. With liminal spaces, it's every day rooms and hallways and objects that just seem wrong and out of place somehow, but you can't pinpoint what it is. With Everywhere At The End Of Time, it's using typical big band style music from the first half of the 20th century but making it sound like it's all slowly degrading, because the album is all about how alzheimers feels.
I know Adam's definition makes a lot more sense as what "liminal music" really should be like. But just listen to even the first couple of minutes of Everywhere At The End Of Time and you'll hear exactly what I'm talking about
King Gizz have a song called perihelion, Leprous release an album called aphelion, sungazer release an album called perihelion. I guess it's a science-y way of describing concepts or people as being (closest, fastest, most influential - perihelion) or (farthest apart, slowest, least influential - aphelion). Interesting.
Interesting interpretation. When I look at (peri|ap)helion I notice first "helio," so we have "thing close to sun." As album/song titles, this makes me think less of personal connections, and more of a connection between a body and an ideal, or a grand figure, or some sort of brilliant entity, a "sun." Perhaps this represents a striving, an optimistic title, or perhaps it's an uncomfortable situation in the glare and heat. Going with "aphelion" instead it may mean a solitude, a wallowing, a darkness (on-the-nose, yes), or perhaps also a shelter from the blaze. Or perhaps it's just "ooh cool science word."
This is absolutely fascinating in the understanding of how we evolved as humans alongside rhythm.
I wonder how other cultures would react?
You need to check out some of the extreme ends of this in metal-- I suggest "Mirror Reaper" by the band Bell Witch (slow end), and anything off the album "The Lucid Collective" by the band Archspire (the very fast end). Thresholds can be very adaptive based on experience/ immersion variables in such an environment. Two bands that also brilliantly utilize the liminal concepts are Between the Buried and Me (their album Colors for example), and The Contortionist (their album Language I is prime for this, check them out too).
Thanks for sharing
@@prapanthebachelorette6803 Of course, cheers.
I've always struggled with the rhythm on a handful of BTBAM songs, and this just lit a light bulb for me. I always recognized they sometimes use some unique time signatures and tempos, but I never realized _how_ strange some of the time signatures and tempos they use may be... Like, Mirrors? Seems like there's something going on with some dragging notes sometimes? Not to mention the time signature changes that they like to throw in... I was going to try to break it down, but I don't know enough music theory to nail this down...
@@mrahzzz Check out the channel literally titled "Metal Music Theory", that guy dives deeeep into the meat and potatoes and it's super informative/ helpful.
Yeah BTBAM are some amazingly good songwriters/ composers, just impressive stuff that I also don't have a full grasp of at times.
@@DJTheMetalheadMercenary Ah, nice - thanks for the rec! I'm definitely going to go look into this channel.
Some years ago, I watched a series of videos that attempted to delve into what makes music, music from a scientific perspective. Part of the series talked about tempo and explored some of the same thing this video does, like how extreme can you get with rhythm before you stop considering it music?
Well one idea that was explored was that it was connected to the average heart rate of humans. Rhythms we would consider music don't stray extremely far from what could be considered a natural human heart rate. That certainly seems to work with the lower perceptual limit that you showed here at 33 BPM. A 33 BPM heart rate is on the extreme low end for humans. There was also exploration of what could be considered music to different species, because their sizes would lead to different average heart rates for the species, so music to a blue whale would be different to music for a cat.
Anyway, I think that could explain variability in the "indifference interval" between people and also why younger musicians are more prone to rushing their playing, while older musicians are more likely to drag along, as heart rate decreases with age. It would be interesting to see studies on this while taking individuals resting heart rates into account.
"Can Music save Your Mortal Soul czcams.com/video/-uexjy4sWu4/video.html
I love how the musical experiments were baked into the title and concept of the song, that's so cool. And yeah I felt it in the middle way in terms of fast and slow beats.
h y p e r t u p l e t s
First reply......
u n d e r w h e l m i n g t u p l e t s
h y p o t u p l e t s
I suppose it's fitting that, in a family of fast walkers, my "neutral tempo" isn't 100 but 111 😄
No matter the topic you always make them interesting
Trumpet player who has minimal to zero knowledge on proper musical stuff and you’ve managed to grab my interest and hold it for several months now, if not a year
Keep up the quality content, Adam!
So I totally listened to “Threshold” last week when you posted it, and regrettably found it odd and uninteresting, UNTIL seeing this video today and now that I know what is going on, I find it fascinating and very satisfying to listen to.
You should do a video on other songs like this that may seem unremarkable or unpleasant to listen to, unless you really understand some underlying principle.
Inculturation's very powerful. I'm still blown away constantly by the fact that sound isn't music until I interpret it as being music - and anyone else around me hearing the same sound is uniquely converting those sounds into their own personal interpretation which is distinct from my own.
On the neuro side, this definitely has me thinking about the motor cortex and event -related desynchronization in the mu frequency band (8 - 13Hz, motor/SMA)
The mu rhythm is attenuated/desynchronized to attend to the immediate event - with physical or imagined motor activity and is modulated by congruency of the objects attended to (more congruent > higher power in attenuation) - important stuff when we learn new things, across domains.
We latch on to what’s most congruent to us based on prior knowledge, so a tune like Threshold is cool because it gives the listener many options for finding congruence as you so beautifully put it (4/4, tuplets, groupings).
It’d be cool to look at mu rhythm desynch/attenuation and the correlation between natural motor responses to the tune and the different levels of rhythmic auditory objects and their associated congruency. I’m just daydreamin’ but there be something interesting there.
Because of your analysis of too fast/too slow, I took this concept and applied in my recent album, A Night of Ephemeral Transcendence. In the track “Ephemeral Transcendence”, I have the tempo set at 24bpm and the meter at 12/4. One reason for it was because I shift to different chord sequences and I wanted them to be at the same length regardless of how many chords were played. But the main reason was I wanted to create a space that was beyond this one where time can lose meaning, i.e. a minute becomes an hour or an hour becomes a minute. Think of it as manually creating a PaulStretch effect =].
What’s interesting that the first part of the track had a sound which had a high melodic figure. In any other tempo, it would have been a nice little melodic frill. But playing a chord at 24bpm, it creates an unintentional groove at … 96bpm (close to your indifference interval).
8:33 Ah yes, every musician's worst enemy - spelling the word "rhythmic" XD
An eye-opener for me in realizing the fact there is some slowness threshold is when I took some guitar group lessons where some people were absolute beginners in any musical instrument and the focus was just on finger placement. The teacher made us strum so slowly I completely lost track of where were in the song (or even what song we were playing).
Glad I switched to drums with just one friend who's at a very similar level and a teacher who feels exactly how we are experiencing music and how to push us in interesting ways 🧡
My only objection to any of this is calling it the Indifference Interval, when the one thing almost every human is least likely to feel towards music at this speed is indifference. Our most obvious source of rhythm, the heart, varies wildly from person to person as well as with each individual's current mood and physiology, whereas the vast majority of humans have legs of similar enough length and so about 100bpm apparently just feels "right", regardless of our cultural background or previous musical experience. That's kinda mind-blowing, really! It's also making me *really* want to try and imagine and compose a hypothetical alien's music based on a simulated walking gait. What would this Indifference Interval sound like for a species that has three legs in an isosceles triangle-based pyramid configuration? What about a different terrestrial species like an insect or a cephalopod? This definitely bears further study!
Also: the crowd counting 'three' and 'four' (you were feeding them one and two) at 3:46 are *not* feeling it together, the earliest and latest threes and fours they speak are spread out by *at least* 500 ms
Good point
Yes. They were not only spread out, though- they tended to get faster as well.
Ok, but I REALLY want to know if anyone in the audience tried to bop along at the upper rhythmic threshold. Actually, I'd like to *see* it 😂
One bop cycle would literally last three frames so yeah you wouldn't really see a lot of it haha
This makes me wonder, did humans develop rhythm to assist in their bipedal walking/running?
Uhhh i guess it's the other way around? We just dit it, and realize the fuck we were doing after, the concept of rhythm and shit
I think its because humans are pattern seeking creatures. We seek patterns for some reason.
I read once that humans started walking at the same time as others to reduce noise while they go around, which might be the origin of rhythm, although I don't remember the source, so it could be false
I always thought it was because of the dinosaurs. lol
Dancing bro not walking
This explanation offers such a neat insight into the logic behind this song! Very fun to participate in live. I think I was trying to feel the slowest tempo since that’s how you initially prompt the audience to count to 4
I was trying to feel idk
This is amazing. I'm really into a band called Consider the Source, and I've noticed multiple times how different everyone grooves to their music live.
I think Zappa was infatuated with the lower limit. Even though he could out-shred anyone at all if he chose.
.6 seconds.
RUNESCAPE PLAYERS KNOW
if youve ever done tick manipulation you know it too well
In too lazy for that
Jumped back into it for a while a month ago, I still remember timing actions to this 0.6 second interval lol
flash1:wave2:hello!
There's a great Finnish post-prog band Saimaa whose bandleader-guitarist has introduced a song that goes in 6/4 as "this next song has a bit weirder rhythm... 1... 2... 3... 8... 13... But on the upside, it frees up all the people who don't have any sense of rhythm".
I think that's a great way to think about weird rhythms with regards to the audience.
What's the name of the song?
@@user-bf6gz8ej4o it's a live performance of Lentävä Kalakukko, you can find it on youtube
@@oskarileikos Sounds like shit but still thank you!
@@user-bf6gz8ej4o yeah the sound quality is bad but the band is fantastic, there's like 12 talented musicians on stage having fun whilst doing some really complicated stuff, without actually sounding all that complicated (compated to many traditional prog rock bands like King Crimson or Jethro Tull)
@@oskarileikos I don't even think I got the right video, could you send a link?
The 10 millisecond limit is interesting to me as a linguist and trained phonetician. We also mention that the smallest perceptible difference for distinguishing speech sounds is about 10 milliseconds. For instance, the difference between an initial /b/ and /p/ in English is about 20 milliseconds of voicelessness in the start of a following vowel. If you have two sounds where the difference in that voicing delay is less than 10 ms, you won't hear the difference.
Finally! A word to describe this feeling of being slow and chill but also fast paced and energetic. If anyone wants some more music with this kind of vibe, I recommend Little Light by Geshem, Good Morning Mr. Wolf by Patrick Watson, anything by the Dead Pirates, or Troubleman by Electric Guest. If you have more recs, please do let me know!
I find that for me, it not only links with walking (tho I would sometimes walk around the city to this kind of music pre-lockdown), but it also matches a kind of mental state. It sometimes feels like this liminal music is what it's like being in a depressive mental state but a physical high-energy state, and music like this can really help to work through those states healthily imo
I’m a “classical” pianist. I must say the fundamental experience of music:”sound organized in time”, for those that learned music from the score, experience the “passage of time” quite differently.
It seems us classical folks treat “classical music” like museum pieces, rather than something that is alive. (At least from my own experience!)
I am forcing myself (but with pleasure!) to comp any music I hear, and boy is it difficult; it seems that intent and intense listening and copying is at the essence of any natural music learning.
It’s like babies learning languages: they imitate and learn by audiating what they hear and see, rather than learning from textbook grammar 101.
I always wondered why classical musicians seldom or never talk about “grooving”. It’s so strange how rhythm is taught.
So in essence, I am just trying to break out of the habit of learning music the “textbook” way.
Thanks for the continuous inspiration!
I wanna see audiences at “classical music” concerts groove like your audiences! Keep pushing the liminal boundaries 🤓😎😆
M
For me my indifference tempo is 120bpm, which is the default on most metronomes.
I had a similar thought that 120(ish) is the most common for pop songs. I was surprised to learn that 100 is "indifference." I'm going to have to listen to a list of 100bpm songs now
i've realised mine is low now at 86-90ish haha
a lot of my favourite music falls in that range which makes sense
Ach yet another Sungazer song I fail to guess the time signature of lol
My guess was 9-tuplets tho so not THAT far away, I am getting better :D
Your discussion about time was interesting because I definitely feel like time has been simultaneously dragging and flying by way too fast since the pandemic. Like, I started at a new job in October of 2019, and I was only there for about 6 months before the pandemic changed everything, I spent a couple of months laid off until they eventually brought me back before the end of the summer, and we’ve been wearing masks and following COVID guidelines ever since-and until I did the math and realized exactly how long it’s been, it hasn’t felt that long, so time has been flying by, and while time felt fast before I would’ve sworn that I’d been there longer pre-COVID that I actually was. It’s strange to think back to that 6 month period, because and it feels like it was so much longer and yet as fast has time has flown since COVID guidelines went into effect, it hasn’t flown fast enough to bring them to an end. There was a month when they eased up and allowed vaccinated people to go unmasked, but then Delta surges rolled that back.
So, it’s interesting that your band found a way to express that sentiment musically, rather than lyrically; and I just wish that things could be more like they were pre-pandemic sooner rather than later. This entire time has felt like an awkward pause, like a moment of silence that seems like it goes on for way too long and you’re just dying to break the silence and go back to what you were doing, even if it wasn’t that different. It’s the waiting in anticipation of something for an indefinite time that’s the worst. You can’t even make plans for afterwards because you don’t have a clue when that will be, and you’re just stuck in limbo-or a liminal as you’ve mentioned.
mind blown at how earlier in the video, i was bopping to your song EXACTLY as you described, that 6-6-7 pattern
Finding your own indifference interval looks like like a multi step process
Well time to try and normalize walking in 30 bpm
4:31 Adam: fastest tempo is 10 notes per second... "yes, you can play faster than that"
Twoset gangs: Yes we know that
Threshold is what we refer to as a sway beat. Stepping to a sway beat will make you feel awkward. Instead, you'll sway you shoulders with an abdominal dip between, almost a triangular pattern of movement but much more liquid like. Feet will have to adjust by either double time or halftime.
"In a large group of people you could lower the limit for rhythmic perception, and make music that is even slower and the larger group would be able to feel it en mass more" and yes. If crowbar or any sludgemetal band is in town, check that out. The audience regularly feels very slow tempos and usually in a large (ish) group