Riff Analysis 056 - Extra Life "I Don't See It That Way"
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- čas přidán 4. 10. 2022
- Big thanks to Charlie and Tim!
Extra Life - Secular Works: extralife.bandcamp.com/album/...
Extra Life - Secular Works volume 2: extralife.bandcamp.com/album/...
Charlie Looker’s CZcams channel: / clooker1
Live video of IDSITW: • Extra Life Final Show ...
Tim’s Trauma Triad (microtonal electronic music) project: notmusiclabel.bandcamp.com/al...
Sick video with the lenticular demon card: • Roll Player: Lenticula...
Patreon, where you can support the channel, get exclusive videos, your name in the credits, all the diagrams I make for these, and input for my rapid fire riff videos: www.patreon.com/metalmusictheory
My music: www.bandcamp.com/floridekstasis
Recent comp with my music on it: machinemusic.net/2022/09/17/m...
My website, which has all my videos and academic work nicely organized: www.calderhannan.com - Hudba
First time i saw Extra Life was a few days after getting Secular Works to review - supporting Deerhunter in London. I was hoping for it to be up to the standard of the album and then they walked on and Nick Podgurski settled down behind the kit and arranged a lot of sheet music on stands and I did a mini fist pump because I knew I was in for a good time.
Thanks for making me such a major part of this video, and as always, I'm thrilled that I was able to introduce you to this band and this song.
One illustrative concept I think I brought up during our recent video call, that I feel like is worth mentioning here, is just how small the difference in timespan is between different types of rhythmic divisions. A pretty easy example: at 140 bpm (quarter notes), a dotted sixteenth note lasts 161 ms, where as an eighth note triplet lasts only 143 ms - a difference of only 18 ms. And these are rhythms which are common in all kinds of music at this tempo! It's hard to say what the 'just noticeable difference' is for rhythm, as a lot of the research I've seen focuses more on tempo changes, not changes in rhythmic subdivisions, but my suspicion is that in context, 18 ms may not be an intrinsically noticeable difference without, as you point out, an underlying beat or at least some type of repeated figure that allows you infer a pulse.
To illustrate further: in my version of the score, I notate the rhythm in measure 2 as an eighth note, then an quarter note note (a 1:2 ratio). In Charlie's score, the same pattern is notated as a sixteenth note, then a dotted eighth note (a 1:3 ratio). If you do the math, you find that at the tempos we used, the first note should have a duration of either 268 ms (mine) or 179 ms (Charlie's). With a difference of 89 ms, these rhythms should be much more distinct than my previous example and yet Charlie and I hear the actual recording completely differently.
What's even more intriguing to me is the empirical measurement of these rhythms in the recording. I opened up the file in Edison, and in spectrum mode it's very easy to isolate the rhythmic placement of notes unambiguously (Edison will even measure the timespan of highlighted regions). Here's what that looks like:
freeimage.host/i/Q5Slvj
The short:long figure is played twice in the highlighted regions. The measurements for these are 281 ms:523 ms, and 272 ms:496 ms respectively. These come out to ratios of 1:1.86 and 1:1.82, which are much closer to my 1:2 interpretation than Charlie's 1:3. Yet it's hard to say Charlie is 'wrong', since he wrote and performed the piece, and obviously his interpretation holds a lot of influence on how the recording turned out. Still, overall, this discrepancy indicates how important the rhythmic context of an underlying beat is, and how ambiguous even relatively slow, simple rhythms are without that context.
For sure! Thanks for doing the math I brushed under the rug-the thorough approach would have been to calculate the absolute durations for both transcriptions in milliseconds, and when you compare like that you see that they're mostly pretty close, which is why they sound very similar to each other and to the recording without the clicks (I did this when I was looking at The Dillinger Escape Plan's "Prancer," in my video about them, which is based on my article about heaviness, if anyone wants to see what the math looks like). But also like you said, in some places the proportions actually don't match, which is what I was getting at with the "performance version" drifting away from the score very slightly-you're showing that this is true even in the studio version and not just in the live version.
Though again, you're also right to point out that this is happening on a scale so small that computers can see it when you calculate inter onset intervals between the hard spectral lines you get from drum transients, and you can learn to hear it if you slow things down a bunch, but at the actual tempo the differences are so small that they can barely be noticed, and both interpretations can work. I know I've learned to hear both interpretations when listening along with the recording, which is really trippy and why I love this section so much.
Thanks again for being such a big part of this!
SO glad to see Extra Life pop up here!
Love hearing Charlie’s perspective on it. And how did I miss the new album?! Thank you for telling me!
There’s another new one now as well, the sacred vowel.
My guy, I love your videos.
love this album
Man this makes so much more sense now, awesome stuff dude!!!!
ohhh heck YES so stoked to see a full video analysis of this song!
Great channel - thanks!
Dude. Excellent video.
I was looking all over for a video or interview where Charlie describes the composition of this piece. So glad to finally see one from you!
This song is perfect for this series! So sick!
hey i remember making a comment of this song in one of your videos! so glad you finally dissected it. honestly the value of your content is unmeasureable. thank you so much!!
Whoa holy shit, two of my favorite music-related creators on this platform crossing paths! Been on a HEAVY Extra Life kick as of late bec of Charlie's channel and it's so rad to see it getting the Metal Music Theory treatment.
Love this band. Love that you made a video about it. Didn’t know he’d released a new record so fuk yeh. bandcamp friday here i come
Charlie is amazing and so is his band.
What I've taken from this is that irrational time signatures are so rare that even something this rhythmically insane was still somehow conceived on an unbroken 8th note grid, thought for sure we had another example when you first tried to transcribe this.
Unrelated but also seconding the Trauma Triad shoutout, keep coming back to A North Facing Window since it was first mentioned somewhere around here a couple months ago. Very cool album on its own but it also comes with a pdf explaining some of the theory (mostly the microtonal system but there are is also some neat rhythmic info in there), always love experimental musicians that are just as passionate about telling other people how to learn from and reproduce their work as they were to make it in the first place.
That's awesome! And yeah definitely true about the irrational time signatures thing. I think some of Tim's version could actually be re-written as irrational time signatures (changing dotted to undotted and undotted to triplets), but I think if you're using almost any notation software it's such a pain to make them that most people find workarounds even if that's the effect they want.
And I'm glad you like A North Facing Window! Tim will be happy to hear that!
@@metalmusictheory5401 Yeah, it would also probably be more annoying to learn than the original notation since even if the rhythms are the same the downbeats would no longer line up with a traditional metronome.
Extremely cool section either way, almost makes me want to go grind tuplet syncopation grids to develop the same sense of time that lead to it. I won't, but I almost want to!
Dude extra life is soooo good!!!!
Hell yeah! Love Secular Works II
Love to see you struggling with the transcription. Just to remind us you are also human.
All too human
Surprised to see an extra life analysis, such a great band. Would love to see you do “B is for Burning” by Zs, it’s one of Charlie’s compositions when he was in Zs
Not cool asking me to calm down when there's a new video by you and especially when it is on a composition by Charlie Looker. Had to pause for ages... Great video, as always, though.
With something this complicated I wonder how much of playing it is actually feeling a pulse vs basically just memorizing the rhythm
This is fucking awesome.
+1 for the lenticular cards from the board game Roll Player.
Not gonna lie, Ive heard the beat the same as Tim. Maybe its because Ive tried to headbang along for a bit and tempo changes dont mesh well with headbanging :D. This is a really fun section.
Yes goddamn I've calmed down now start the video!
amazing,, i my selfe has a life o quintuplet and septuplets and there is something with that groove that you cant notate any other way with tempo changes or more complex metrics, the feal in 5, 7, 9 over4 or any other is just amazing if you get it right.
I'm never calm. I do love your content though
5:38 God I wish my counting was as good as yours
So, there's an interesting hypothesis here: tied tuplets with certain parameters make something effectively untranscribable. Can those parameters be reasonably defined? Eg, are tied triplets and 8ths just about doable but throwing quints in makes it impossible? Are there tempo ranges that make this feasible/infeasible? Dangit the limits of the mental frame for music are so interesting 🤔
Great question! I don't know if I could put any hard limits on it for right now, and I don't know how much knowledge would be enough to nudge someone in the right direction (like if they knew the tempo ahead of time, if they knew there were tied durations, etc). But it definitely goes contrary to assumptions that I always start with when transcribing. And there's also a difference between transcribing from a MIDI accurate version and something actually played by humans, because the little human discrepancies are enough to really muddy the waters when we're dealing with such subtle differences.