My thoughts on: 'to what extent do you think about numbers when writing music?'. Alan correctly said that musicians almost never use number sequences to write music, and just goes with what sounds good. More amazingly, the reason stuff sounds good is due to the numbers/maths/physics, but in composition that aspect becomes completely subconscious. Why are there 12 keys in an octave on a piano (or 8 in a scale)?... there is a mathematical reason for that too. Does Alan think about this every time he sits down to write a piece? No, because the use of those 12 notes is completely natural and doesn't need to be thought about. Someone somewhere once said: "Music is the brain doing mathematics without realising it is doing mathematics'.
+nidkidwonderboy True. 12 tones is an elegant approximation to the whole number ratios of perfect harmony while establishing octave equivalence. Funny how it works with pi base 12, too.
This is an ignorant statement: "musicians almost never use number sequences to write music, " You're obviously not very well acquainted with the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern revolutionized modern composing by doing exactly that. Serialism is an entire school of composing based around attributing numerical values to specific aspects of music (dynamics, note value, etc.) Furthermore, "Does Alan think about the 12 keys every time he sits to write a piece, no." is also unjustified considering experimental composers such as Harry Partch, or Lamonte Young, or Terry Riley, or Erv Wilson base large portions of their careers on exploring the domain "in between the notes on the piano." Going so far as to create their own instruments to investigate just intonation and microtonal intervals.
@@liammcooper that's still a tiny minority of musicians unless you're only thinking of the canon or whatever you want to call it. No one's saying it's impossible, just that it's interesting how most of us compose music without direct reference to maths.
I'm a music teacher and it put a smile on my face. Hopefully you can appreciate that it shows how amazing and bizarre the "rules" of music are to a non-musician and can act as a way to remind us of a time when we were the same and use it as a small reminder of how far we've come! :) It also reminds me to not forget the impact and power of music on everyone!
The band Tool makes music according to mathematics, it's impressive work especially seeing how well constructed their songs are. Same here with Alan, I really like it when music and maths come together this well.
The ability to recognise the relationship between an unknown note heard and a known note (i.e. after he'd got a reference point by playing the G, he could immediately tell the the note he'd heard before was a major third above and therefore B) is called "relative pitch".
There's also only seven notes in the piano and guitar with the exception of Sharps and flats e's and b's don't have sharps, and I know it's going order ABCDEFG so another words a a sharp b c c sharp Dee Dee Sharp e f f sharp G G sharp back to a now here's where it's get it's interesting there's really only 12 notes because 7 * 2 is 14 but out of those 14 numbers to doesn't have a half step Being Ian B and every numbers sharp is the next numbers flat in other words C sharp is the same as d flat so you could go see d flat d or C C sharp D sing C sharp and d flat are the same notebut 12 is such an awesome number, 369, the key
The time spent watching this was time well spent. Good to get behind the scenes and have the music explained. Subscribed to Alan's channel and looking forward to more music.
Being a numberphile and having looked into this stuff for myself, I can tell you a bunch of neat facts about the sequence repeating over any modulus, some having to do with primes. The most illuminating thing to say is this: the Fibonacci sequence goes off whatever the last two numbers were, so once you have those two numbers, the sequence repeats. Over any modulus, there are only m^2 pairs available, which means the sequence can only go m^2 entries without repeating.
It is pretty standard practice (for me at least) to ask lots of dumb questions whether I know the answers or not, so people really try to explain stuff... Pretty much every numberphile, sixtysymbols and periodicvideos gets made this way - you just don't always have to put up with me! :) Not everyone watching the videos gets everything straight away, and I represent them whether I happen to get it or not...
I am going to have to watch the full video later, but I want to say right now that I loved that Everest music. Amazing job! Alan's work is such a great complement to Brady's videos. For whatever reason, so few RU-vid videos use original musical compositions (or any music for that matter) that it is very refreshing. To both of you, I say beautiful work. I'm going to go over there and subscribe right now.
49 minutes of interview and not boring at all, I rarely watch an interview that long and what a talent this Alan is. just subscribed to his channel and man , I'm loving it!
I believe movie/video/... music is way underrated because you take it for granted, but it often sets the mood of a scene. It's nice to see you highlighting it!
As a musician, listening to the discussion around beats per minute in this video was excruciating. I know the point here is mapping music to maths but just a simple explanation of music theory would have cleared up the confusion. The click track was simply playing 89 crotchet ♩(or quarter note for Americans) beats in 4/4 time within the space of a minute. The top 4 means 4 notes in a bar and the bottom 4 specifies that we are talking about crotchets/quarter notes. Therefore Alan doesn't play 89 crotchets/quarter notes in 60 seconds, he plays a combination of notes which add up to that. I know he goes on to talk about halves or quarters of a beat, but using music theory would have been much clearer. It's really very simple.
Dónal O'Flynn Yes, but we didn't come up with it ourselves. We've had it drilled into our heads ever since we first started reading music; he never really learned that, and so had to come up with an explanation on his own. It only seems obvious in hindsight.
I actually told myself: "don't watch a whole 50 minute video, you should really be studying right now." And now I've finished the whole video and I'm really glad I did. Alan seems like a really great guy and he's gained at least one subscriber today (night actually...). I also saw he gives away all his music in mp3, which is plain awesome! Greetings from Belgium!
I think I've got it: the click track is an explicit manifestation of the music's "beat", which is also what you're expressing if you're tapping your foot along to something. You don't make one tap for each note that gets played; what you're doing is keeping track of how it feels like the piece is moving overall. It's like there's a number line modulo 4 (or whatever number the "time signature" of the piece is), where the integers are the beat and each note starts and ends on a rational number.
Brady, what you are doing is quite obvious and is an excellent technique for flushing out the little details. Your videos are always enjoyable and instructive regardless of my experience in the subject matter.
Though I clicked my up pointing thumb for the video, I felt that I have to post a comment here to express my liking the video, it is more than "like"! I appreciate the genuine quality in both of you.
To help Alan with explaining the rhythm that notes have within a piece, I realised that notes usually align to a division the size of some power of the time signature. For example, in standard 4/4 time, most notes align to 4^x, e.g. 4^-1=1/4 of a note. Of course, most 4/4 music actually has notes aligned to 2^x. When it comes to dividing notes into triplets, it's just a matter of switching the divisions from being marked in intervals of powers of 2 to that of powers of 3, e.g. 3^-2=1/9 of a bar.
I like this video--and Alan -- very much. I've spent a *lot* of nights standing under the sky with a telescope under my hand, a crick in my neck and the stars staring down, trying to see something of the face of the universe, and Alan's Messier piece captures the sense and feel of that perfectly. Thanks to you both. Subscribed.
You know what, I really enjoyed this video and I had no idea what I was about to see. Alan sounds like a nice person and I enjoyed hearing his methods of righting music. I will be subscribing based on the fact that his music is beautiful and that it has elements of maths involved.
Alan totally deserves subscribers! He's such a good musician and a nice person. When I subscribed to his channel I received an email from him thanking me. He even subscribed to my channel after I mentioned my aspiration to record music. He is certainly, certainly worth subscribing, and his music never disappoints.
The scale he was playing was not just the "minor" scale, but it was the "harmonic" minor scale. There's three different minor scales, and those are natural minor (the Ionian mode), harmonic minor (raises the 7th tone a half step), and melodic minor (ascends harmonic, descends natural),
Easy 49 minutes to spend. I am in awe of someone with this talent and ability. I took piano lessons for 8 years and could never play by ear but could read music. I always thought not being able to play by ear limited me. Now I see it did indeed.
that is totally true... sometimes I pretend to be a little big ignorant on certain topics to help the questions work... but with music no pretending is necessary! :)
In the time between when Brady first mentions Alan's channel and the end of the video his subscriber-ship went from 1400ish to 1714. That's only in 40 minutes. Cheers Alan, can't wait to hear more of you.
The traditional way would have you learning time signatures (like 4/4ths, 3/4ths or 6/8ths) first, and counting the bpm from that. Essentially the bpm tells you the tempo in terms of how many quarter notes (4ths) there are in a minute. And that rhythm is constant (usually) even if there are pauses in the music.
That property of the modulated fibonacci numbers is actually quite simple - it comes down to what the sequence really is: Fn = F(n-1) + F(n-2) and because of the way the modulus works, the quantity removed through the modulus is always a multiple of 7, so in fact we can get the new modulus value by taking the modulus of the sum of the last two modulus values, without losing any accuracy. Therefore, as soon as a 1 and 0 appear together in sequence, the sequence starts over. 0 + 1, +1, +2, +3...
Another way to think of the clicks is that they provide consistent reference points. The musician divides them and compounds them as needed. Referring to how musicians talk about quarter notes, eighth notes, etc., may be confusing without going into a bit more detail about why those names and divisions are so common.
When I watched the other videos I was convinced the music was composed by a professional. The questions about the tempo show how little he learned about music and yet how much he still "just knows". I can't describe how impressed I am. I to seem to be impressed by anything i can't do :)
Thank you Brady and Alan. This video was really fascinating and engaging. So nice to get an insight into the things that people have a talent for and don't do it to show off, but just because they love to do it. Truly inspirational
The modulo of the sum of two numbers is the modulo of the sum of the moduli (yes, I made up that plural) or (a+b)%x=((a%x)+(b%x))%x What this means is that we can calculate the next term of the modulus sequence without knowing the relevant Fibonacci numbers. Since the next term is based on the previous two terms if a sequence of two numbers repeats then the whole sequence will repeat after them. As there are a limited number of combinations of 2 numbers, a modulus series will always repeat.
I like numberphile channel in general, but I must say the background music composed by Alan really enriches the videos. I loved Alan's music, quite fascinating and original if I may say so. I am now the 3,196th subscriber of Alan's channel :)
I am so glad that you introduced me to Alan through your videos. I subscribed to his channel a while ago. I really appreciate this interview. It was really nice to see the wonderful man behind the beautiful music.
You can find the modulus of a Fibonacci number just with the modulus of the previous 2, by adding them and taking the modulus. For example, 21mod(7) = [13mod(7)+8mod(7)]mod(7) , LHS equal to 0. RHS = [6+1]mod(7) = 0. Because of that the sequence of the modulus of fib numbers will repeat once the moduli of two consecutive terms have been seen before.This is bound to occur because there are a finite number of two digit combinations where both digits are less than 7.
Very interresting video, Brady! As Simon mentioned, I also got a little scared I'd be bored after 15 minutes, but this was indeed very enjoyable! Hats off to mister Alan Stewart for composing all that beautiful music! Have a nice evening, and thank you for making several of my all-time-favourite RU-vid channels!
lovely interview. Alan seems kind of person i could be friends with. And I appreciate Brady asking basic questions about music. i probably know even less.
Another way to describe modulus is to call it clock arithmetic, that's because the answer will always be less than the divisor. Possible answers range from 0 to divisor - 1. As the dividend increases though, there will be a larger remainder. So picture a clock face and put the remainders on it. Then move one of the hands to get to your dividend one tick at a time. As you get to it, you will see why it's cyclical: especially if you have to do one or two turns around the clock.
Although I thought that 49 minutes are too much, I watched the first 5 minutes and understood that I just cant stop. It's pretty interesting interview! Thank you, guys.
A tempo is a guide. The click track he plays in the video is quarter notes in 4/4 time: 4 beats per bar. You can then subdivide those beats into any number you like. A note that lasts 4 beats is a whole note, a half note lasts for 2 beats, a quarter note lasts for 1 beat. Then you have eighth notes, which are two notes for each beat, sixteenth notes would be 4 notes for each beat, and so on. It gets vastly more complicated than that but that's the basic idea.
In his explanation of the metronome, it’s obvious that he’s not classically trained-but he admitted that at the onset, so the comments complaining are unnecessary. Quite frankly, i think that him not being a trained musician yet having an inherent sense of what to do well enough to compose music around it demonstrates his natural talent!
I think that the reason the notes repeat themselves in the Fibonacci song has something to do with calculus. I realized in high school that for an exponential graph, the slope of the lines increases linearly. For example, 1^2 - 2^2 = -3 2^2 - 3^2 = -5 3^2 - 4^2 = -7 If you take the derivative of an exponential function, you'll get the same answers for x. Numberphile, please do an episode about the derivative of Fibbonacci, the slope of the curve, the golden ratio, and how it makes music!
I actually watched it completely, by accident. I thought it was short and when I was allready 35 minutes in I started suspecting that perhaps it was a bit longer than I thought, but I still watched it all!
Didn't notice this video being so long before Brady said that they've recorded for 54 minutes... literally just sat down, started the video and sat still for 50 minutes! :O very nice video!
As a musician, I found the questions about very simple rhythm and time quite frustrating! But it also made me realise that since I've been doing it for so long, and now do it so naturally, I would also have no idea how to answer them!
I'm a latecomer to the Bradyverse, but I came to this video after watching a sixty symbols video of prof Moriarty in Ethiopia. The piano music in it reminded me of Allen Toussaint, just so light and lovely, I could listen to it all day.
Not in the slightest, but thank you for the offer. I think Alans work is interesting, and I hope to see more math-infused music from him in the future, be in on either channel. You've done a good job featuring and recommending him to your viewers.
Hardest part about watching this was the fact i couldn't watch all of the videos in the comments section at the same time i was listening to the interview!
I agree with Marcos Wappner, was sitting here wanting to do the explaination of length of notes and BPM and that whole thing when Brady asked. I think others would be fascinated by the math in music as well.
Think about rational approximations of pi. 5^pi is greater than 5^3, less than 5^(22/7), greater than 5^(333/106), less than 5^(355/115), greater than 5^(103993/33102)... It is the limit of the sequence defined as 5 to the power of successive rational approximations of pi.
While I was looking at Numberphile logo it reminded me of one geometrical concept - chirality. It is fact that some object, when mirrored, isn't exactly the same. Numbers around corner we see go (clockwise) 2,3,6. But if it was flipped, we would have 2,6,3, and we couldn't return using rotation only
The question about the tempo click track is music theory. He uses it to define his quater note. Theoretically you could cast the whole song in another tempo and change the note duration and thus there value. As a musician, however, you will use what feels easier and more readable.
As a musician/composer who has written several mathematical-based pieces I really enjoyed this video, thank you Brady + Alan! I'm already subscribed to numberphile, computerphile, sixtysymbols and periodicvideos but AlanKey86 has picked up a new subscriber :) This comment will likely be buried to the ages of RU-vid, but have you considered a musicphile channel to go with your new computerphile channel Brady?
Alan, I think you may have just inspired me a bit. You said, "it helps to have restrictions" and I think that might be just what I need as a musician. I'm a numbers guy, I like to have things orderly and symmetric. I've been trying to go about music in a free manner, which feels dull and so hard to work with. After watching this, I want to try new things. I really loved your breakdown of those songs. It's so analytical, and systematic. I love it! I'm definitely going to try making math based now
I really love his music. The pi music and the Charles Messier bit in particular I enjoyed a lot. Also, and this is perhaps going to sound a bit weird, but I like Alan's voice. It's very relaxing somehow... So I really liked this video, thanks for making it Brady. :)
Wow! After watching this video, I was thinking about what it would be like if Brady created a Musicphile channel. It would explore everything from all the different genres of music, various musical instruments, music notation, and music history among many other things.
