It's nice to hear a musician who knows what he's talking about with this stuff! Great work! :) Did you consider factoring in difference tones, which are particularly present in pure flute sounds (and can be a massive problem for recorder consorts if they're out of tune!)? --Janet
@@WorldAnvil I didn't factor in difference tones primarily because they tend to be most perceivable in higher registers; the pan flutes occupy a low enough frequency range that one wouldn't really notice them. Also, part of the reason I chose these intervals was so that, when playing perfectly, the nuns could "ring" a chord like a barbershop quartet; the harmonic seventh interval, in particular, is quite resonant when played in the context of a dominant seventh chord (if you're not familiar with "ringing" chords, it's basically when singers or instrumentalists tune a chord such that certain overtones in their voices are perfectly in-tune with each other, thus amplifying those particular frequencies and producing a sort of "ringing" tone that's not actually being played/sung by any of the individuals). As such, the nuns are constantly focused on intonation, so they would be generally aware of difference tones and aim to avoid them if they didn't sound good.
@@GretchenKruegerMusic Very interesting! I'm a professional recorder player (I know, it sounds like a joke!) so I'm very aware of 'ringing chords' - in fact, it's why I asked! (This kind of thing, though I'm not in this video! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-WXkRgUvY6PM.html) You definitely get difference tones present even in those very low recorders!
As a composer myself and an amateur musicologist, I enjoyed this episode of worldbuilding notes. Things like this add lots of depth to a world, and not a lot of people seem to consider them. The music has an otherworldly sound that I could see people interpreting as some sort of divine communication of some kind. Excellent! :D
@Pecu Alex It should be noted, though, that many musicians and composers also have rather limited to non-existant knowledge of tuning systems, as people in Western culture generally just assume that everyone's making music in the Western musical tradition with Western instruments and Western notes, and that's mostly what people teach.
I love that you guys actually made some of the music they would be playing! (It would be cool if songs like this became the intros and outros for this series, but I know that would be a MASSIVE amount of work. Just keep doing what you're doing! We love it!)
Yup! I'm a big fan of complex rhythms. I actually developed a somewhat convoluted rhythmic system for the nuns' music, but it ended up being too complicated to explain without derailing the video a bit, so we decided to leave it out. Basically each "measure" can be divided in to a number of "strong beats" and "weak beats." A measure is always the same length, and the beats are always equal divisions of the measure regardless of their "strength." You may notice that at 8:16, another drum enters the ensemble. The "primary" drummer divided the measure in to 7 equal beats: |Strong-weak-Strong-weak-Strong-weak-weak| (or |S-w-S-w-S-w-w|). The secondary drummer divided it in to 5 equal beats: |S-w-S-w-w|. This resulted in a 5-against-7 polyrhythm, because one drummer was playing 7 beats in the same amount of time as it took the other drummer to play 5 (in other words, one drummer was playing septuplets--sevenths of a measure--while the other was playing quintuplets--fifths of a measure). Note: the strong beats are ALWAYS played, but the weak beats are optional, which is why you would sometimes hear the primary drummer only playing 3 notes within the measure; she was playing the |S-w-S-w-S-w-w| pattern but keeping the weak beats silent, resulting in |S-.-S-.-S-.-.-|.
It's not odd for them - they would take one look at our music and say it's "too complex" or "terrible odd sounding" or something. We have a way of finding ways to feel this way about basically everything different. But yes - I too noticed the 7/8, but I've been doing a lot of that lately so it sounded natural to me.
Every so often I return to an Ewa video, but this one is the only one I return to exclusively for the sounds and not the fun ideas. That music has grown on me a lot and I really like it. At first I couldn't listen to it all the way through, but now I find myself dragging the cursor back and relistening to the musical section again and again for its wavey rhythmic property that kind of keeps dragging me in.
Well done on the music! I can imagine sitting close to one of the paths and just watching as the Nuns go by, listening to their ethereal music. You and Nick make such a great team!
I just watched a video earlier today, from a series called Down the Rabbit Hole, about the history of the hurdy-gurdy, and how its original design came out of a desire for music that could sustain a droning note indefinitely - similar to the idea of music that focuses on harmony and rhythm to the exclusion of melody. Serendipity is nice ^^
Huh, I watched that same video, but I did totally by accident. My finger slipped and I tapped the wrong video thumbnail, but I ended up watching it anyway, having watched a couple Down the Rabbit Hole videos before.
Thanks for that leap into randomness! Just spent an hour watching the history of the Hurdy Gurdy... and then (of course) a bunch of videos of people playing it. :P
So beautiful! Individual flutes does give me an idea of musical harmonics being used as a method of identity. What if all the hunters of a tribe had flutes that were based on perfect harmonics of eachother, but would be discordant with the flutes from other tribes.
@Ben Sanders Sorrel Watson and Nick Krueger (the musician from the vid) have a relevant discussion on the possibility of variation of tuning between temples, if you’re interested
I loved this video! It adds depth and culture to the river basin that had previously been unexplored. As a quick question, does the river basin have any large cities? When I saw you explain how there is an extremely long waiting list for the services of the queens, it seemed odd that the villages you showed would have such a large concentration of aristocratic families. Is it possible that like in ancient China there are cities dominated by aristocratic families? Aside from the confusion though I love the things you’ve done with the river basin. I hope I get to see more of it soon!
You've reminded me that I never did do any population calculations for the river basin. I keep forgetting to do it, but there's probably no big cities.
Wow this is all so fascinating! I love thinking about how different tribes would ‘discover’ music from scratch, disconnected from all the known Earth tribes, but this is the first time I have seen anyone worldbuild music!
I really got what you meant when you mentioned the staccatos and rhythm. Playing those on the piano was murder until I knew what it was supposed to sound like rhythm wise, and had a mental reference for it.
That’s awesome! I’m a musician and a world builder, and the stories I’m writing are meant to be sung in the conlang I’m (eventually) using, so musical worldbuilding is very important to me!
this reminds me of something from my book. it is a magic called littela. only an elf (or human) can do it. they do it by playing "a song older than the gods." ether on an musical instrument, or just by singing. a common elf can use it to manipulate the emotions of animals, and one who is naturally gifted can speak to animals.
While developing the system for this video, one idea I discussed with Ewa was the possibility that each of the temples' drone pipes could be tuned to any of the five notes, with the rest of the panpipe players treating that note as the tonic, as opposed to _setna._ This would mean that, in this tuning system, there would be 5 "modes," one for each of the notes. (In Western music theory, a mode is a scale which contains exactly the same notes as a related scale, but which has a different tonic or "starting point;" if you write out all the notes in C Major, for example, you get C D E F G A B c, but if you treat F as the tonic instead of C, you get F G A B C D E f, which is a mode/scale called F Lydian). That means there could be a _kallaty_ "mode," for example, whose notes would be _kallaty, tumma, nisy, setna, lipsa, kallaty laxna,_ in that order. For this mode, the drone pipe would be tuned one octave below _kallaty putmihy._ This idea never made it in to the video, so I'm not 100% sure whether or not it should be considered "canon" in Ewa's river basin, but that could definitely be a way for different temples to have distinct musical identities.
@@GretchenKruegerMusic Oooh that's a really interesting idea. I like it a lot! But I was asking more along the lines of medieval organs having wildly different tunings for A. Obviously, the drone pipe is much easier to transport than a pipe organ so it would be easier for the nuns to compare notes (hehe) to make sure they're all using the same setna, but if the monasteries don't have much contact with each other, each pipe's tuning might drift over time so some are sharper or flatter than others.
Gotcha. That's an interesting point; it could be that one monastery tunes to _nisy=440Hz_ and another tunes to _nisy=432Hz_ and they have conflicts over which one is more worshipful or something ;)
@@GretchenKruegerMusic that actually raises some interesting questions about number systems and numerology/pseudoscience. maybe bc of the magical creature slumbering in the river basin, what we would call nisy=437Hz is the most worshipful frequency of all.
I love both of these ideas. I only know modes from an analysis of their use in Zelda music, but as I understand different modes would give each temple a distinct sort of feelings. Different processions might sound inherently earthy, mystical, playful or solemn, even if the style of harmonic/a-melodic composition remains largely the same. I also find the idea of referring back to the giant magical creature to be wonderful! Perhaps different parts of it’s body resonate with certain notes, and when music is played that part is tickled and it releases magic into the land above it. Combining the two above ideas could have lead to temples built in different locations above the creature favoring a particular base note and the whole harmonic tuned to slightly different frequency. That can give us some great environment-shaping-culture dynamics to work into the world.
This music has something fascinating. The notes aren't as harmonious and fluid as in modern music, but each note seems to carry a certain emotion, some are harsh, and strong, while others are calm. Just listening to this 10 seconds gives the feeling that important events are taking place. This music tells a story : maybe a myth, or a sacred tale of this people's religion.
Maybe something to be considered in folk music is that the pipes can produce melodies by blowing them harder, like how a baroque trumpet or horn worked? Folk music is also an important cultural point to consider in the musical heritage of a community
conworld music has always really interested me as a musician and worldbuilder and this is like. really really good and really inspiring! thanks for making it!
In all honesty, the River Basin might be the most beautiful fictional world I've ever come across. I could only dream of someday getting on your level, Ewa. I can't wait to see what you come up with next.
The paths remind me a little of fairy paths in Irish folklore. They’re imaginary paths connecting certain places thought to have fairies living in them. I think fairies are supposed to march down them on samhain (Halloween). If you build stuff on them and block the fairies they will seek revenge for it. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately and have sort of come up with a made up religion for fairies where they believe that by walking these same paths each year they are imbuing them with their magic and life force and that by doing this they are allowing the seasons to pass. I think that samhain was the last day of the year to the irish and so my made up version of fairies believe that if they don’t march these paths then the new year won’t be able to start. These paths also contain the accumulated life force of all of their ancestors all the way back to the tuatha de danann (I think that celtic folklore says that those were a bunch of gods or godlike beings that hid under Ireland’s hills long ago and became the fairies. I thought that it would be fun if fairies also believe this and consider themselves to still be gods, despite being a bunch of tiny people. It explains why they are so easily offended). So therefore humans building things on their paths would be horrible blasphemy and have possibly world-ending consequences by preventing the seasons. Anyway, this video is making me think that perhaps my version of fairies could have special songs that they sing as they march on these paths each year. I’m not even irish, I just like celtic folklore and mythology. I’ve probably gotten something incorrect here.
Reminds me of something Critical Hit Composition did recently. I forgot the exact context but it was literally Infernal music, like what devils would play in a fantasy system. The idea was instead of the normal system they used a 9 octave or something (I do not know music) system to make it sound off. It did sound pretty infernal in the composition they did.
@tallbean bells can be played bright and charging or solemn and heavy, and different shapes lead to dramatically altered shapes of sub-harmonic overtones, or something. I learned this when, for a couple of weeks, I was obsessed with finding that woody, distant, gravity-inducing sound you get in certain tower-bells, but the sites I visited wouldn’t even give me a clear answer on what note was being played!
Different from my other comments, this one is more dedicated to what people do for fun. What kind of games do the people play, such as children's games, mature games, gambling, and sports?
Ah... another great video:) Would love to include music in my worldbuilding. Sadly I am absolutely incompetent in that regard and anyways I am already full of stuff I want to do with my current world to the extent that I will most likely work on it for many years to come so I guess I can leave that aside for now. Well, I will propably do something more vague and less detailed I can do with my pitifull grasp on music once I find a fitting point to include it so thanks for the idea, it sounds really interesting and it is an important part of practically all cultures after all.
Amazing video! Don’t know why I hadn’t considered music theory while worldbuilding. Also, have you thought about doing a video on what role the nuns play in society? Like do worship any gods? Another question I have is have you considered doing a video about the wastelands outside the river basin? Like what kind of creatures lurk there, if any? Is there anything crazy hiding there?
If the paths can only be walked whilst playing the music, and the procession is led by a drummer, does that mean the drummer is always someone of seniority in the monastery? In that case, is which Nun plays which instrument a fixed affair, or do Nuns move fluidly through the various instruments, and how do the instruments they play interact with the wider Monastic hierarchy?
Dylan Chouinard yeah I don’t remember where these nuns come from. I do remember the temples and the blue flower and the supposed divinity of the king, but not a whole lot on how religion figures into the lives of the people...
I adore the idea of using the Nasca lines and such as walking music paths but I have one question, It has recently been discovered that the reason the Nasca people made such large drawing is because they had access to hot air balloons and can view the draws from above when using them, Do the people of the river basin have Hot air balloons too? Or do they have specific platforms high in the mountains, where they can see the full drawings? Perhaps the temples are in very high places and can view the full picture of the lines and every so often has to go down the mountains and 'renew the magic' within these pictures by walking and playing the music
