The M.C.Escher of Music? 

Are there many jazz composers influenced by Ligeti's techniques, Adam? 😊

Adam, I love your work.

Gonna repost this here Adam! I think you’ll appreciate it. You know what’s a fine illusion that is fairly conventionally musical? Third matrices - circle-of-thirds compositions. The most famous & pioneering ones are of course by John Coltrane: “Giant Steps” (tonal center continuously descending in major thirds from B to G to Eb and again), and “Central Park West” (tonal centers in minor third relation to one another, including a modulation by tritone - B to D to Ab to F and again). “Giant Steps” especially feels as though it is both ascending and descending in key infinitely, and the changing tonic simultaneously acts as a changing home base as much as it acts as a pivot to the next key. There is also a completely under-discussed example: “Knights of Cydonia”, a fairly popular song by Muse, cycles in descending major thirds through the same guitar & vocal motif performed in E minor -> C minor, then C minor -> G# minor, then G# minor -> E minor. And interestingly about this song, the melodic motion is upward as it modulates, yet the keys are most easily understood as being in plagal, *down-leading* relation to the key before. To me the song repeatedly feels like it’s rising to the heavens as much as it’s surrendering itself to the dirt. Exploiting the cycle of keys gives the impression of a new key in fractal-like relation to the last one, even though it is harmonically identical to the key played one cycle before. One might want to say that that key is completely new. For instance, B major might actually feel like C-flat major due to continuously descending in thirds. E minor becomes “F-flat minor” if G# minor is read as Ab minor instead, even though Ab minor is more coherently modulated to from a key like C minor as it is a major third down instead of a diminished fourth down. A move from D major to the key a tritone away can be read as Ab major or G# major, which recontextualizes the key a minor third above as Cb major as well as it could B major. One could read it also as though it were indeed that same key being played again, or as though the song is continuously progressing to a key that truly resolves it. And all of these interpretations would be simultaneously correct and incorrect because the notes relate harmoniously, but the tonics are dissonant to one another such that the roots of each tonic would become ambiguous - “perfectly dissonant”? - if put together as a chord (an augmented or diminished seventh chord), though harmonious - imperfectly consonant - if the chord resulting were separated into dyads (major or minor thirds). A modulation by major third, diminished fourth, minor sixth, or augmented fifth can be sensorily interpreted from the same modulation... and namely, when modulating by a tritone like occurs in “Central Park West”, the relation by augmented fourth or diminished fifth is ambiguous and becomes simultaneously upward and quintal in movement as much as downward and plagal in movement. Like the Shepard tone, it’s a musical Penrose stairs. Up morphs into down, down morphs into up, consonance quickly becomes read as dissonance and vice-versa, yet the structure itself is cyclical and unchanging.

And indeed, you can make a dissonant interval sound consonant through chordal extension. A sharp eleven and a sharp fifteen are both fairly common in music (namely the former), even though they both create dissonance with the root and fifth of the chord. And even a major seventh becomes dissonant the moment that it is inverted, as it creates minor ninth dissonance. But if thirds are stacked in an alternating pattern of major and minor, they become consonant by being quintally related to one another. This is illusory consonance because the chord as a whole has dissonances that can be brought out of it.

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-dCjUdOUMaSQ.html This trance track uses the Risset rhythm. The effect starts at 2:30

definitely, right

Love that piece also! Named for the title of a Karl Popper essay.

I have that constantly, I thought something was switched on. Can you get a remedy for the Earwicker Tone? Google time, thank you!

this has been done before; I heard it years ago used in an electronic piece and ever since I've been desperately trying to find out what it was!

Really?? That's interesting! Gonna look into this 😬👌🏻

I imagine it would be something like Picture at an Exhibitions' Catacombs, but even more

Interesting. Would it be safe? As in: would it not induce (more) tinnitus in people who have (or are receptable ) to it?

Thank YOU Paul! I thought that performance of Désordre really gave the feeling of 'lift-off' Ligeti talks about - I'm sure he would have loved it !

That's most vividly visceral performance of that etude i've ever heard. Especially when it goes to the pentatonic middle section. Love it!

Congrats!! Sounds awesome!!

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@@DBruce the solution is to use some of the popular forms, the drums kit, electric bass, accessible tonal melodies, and then use these various devices with or without additional instrumentation which could be anything, string sections, bass sections, synthesizers

Amazing! Fractals have always fascinated me.

And you ended the video with the same piece. The fast never ending pattern encapsuled the whole video pretty nicely. Easy to come up with but one still gets a nice feeling out of it.

Same with Ricercata No. 3

It's actually a gradual creation of reverberation formed by the acoustics of the space in which the piece is recorded. That's the critical component of the piece. The gradual accretion of the individual parts describes the physical acoustical space in which the speaker is speaking, in much the same way that a series of photons shot from different positions in different directions bouncing around a three dimensional reflective space would result in the visible manifestation of that space.

Was going to mention this one myself but 12 others got there first! :-)

Achilles and the tortoise approve this comment

haha was also about to mention that book. Such a terrific read.

yess

I am sadly not aware of this work, is it a analysis/comparison of their aestethics?

Oh, you!

I’m pretty sure from listening the illusion comes from 2 Risset processes that function in polymeter, so you lose the sense of phrasing. It’s the greatest rhythmic illusion I’ve heard, although unfortunately kind of a boring piece of music

I love that track, and I came here to comment about it, too. A couple of years ago, Second Woman made an entire album around this concept, undoubtedly inspired by fold4 wrap5, it's called S/W, and it's dealing with the illusion on a much faster rate, right where rhythm becomes low tones. It's pretty great. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xYtWu1uPfa8.html

Isaac Dweck ? What a silly and foolish thing to say. Being a good musician (composer, performer, whatever) does not mean you need to be good at “getting” or not getting one composer’s style and music easily. Also, it’s sounds like you used “basic music” as an insult. What wrong with basic. Is complexity better music? No. Listening to a piece with 128 independent voices playing at once doesn’t mean that piece is better than say, a Bach fugue, with usually 2-4 voices. Listening to a piece with complex, ever changing 20 note chord harmonies is not automatically better than one of Satie’s Gymnopedies, which consist of simple (mostly) harmony. Up next, “basic math”. All music is pretty much math. Rhythms, math. Time signatures, math. Harmonies, math. The sound of notes, math. Additionally, math can be a tool, which Ligeti uses, but that does not mean it devalues a piece of music for using math as a device. Finally. is beauty in basic, simple music, as a composer could do so much, with let’s say, 4 pitches/sounds or a small motif. Several popular melodies of today only span an interval of a third or less. I mean hell, the ever popular 4 chord harmony in much of today’s modern music is incredibly popular and loved by many. Not understanding 1 composer for a little while doesn’t make you a bad musician, a piece of music being “basic math” doesn’t mean it’s bad music when music is based on math, and basic music does not bad music.

I thought of the same too! Here it is: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-B-udfiFZcko.html

@@PabloPerroPerro ha! exactly. that upward shepard scale built up so much anticipation, it made me run for much longer than i would have without it i guess. well. at least one did not have to walk the same distance down again to get out :D

I built one using command blocks in minecraft

Hahaha that was trippy 😂

exactly, here is a musical fractal : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-SLvFsP1izS4.html

👀 I never realised how clever vgm was until I started listening to The Consouls - they use the original tunes as jazz 'standards' and make great music which I highly recommend if you like jazz

I agree, it makes more sense to call Bach the Escher of music than Ligeti. It's not necessarily fractals or the illusions that define Escher or Bach, but more so the combining of mathematics and art; creating meaningful mathematical art in which something relatable and recognizably human can be found, e.g. emotions or animals.

Yeah but what’s illusive about Bach’s music

I'm glad I found somebody who mirrored by thoughts on this video. It just all seems very forced to me, like I have to lie about what I'm directly experiencing in order to pretentiously go along with these supposed illusions but, as you say, with optical illusions that is rarely an issue. I'm not very familiar with Bach yet though so I'll look into what he might add

​@@brodjefferson3513 Illusion is not necessarily fundamental to Escher's art. Bach and Escher share an affinity towards the same kind of clever enigmatic structures that are both mathematical and relatable on a human level, that often leave people wondering how it works. And Bach does actually have his fair share of illusive tricks, e.g the infinitely modulating canon.

I think it’s really telling when he asks “why isn’t Ligeti as popular as Escher?” It’s his pet project of advocating for Ligeti. Ligeti may be fine, but these are not illusions.

Hehe I thinking the same.. even 5, 6 here for me + taking notes.

🤯🤯🤯

I was vibin' to her "Chorale"!

You think Ligeti is "listening friendly"? For me, Ligeti pieces are all too long & I can't wait for the blissful end when the noise stops.

@@resourcedragon I think you misplaced your comment