#charge cycles

DAY 1318) Charge Cycles - Welcome To Ulka!

Composer: me (Chimeratio)

The final track I have left to post from this game that I did the music to! (https://chz.itch.io/charge-cycles).

So this is what I’m picking for “Valentine’s Day” this time...because Charge Cycles was technically made for a monthlong gamejam themed around “horny games” (hosted around Valentine’s Day), even though this game was 100% SFW, submitted to that jam in a slight joke-ish sense, as it only vaguely has slight suggestive implications and barely fit that theme. Really it’s just a cute silly puzzle game about charging robots, just, “charging robots” has other potential innuendo behind it...

Man I was dreading have to take the effort to make the post for this one most of all out of all the Charge Cycles tracks, even though it’s the shortest, mostly because it’s so ambiguous and polyrhythmic, and sounds nothing like the time signatures it “actually is”

It was written at 124 bpm with no tempo changes but with A LOT of polyrhythms or odd tuplets that stretch/squash weird amounts of beats into the length of a single bar or beat or whatever given space.

As I’ve said before, when I write music, in my personal workflow I write without writing in real timesig changes in. I just keep the software in default 4/4 and just ignore barlines when I want odd time to happen. So I had to take the time and effort to figure out how to interpret this almost as much as I would any other piece that I didn’t write myself.

Something like this is going to be VERY subjective, but the way I usually personally interpret and feel this is:

(0:00 - 0:15) 8 bars of 4/4

(0:15 - 0:30) [4/4 + 9/8]x3, 4/4 + 5/8

(0:30 - 0:36) 5/4, 7/32, 15/32*, 13/16

(0:36 - 0:49) 11/16, 9/8, 15/16, 17/16, 13/16, 6/8, 9/16, 6/8

(0:49 - 0:52) 13/16, 7/8

[loop]

Now, like I said, this looks ridiculous, and mostly unfitting with what it actually sounds like...and that was kind of the point! Originally this was supposed to have an alt version with “actual drums” like the in-game songs, but we didn’t go with that since we decided just a more ambient/calm tune would better suit the way the game’s menu turned out (this is the menu music).

The version with drums would’ve brought out all of the jarring barline placements rhythmically, and made this sound entirely different from the ambiguous/smooth style this has a lot of. It’s not clear how strange the timing of everything is without a drums layer like that, so it certainly would’ve been an interesting contrast to alternate between.

LOTS of polyrhythms/tuplets and other ambiguity explanations to talk about here:

Now, first off, with no drums, instead you hear the layer where 7 evenly spaced beats are stretched out to the length of a 4/4 bar (a septuplet), throughout most of the first 15 seconds. Only the 4th bar (with that high pitched glitchy sound doing constant 16ths) and the 8th bar (with the sound from before changing up its rhythm, as well as a new added sound) do anything to hint at this “actually” being in 4/4 at 124, rather than 7/8 at ~108ish like it initially sounds.

The rhythm in the 8th bar in that first section is a tuplet where 6 notes are squashed to the length of the first 2 beats of that 4/4 bar (so a sextuplet) and the last two beats of that bar are 7 notes squashed to fit in the space of beats 3-4 (so a septuplet).

Immediately at the start of the section at :15, there’s a quintuplet taking up that first beat, this happens a number of times. It’s different at :19/:29 though, a septuplet instead, 7 hits stretched to the length of 2 beats.

At the same time, the driving pulse every quarter note has two layers that get slightly offset. It’s actually an 9 against 8 polyrhythm, where the “9″ layer is the part doing quarter note hits. It’s easier to just think of it as “the ‘four-on-the-floor’ metallic click...gets desynced from itself” or...something, maybe.

:30 - :36 is where it’s ridiculous to interpret any meter unless there’s actual drums or something, but it is how I “wrote” it, where I felt barline subdivisions, and the divisions the drums were meant to employ there if they had been included. Obviously that’s a very free/glitchy feeling section so it might seem silly to define strict meter there, but it’s intended to be felt that way, since this was written with having a version with drums in mind.

The 7/32 bar is legit intended to be 7 32nd note beats, just a very subtle cut off 32nd note at the end of that moment.

*The 15/32 bar is not ‘really’ 15/32 though, really better interpreted as a tempo change for that single bar (in which it’d be just a 3/4 bar). That 3/4 bar is squished into that 15/32 space. It’s written this way only to be consistent with not writing in any tempo changes and interpreting any non-124bpm stuff as polyrhythms/tuplets (since that’s how I see most/all of it), but yeah.

The melodic section at :36 is much simpler to explain, really just put the barlines at the chord changes. The 15/16+17/16 might seem silly to not consider just 2 bars of anticipation rhythm 4/4, but it’s in the middle of constant mixed meter and definitely is intended to feel like starkly separate bars with the downbeat on the chord change, certainly would’ve been clearly that had there been drums.

The last two bars are really just empty space with almost nothing to latch on to, but it lines up with that amount of time. It’s debatable where you put the division between the two bars if you even write it like that at all. Originally, when writing a theoretical drum part, I actually had the downbeat be 2 16th notes earlier (last note of the melody is the downbeat of the next bar) and the drums just go like 4/4 + 13/16 after that. Without that context though I think 13/16 + 7/8 makes way more sense.

LASTLY, there’s a lead-in septuplet just like at the start just before the loop point at :52.

Hopefully I didn’t forget anything, haha. This is a ridiculously hard tune to break down imo and I can only really do it as easily as I can (it was still very hard to do) in this case because I made it, knew my intents, and can just look at the project file.

Hopefully this made enough sense to understand!

Even though I’ve finished with posting the Charge Cycles music finally, there’s still plenty more odd time VGM by me that exists (some already released, some not yet out) that I’ll eventually post here. Hopefully no one minds me occasionally posting my own music as I have been.

“Once its cycle count has reached 500 complete charge cycles, your iPhone’s battery is considered consumed as its ability to provide power reduces,” Christian Zibreg reports for iDownload Blog. “As a result, you may need to charge the phone more and more frequently and it might exhibit unexpected shutdowns.”

“All rechargeable batteries have a limited number of charge cycles,” Zibreg…

DAY 1200) Charge Cycles - No One Cares About the Letter L

Composer: me (Chimeratio)

DAY 1200!!!! To celebrate, posting music to a soundtrack I wrote myself AGAIN of course. As I’ve said before it’s to a quirky puzzle game by my cool friend CHz (who has helped out a ton with this blog! thank you CHz!) You can play it here!: https://chz.itch.io/charge-cycles

As I’ve stated every time, I write music without actually paying attention to or writing in the time signature changes, just writing in 4/4 or 1/4 or whatever and ignoring barlines (though definitely consciously making sure my writing is free enough for odd time/polyrhythms/polymeter to form itself). So these timesig changes I had to spend a lot of time figuring out on my own just now as much as I would with any other song pretty much.

This soundtrack has music where the drums are only playing when triggered by your actions in the game, so for these soundtrack uploads I just played one version first and the other version second. In this case the version without drums plays first and then the version with drums plays second, but the loop point is still 1:49 really.

This song is ridiculously polymetric to the point I’m going to have to write the timesig chart out multiple times for different layers and in general am going to have to talk about a bunch of parts separately. Here I go!

1) Focusing mainly on whatever I personally consider the ‘base’ groove at a given moment (ie what i’d actually write on sheet music):

(0:00 - 0:15) 6 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 7/8

(0:15 - 0:24) 3 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 5/4

(0:24 - 0:33) 4 bars of 4/4

(0:33 - 1:05) [4/4, 4/4, 11/8, 4 bars of 4/4]x2

(1:05 - 1:12) 4/4, 4/4, 24/20*

(1:12 - 1:21) 3 bars of 4/4, 2 bars of 5/8

(1:21 - 1:26) 2 bars of 9/8

(1:26 - 1:44) [3 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 17/16]x2

(1:44 - 1:49) 4/4, 4/4, 2/4

(1:49 - end) [same as 0:00 - 1:49 except with drums]

*Yes that is a bar of 24/20, it’s very concretely interpreted as irrational time to me personally, rather than a sudden tempo shift with metric modulation. The bass is doing constant quintuplets, but it does 24 in one bar instead of an even group of 5 so you can’t count it as 5/4 or 4/4 or anything. Some might argue this would be easier to read as a tempo change where the quintuplet becomes the 16th note temporarily, but I feel it’s best thought of as just quintuplets at the same tempo as everything else. If someone wrote it out as metric modulation where the quintuplets become the 16th note though it would still be a perfectly valid way to write it!

As another note, the drums from 3:11 to the end are all just a constant quarter note pulse, but I still wrote x/8 and x/16 time signatures over it because I felt those were a more dominant feel at those points, and instead interpret that hi-hat click as beat displacement layered on top of non-4/4 timesig changes until it finally lines up toward the end.

Also yeah the 4/4 at the VERY start here for the first 15 seconds mostly only makes sense in the with-drums version of the tune. Otherwise your only real feel to go by is the part I have listed below. If you were writing an arrangement for people to play this where you didn’t have drums come in the first time, the way this does, you’d be better off writing the first 15 seconds the way I have it below.

2) Focusing on the main mixed meter synth figure

(0:00 - 0:15) 7/8, 13/16, 7/8, 11/16, 7/8, 13/16, 7/8, 6/8, 5/16

(0:15 - 0:33) 7/8, 13/16, 7/8, 11/16, [the rest of this section is random notes from the 7/8 + 13/16 + 7/8 + 11/16 groove being randomly chosen (based on the random hard L vs hard R panning) and the L layer and R layer going out of phase with each other at different rates. This is barely audible in the final mix but here’s :15 - :33 with this layer isolated to make it easier to hear. https://instaud.io/2P1Y ]

(0:33 - 1:05) [7/8, 13/16, 7/8, 13/16, 7/8, 13/16, 7/8, 11/16, 6/8]x2 (note: this section has two layers of that bass synth, one offset to play 1 16th note later and 1 octave higher. Both layers have completely different random panning as well, so this makes it challenging to feel this mixed meter pattern clearly because more likely you’ll be paying attention to the high note that’s a 16th note late, or accidentally alternate what part you’re hearing)

(1:05 - 1:37) [same as the version 1 of the timesig chart since that synth line isn’t present here]

(1:37 - 1:44) 7/8, 13/16, 7/8, 11/16

(1:44 - 1:49) 7/8, 13/16, 13/16

Additionally at :20 there’s a layer that’s playing this same figure added on top except it’s playing in dotted 16th notes relative to everything else. It’s a solid loop of 7/8 played at the tempo of “if those dotted 16ths were 8th notes”, rather than the tempo of everything else (this was inspired heavily by Fez - Knowledge, which does a similar thing). I guess you could interpret them as being played in 21/32 time too, but that’s a weird way to think of it since it’s all groups of 3 32 note beats.

3) The organ and piano stabs

These are basically RANDOM, there’s not really a convenient way to write a time signature chart around them even if they exist in a “polymetric” state to everything else, it’s really just random rhythmic stabs to convolute this even more hahaha. I just picked a random feeling rhythmic feeling that I thought sounded cool. There is methodology to their layering against each other however:

In the first use of them from :06 - :15 though the piano rhythm is exactly the same as the organ rhythm except delayed to play 15 16th note beats later.

The 2nd instance from :28 - :33 is just hocketing (one instrument playing in the gaps of the other).

In final instance at 1:30 - 1:44 the piano rhythm’s exactly the same as the organ rhythm except the piano rhythm is delayed to play exactly 7 quarter note beats later.

4) The polyrhythms in the drums!!

Starting at 2:56 the drum loops start stretching/squashing an amount of beats into one bar that isn’t the same tempo as everything else.

2:56 - 2:59 is 6/4 squashed to the space of 4/4

2:59 - 3:01 I already addressed far above, it’s an irrational time bar where there’s 24 quintuplets, but you could interpret the drums there as 5+5+5+9 6/4 squashed into the space of 24/20 but that obviously makes little sense.

3:01 - 3:04 is “10.6666.../16″ stretched to the space of 4/4 (this is really just dotted 16th notes in 4/4 except since that doesn’t line up nicely with 4/4 evenly the last beat has 1/3 cut off of it)

3:04 - 3:05 is just normal 16ths/32nds in 2/4

3:05 - 3:06 is 11/16 stretched to the space of 2/4

3:06 - 3:08 is just normal 16ths in 4/4

3:08 - 3:09 is 4/4 stretched to the length of a 5/8 bar

Then after that it’s back to normal 16ths in 4/4 for the rest

In sheet music you’d most likely just write these as tuplets, but I’m describing them the way I am here because they’re drum loops originally at different tempos, so this should make the sound easier to understand exactly how I stretch/squashed their speed.

I really thought it would be fun to play with the feel being entirely different with drums vs. without drums so that’s why I did a ton of playing around with that. In the drumless version of that section obviously it all just feels like normal 16ths in 4/4 (or 5/8 for 2 bars) but once the drums come in that feeling entirely changes.

- - - - -

HOPEFULLY THAT ADDresses everything and hopefully I explained it all articulately enough for it to all make sense! This track has possibly the most rhythmic eccentricity going on in this entire soundtrack, despite arguably being the most conventionally pleasant one to listen to and technically being mostly written in 4/4 in typical sheet music. You wouldn’t think it’s this difficult to write out but it definitely is.

Oh yeah also this has my voice from when I was like 15 years old in it hahaha.

This tune is in general a tribute to what my taste in music (and life) was like when I was that age so it borrows a lot of traits from it.

That was when I first got into steve reich and that sort of polymetric minimalist music (it is probably very obvious that this is inspired by steve reich and similar minimalism stuff haha).

Was also when I first got interested in tracker music (some patches from this are the same as ones in tracker module files I was really into at the time and stylistically this is vaguely similar to some of the tracker musicians I listened to a ton back then).

I also was just very enamored by electronic music with this type of sound to it.

It’s also when I first started using fl studio so i intentionally used a few fairly blunt fl studio sytrus/etc presets here haha.

DAY 1050) Charge Cycles - Electrostatic Discharge

Composer: me (Chimeratio)

Happy 1050th anniversary of this blog day!!! Doing another of my own tunes from this game again! I talked a bit about this game/soundtrack already here: http://vgm-in-irregular-time-of-the-day.tumblr.com/post/172541845172/day-1000-charge-cycles-transformer-robot-sing

The creator of this game, CHz, is an awesome guy who’s helped me out with this blog a lot too, so check out his game if you like puzzle games at all! https://chz.itch.io/charge-cycles. Also this was his favorite track in the game and it seems to be the most popular one in general I think!

Here we go:

(0:00 - 0:01) 1 bar of 11/16

(0:01 - 0:28) [13/16 + 5/4]x5, 13/16 + 11/8

(0:28 - 0:36) 4/4, 4/4, 3/4, 3/4, 2/4

(0:36 - 0:48) 4/4, 4/4, 3/4, 3/4, 3/4, 2/4, 4/4

(0:48 - 1:05) [3 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 7/8]x2

(1:05 - 1:13) 3 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 15/16

(1:13 - 1:22) 4 bars of 4/4

(1:22 - 1:54) 16 bars of 15/16

(1:54 - 2:06) 4/4, 4/4, 3/4, 3/4, 3/4, 3/4, 11/16

[loop (but in this video playing the drumless version this time)]

As I said on Transformer Robot Sing Wheels On The Bus, when I write music I don’t write timesig changes in or think of the music as being in “odd time”, I just allow for metric freedom by letting rhythms flow naturally and normalizing potentially complex/uneven stuff. Also in most of the pieces of software I prefer use, there isn’t support for writing timesig changes in, so I just keep it in 4/4 or 1/4 or whatever and completely ignore barlines.

This leaves a lot of intentional ambiguity...so this of course also means that I had to figure these timesig changes out the same way I would any other music, since there’s no actual hard “intent” of feel that I had when writing. This is just what I think makes the most sense to write/read it as!!! There’s certainly plenty of equally valid other ways to interpret it though!

Anyways aside from the “the time signatures” you’d write out on sheet music, there’s also polymeter in a few places.

The 15/16 section at 1:22 actually has the main drum loop in 13/16 layered on top of the 15/16 chord changes/etc.

The more active version of that section at 1:38 has a different more 15/16 aligned drum part become more prominent (though the 13/16 is still there), but a very 5+5+5 layer pops in on a synth arpeggio to stir things up to make up for that.

At 1:58 when it’s doing the 3/4, there’s actually two layers of chord changes. “Weird chord pad sound that doesn’t have a delay echo” is doing the 3/4, while “weird chord pad sound with a delay echo” is doing the 5/8, though the first time it happens it’s 3/4 like the other one.

Even some parts like the dial-up sound effects from about :33 - :45 could be considered 5/16 polymeter over what’s going on there, since that’s consistently playing that beep part of the sample once every 5 16th note beats.

DAY 1000) Charge Cycles - Transformer Robot Sing Wheels on the Bus

Composer: me

So to simultaneously celebrate april fools day one day late (slightly funny song), my birthday one day late (my song), easter one day late (uh I don’t know just pretend this has to do with easter), and SOMEHOW DOING THIS BLOG FOR 1000 DAYS WITHOUT MISSING A DAY here is THIS.

...so I’ve never really talked about it on here...but yeah most of my time lately is spent composing music, often for games (though most games I’m writing for won’t be out for a while) so...yeah! In case you did not know this (you probably didn’t unless you personally know me) I write music under the name Chimeratio!

I wasn’t originally planning on revealing the person behind this blog publicly, but it feels silly to pretend that I didn’t write this music that I have obvious reason to be talking about on here. I’ll gradually be posting any other odd time vgm I've made on here of course too.

Anyways this game was made by my cool friend CHz and you can play it here if you’d like!: https://chz.itch.io/charge-cycles

The soundtrack in game is ‘dynamic’ and seamlessly transitions between a drumless and full version of the track at any time. So I thought it’d be fun to play with a drum part that’s at a different tempo from (but still rhythmically related to) most of the rest of the music, so that the rhythms feel entirely different with vs. without drums.

Here’s how I’d actually break down the timesig changes. This is a weird enough piece of music that there are DEFINITELY a ton of other ways to interpret this, debatably better ones, but because it’s as weird as it is, pretty much no matter what you do you make it hard to read in some way.

Here we go:

~162.67bpm (shuffle)

(0:00 - 0:29) [7/4, 6/4, 7/4, 7/4]x3

(0:29 - 0:40) 6/8, 6/8, 6/8, 4/4, 6/8, 6/8, 6/8, 6/4

(0:40 - 0:59) [7/4, 6/4, 7/4, 6/4]x2

(0:59 - 1:06) 6/8, 6/8, 6/8, 1/4, 6/8, 6/8, 6/8, 4/12

(1:06 - 1:14) 6/8, 6/8, 6/8, 1/4, 6/8, 6/8, 6/8, 7/12

(1:14 - 1:24) 4/4, 4/4, 6/4, 4/4, 5/4, 5/4

Metric modulation: quarter -> dotted eighth

~122bpm (straight 8ths)

(1:24 - 1:44) 1 bar of 3/4, 9 bars of 4/4

(1:44 - 1:56) 3 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 5/4, 2 bars of 7/8

(1:56 - 2:20) 12 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 3/16

Metric modulation dotted eighth -> quarter

~162.67bpm (shuffle)

(2:20 - 2:22) 1 bar of 7/4

(2:22 - end) same as 0:00 - 2:22 except with [72 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 2/4] @ 122bpm layered polymetrically over the entire thing

...

So despite being the one who wrote this, I still had to figure out the meter changes here on my own while making this post. In software it was really just written in 4/4 at 122bpm the whole way through...I just ignored the barlines and was writing in shuffle at the wrong tempo essentially. I also usually do not think about time signatures when writing music, and just try to mentally normalize the concept of mixed meter/strange timesigs/etc so they naturally form themselves (and I usually don’t write time signature changes in (mostly because most of the software I prefer to use doesn’t support it), I just ignore barlines). It produces cool results but it also means I have no more idea how to transcribe my own stuff than anyone else hahahaha.

Also...yes, those are bars of irrational time in there just before 1:06 and 1:14. Since everything is very triplet-based shuffle up to that point, but that section is so mechanical feeling about the triplets, it was very easy to stick non-multiple-of-3 numbers of triplets in there. That means you can no longer write it with a typical 4 or 8 or 16 at the bottom of the timesig unless you write it as something like “2.3333.../8″ or write in a metric modulation for just those single bars. All 3 of those options could be considered very confusing to read for different reasons but I felt x/12 irrational time best conveys the intent of the feel there, just casual extra triplet beats.

The section with "6/8 + 6/8 + 6/8 + 1/4″ and stuff was not really thought of as such, but it’s probably a better way to write it at that tempo than how it was grouped in my head (long phrases were ‘single bars’ to me like 10/4, 31/12, etc). Also another way to write the version of that section that shows up at :59 would be to write the whole section at 122bpm I guess, that way you could avoid irrational time altogether, and it’s enough of a fusion of the shuffle-at-~163 and straight-eighths-at-122 feel at that point that it’s not too farfetch’d to write it as 122 there.

Honestly the argument could be made that the entire thing should be written at 122, and just using 3+3+3+3+3+3+3 21/16 in place of 7/4 and whatever, but I feel like it’d make the more normal parts far more confusing to read than necessary, just for the sake of making a few weird parts marginally easier to understand.

Most of the sections with 4/4 are weirder than depicted as well. An example of that is 1:34 - 1:42, where it has the same ~163bpm shuffle feel from earlier imposed on top of it, but chopped up in a random feeling way at the triplet level, so becomes very difficult to follow if it’s the layer you’re paying attention to.

I can imagine 1:56 - 2:20 might have an offset feeling effect to some people, since there’s not anything indicating that beat 1 is where it is when there’s no drums going on there, but when the drums come in it makes it clear that that first fake mallet perc sound hit is actually a 16th note after the downbeat.

I could endlessly list rhythmic weirdness in this but I think I’ve tackled most of the highlights. Hopefully I explained everything well enough!

Charge Cycles by CHz & Chimeratio