#polymeter

DAY 1850) Tron 2.0 - Credits Medley

Composer: Nathan Grigg, Wendy Carlos

Given that this is a medley; there’s lots of timesig changes but they’re more like unrelated sections from each other, often totally fading in/out or with ambiguous pauses, so I’ll just talk about each section separately.

0:00 - 1:29 is all just 4/4, frantic drums, crazy synth sound design, but no odd time really for this section.

1:29 - 1:44 i’m counting as triplets in mixed meter: 4/4, 4/4, 5/4, 5/4, 6/4, 5/4, 4/4. if you were to count those as 8ths instead of triplets it’d be more like 12/8, 12/8, 15/8, 15/8, 18/8, 15/8, 12/8 (replace the 8s with 16s if you’re going to be weird like me and count them as 16ths if you find x/16 more natural to think about for some reason) !

1:46 - 2:17 is polymetric! The syncopated bell-like synth ostinato is in 7/8, but the slower synth hits and most everything else behind it really are in 6/4. For a short bit before 2:17 I guess there’s some 5/8 polymeter in one of the synth layers also. Some other more ambiguous stuff you might be able to interpret as even further layers of polymeter but the point is like, yeah this part’s lots of layers looping in different loop lengths from each other on top of each other!

2:17 - 3:06′s at a bit faster a tempo than the previous section. Also polymetric but a lot simpler case of it. 4/4 in that metallic bell-like synth rhythm, and 6/4 polymeter in the beeps under it from 2:17 - 2:42

3:06 - 4:03, here it’s 6/4 through most of the parts of this that have enough of a rhythm to latch onto something, which only really happens starting with the echoy drums that come in at 3:31.

4:03 - 4:45 is interesting; this is taken from “FCon/The Root of the Problem (Combat)”, which is one of the tracks I have on my biiiiig queue of possible tracks to eventually post on here but never happened to ever post. I’d count this snippet of it as all 7+8, 15/16, but just being aware that there’s a constant four-on-the-floor “4/4″ kick acting “polymetric” to it from the bits at 4:15 - 4:21 / 4:27 - 4:34.

4:45 - end is all loose, but just 4/4 stuff whenever concretely countable

Hopefully I addressed everything important here! there’s a lot going on in all of these sections, so it wouldn’t surprise me if I missed an obvious polymeter layer or something and just didn’t realize it! Lots of these sections come from other tracks in the game too, so are in a bit different of a context musically from their amalgamation here. Obviously wild tempo changes between each section that i’m not bothering to write out lol

This is a great cross section of the crazy stuff present throughout this ost though, tron 2.0 is totally one of the most odd time/polymeter/etc filled game soundtracks out there. Part of that’s obvious influence from Wendy Carlos’s original score to the 1982 film being much like that (and this game borrowing a lot of the material she wrote), but Nathan Grigg’s style is always full of that kinda thing as well, and he only adds to that intricacy in his original additions to the mix!

For all those reasons I thought this would be a pretty good sort-of-sendoff for this blog i’ve been running for over 5 years...........

....so...

...!

...THE FINAL DAY sort of...! As I said many posts ago (https://vgm-in-irregular-time-of-the-day.tumblr.com/post/623135939348365312/day-1828-shining-force-cd-track-25-composer) [probably a better read than my post right now here today], this will be my final post that’s in the “1 song presented with a text post daily” format; I’ll take a break but I will eventually shift to talking about this again in (most likely) YT video vgm mixes, including other related content besides just the very specific odd timesig stuff in vgm too!

Thank you to everyone who has supported me all this time! ULTRA SPECIAL SHOUT OUT TO CHz who has helped me out with this blog FAR more than anyone could possibly imagine, he’s done far more work than anyone ever needed to do, far beyond my expectations to help me along with this. And he doesn’t get enough credit for that, this blog would’ve probably died a long time ago without chz’s help. Thank you so much CHz for all your assistance! Sharing me things you remember when I’m in desperate need of a new track to post at the last minute, uploading so much music for me, helping me organize so much, writing out timesig charts for me so many times, sharing overwhelmingly huge amounts of odd time vgm with me, probably even more than anyone else. So many other things all these years you’ve helped me with on here, I can’t thank you enough!

That said, thank you to EVERYONE who has shared odd time vgm with me (and this is like, a LOT of people, far too many to list, and i’m sure plenty would be uncomfortable being listed too, so i won’t subject this post to that).

I’m very bad at responding to PMs and other messages sent to me; I apologize greatly if i’ve left you hanging for months...or years...or forever. I’m just bad at that form of communication lol, but I’ve read the majority of what’s been sent and still try to keep as much as possible in my big list backlog of stuff to eventually post. I get excited and happy when I see people linking me new odd time vgm i’ve never heard and stuff like that; so if i’ve never responded or never posted stuff you’ve linked me here, please know that I actually do appreciate it even if i might not show it haha. I’ve honestly mostly only maintained this blog pretty sporadically and rely heavily on queuing everything in advance on occasion, rather than constant observation of it.

Once i shift to the new format of presentation i’ll still include the suggestions that’ve been linked to me, and stuff. I’ll maybe try to be more communicative in the future now that i’m not going to be bogged down by the load of keeping a constant daily stream of these posts. (though i probably won’t be paying too much attention to tumblr for a while during my break from doing this stuff)

thank you to everyone for every positive comment, every intent to help by sharing, and just...general inquisitiveness and enthusiasm about this THING i’m doing for no reason! This is all literally just me nerding out about my favorite combination of niche subjects together “proggy/mathy/etc music” and “video game music” at the same time as each other. I never expected this would get anything close to the following it’s gotten, but now occasionally it’ll get pointed out that this blog is me in some group i’m in or something and 5 people will be like “WAIT...that’s YOU?! I’ve been watching that blog for years!” or something; like i’m really startled by how many people follow this sometimes lol.

Really thankful for everyone showing interest in me just being me, having fun talking about things i like in music. I hope that can continue even if i’ll be changing what I talk about and how I talk about it!

It might be quite a while before I return to doing this kind of thing again, and it’ll definitely be a much less constant pace, but I think that trade-off be worth it. I’ll return to making posts here again when I finally have new stuff to post, big video mixes with animated visual transcriptions or WHATever i wind up doing (probably a new dedicated youtube channel for the new stuff too) and stuff! I’ll find out what that will be when I get there

Thank you all for everything!

THank you!

WOW

THANKJ YOU for all 5 years of this website being a fun place to post music i like inside of

BYE

OH WAIt here’s my twitter/soundcloud/etc links and stuff if you want to contact me in a place i’ll be far more attentive to than tumblr, since i won’t be paying attention to here for a while:

https://twitter.com/chimeratio_

https://soundcloud.com/chimeratio

ok now ACTUALLY BYE

THANK YOUI

DAY 1844) Shining Force II - Final Battle

Composer: Motoaki Takenouchi

this is mostly 4/4 really, BUT there’s one crazy element that makes me consider it more than “odd time enough” to post on the blog-- the fast constant 16ths psg beeps from :28 - :53. Those are polymetric actually, one layers looping in 11/16, while the other layer is looping in 15/16. It’s so fast that it’s extremely difficult to count or feel it that way unless you slow it down, but that is technically what’s happening there.

During that section, the hits are technically in 4/4 atop them, but it’s definitely hard to feel that, since there’s nothing to latch onto except for two unrelated layers of polymetric constant 16th beeps! not made any easier by the fact that the delay echo on this harsh hits is timed super weird, means lots of things layered on top of each other all doing completely different things! the “actual 4/4 container”, 15/16 beep layer, 11/16 beep layer, and the weirdly timed delay echo (doesn’t actually line up with 16ths in timing at all because it’s so weird)

DAY 1794) Pikmin 3 - Plasm Wraith

Composer: Asuka Hayazaki, Atsuko Asahi, Hajime Wakai

Regardless of what potentially simple numbers you’d write here to describe it on sheet music, this is a musically very hard to follow song, and that reason was the main reason I never posted this one until now. Finally decided at least on SOME way to interpret and explain this, but there’s absolutely ambiguity and other just as logical interpretations-

I interpret:

0:00 - 0:09 as all 4/4

0:09 - 0:39 as all 6/4

0:39 - 0:42 as 2 bars of 5/8

Starting at 0:42, here’s where there’s a lot to talk about. The basis, like the actual barlines I’d write on sheet music probably here are:

(0:42 - 1:14) 12 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 2/4

(1:14 - 1:43) 2 bars of 6/4, 1 bar of 2/4, 5 bars of 6/4, [hold]

[loop]

BUT the timing of the hits is felt more like a loop of “2/4 + 3/8 + 2/8 + 3/8 + 2/4“ throughout this whole section, which ADDS UP to 2 bars 4/4, but certainly tests your perception of the feel.

On top of that, you obviously have the fact that the “2/4 bars” and “6/4 bars” don’t line up with the whole [4+3+2+3+4]/8 pattern, which creates some pretty cool rhythm comparisons. You’re hearing different “beat 1s”, different possible start points for that looping accent pattern even if it’s constant all the way through.

On top of ALL That there’s still all these other layers that aren’t timed to either of those things, the strings at 1:06 or references to the tuned percussion stuff earlier on. 

Lots of other ways to interpret all of this, so many little details I didn’t even touch on that could change how one perceives the rhythms, but hopefully I explained what’s going on well enough!

DAY 1706) PlayOnline - Tsuioku (Reminiscence)

Composer: Noriko Matsueda

Something by a female composer for International Women's Day !

DAY 1800) Matthew’s Dungeons of the Unforgotten - Deluged Depths

Composer: me (Chimeratio)

doing another one of my own tracks again! So recently, sergiocornaga, who did art for this game, sort of requested me to post another thing from this game. I said I was saving Deluged Depths for a day that ended in 00 since I knew it was going to be a big post where it took a while to explain everything going on, now’s as good a time as any!

This one’s very polymetric, almost every moment has more than one timesig happening at once, so this will take a bit to explain. I’ll count the timesigs out multiple different times for different layers here:

Layer 1 (the basis of it all, what you’d actually write on sheet music):

(0:00 - 0:21) 10 bars of 4/4

(0:21 - 0:29) 3 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 11/16

(0:29 - 0:34) 1 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 13/16

(0:34 - 0:42) 4/4, 4/4, 7/8, 17/16

(0:42 - 0:49) 4 bars of 13/16

[loop]

These ‘barlines’ are mostly enforced by chord change timings, but there’s usually at least one layer following them even if this is ambiguous/polymetric enough to avoid clarity of these barlines.

Layer 2 (main kalimba ostinato):

constant solid 13/16 from 0:00 - 0:30.

After that there’s a few lines it plays but they’re not any more attached to the 13/16 before than any other layer of the song. It’s also worth noting that this whole layer has a delay echo...one where the echo’s the same volume as the actual initial attack notes, so functionally this is the same 13/16 ostinato duplicated twice: In the left speaker starting on beat 1, but in the right speaker starting 3 16th beats later.

Layer 3 (the mixed meter funky chord stuff at the start):

(0:00 - 0:09) 4/4, 4/4, 5/16, 4/4, 4/4

(0:09 - 0:17) 4/16, 5/16, 4/4, 4/4, 5/16, 13/16

(0:17 - 0:21) 2 bars of 4/4

this layer’s pretty much a solid 4/4 groove (like you hear at the bars that are “4/4″ in this listing), but semi-randomly chopped up, sometimes starting/ending at different points in its loop in an ambiguous way (there’s other ways you could interpret the meter of this layer aside from what I wrote here). It’s also worth noting that there’s chord changes that happen in the middle of some of these bars, so the rhythm plays out in the patterns i’m describing here, but the chords won’t follow.

The organ at :42 also follows the same general musical idea for a short bit. I interpret the organ bit there as 4/4, 15/16, 2/4

Layer 4 (the saw wave constant 16ths starting at ~0:21):

From :21 - :33, this is all a loop of “3/16″ (just 3 looping 16th notes). At first I thought it might make sense to describe an “interruption” after the 11/16 bar before :29, but in practice it’s just a bit of a changeup in notes, the same way that pattern is already doing with chord changes.

From around :30-:33, the harsh low FM synth sound also follows this 3/16 pattern with a sharp hit every 3 16ths for a few seconds, always hitting on the middle note of the saw pattern. From what I remember, I think when I wrote this I didn’t really think about how it worked with the saw pattern...I just put it in because I wanted another polymetric layer, but it just happened to be another 3/16 aligned offset a 16th from the other 3/16 pattern haha

Layer 5 (drums):

This mostly all follows Layer 1, but I’m listing this separately to note one major exception here: :42-:49. Mostly everything else there’s 13/16, but the drums are looping 5/16 for that whole section. It actually starts the becoming broken down into 5/16 in the middle of the last bar before this section. That last synth bell chord leads into the 5/16 with the start of something that sounds like the mostly 4/4 drum loop from prior to it, but after the first 4 16h beats it turns into a looping sequence of 5 16th beats in the drums as described.

This layer’s pretty hard to hear in the mix in hindsight, but that’s what it’s doing, even if it might only be possible for me to figure that out because i can mute channels in my own project file hahha

...

I THINK that is every significantly “odd time” layer here, hopefully I didn’t miss anything. There’s plenty of other aspects of the music I didn’t mention but they’re all aligned with another pattern I described somewhere else in this post and not really ‘polymetric’. I guess maybe the 5/16-ish feel of the guitar before :42′s worth mentioning but it’s really just syncopation that happens to be pseudo-odd time feeling.

ANYWAYS hopefully I explained this in an easy enough to understand way. Also stuff like this as usual is pretty ambiguous and could be interpreted plenty of other ways! There was not really any hard “intended way to interpret the time signature(s)” beyond “i want this to ‘feel’ polymetric/odd time”, deliberately avoiding thinking about how someone might pick it apart. And in software this was all just written in 4/4 and ignoring barlines (how I usually work). So because of all that this was a challenge to pick apart and figure out how to explain here despite being the one who wrote this!

I think i’ve said some variant of the above paragraph any time I’ve posted one of my own songs in here haha but it’s worth mentioning since it’s important to note that even I don’t consider there to be a single correct way to interpret my stuff.

DAY 1829) 2048 Unleashed - Soilscraper

Composer: Zan-zan-zawa-veia

zzzv is one of my favorite composers! and somehow I haven’t posted anything from him until now. He’s recently been doing more music to his own games, but for a while most of the music he had in games was for Various Doom WADs.

His music for Doom WADs is some of my favorite music in the world EVER, atmospherically, composition-wise, and everything, all while being MIDI (or occasional tracker modules). unpredictable chord changes that keep me emotionally enthused by new interesting directions every corner, cool dark dungeon feeling that I really dig, and general subtle (or overt) intricacy and quirkiness all over the place! This is like....in my top 5 favorite pieces of music in a game ever lol. Some of the most nailed down “my favorite type of prog” any piece of music ever even has been

anyway this track I’d personally break down like this (despite the midi timesig data saying differently. counting at 124 rather than 248, etc):

(0:00 - 0:29) [3/4, 7/8, 4/4, 9/8]x3, 3/4, 7/8, 4/4, 11/8

(0:29 - 0:44) 3/4, 7/8, 4/4, 9/8, 3/4, 7/8, 4/4, 5/4

(0:44 - 1:01) 9 bars of 4/4

(1:01 - 1:30) [6/4]x3, 4/4, [6/4]x3, 2/4, [6/4]x3

(1:30 - 1:38) 4 bars of 4/4

(1:38 - 2:08) [3/4, 7/8, 4/4, 9/8, 3/4, 7/8, 4/4, 5/4]x2

(2:08 - 2:13) 3 bars of 4/4

(2:13 - 2:35) 6 bars of 6/4, 3/4, 5/4

(2:35 - end) 4/4 until the end (maybe counting the last bit as 3/4, 7/8 to be self-consistent with earlier)

ironically my favorite part of the song is all 4/4 stuff, like 3:06 to the end, just really addicted to the chord progression there

Anyway this is all more ‘complex’ than just the numbers show, lots of subtle odd phrasing. Stuff like the 6/4 parts adding overlapping layers with the ideas from the mixed meter section. Lots of portions (most notably the mixed meter parts) have portions like that high bell rhythm that isn’t in sync with the drums/piano or rhythms of any other layer, making it sorta polymetric in “feeling” (even if the bell rhythm is too free and ambiguous to really describe as being in a specific meter, more just a cool funky rhythm to convolute everything and ambiguify barlines, a sound i adore~!)

there’s lots more stuff I could say, it’s an amazingly intricate piece and there’s so much going on in it, but I think I’ve addressed most of the elements relevant to this blog. Summary: the odd time bits are mostly a [6+7+8+9]/8 rhythm feeling, sometimes extra beats at the end of each phrase in those sections. Lots of subtle odd phrasing and polymeter-esque stuff snuck in everywhere to make for beautiful flow~!

DAY 1793) Opoona - At Tokione

Composer: Hitoshi Sakimoto, Noriyuki Kamikura

Unless I missed something, I don’t think Opoona actually has any explicit odd time, but it certainly has a lot of interesting polymeter lines and polyrhythmic stuff throughout the whole ost, something actually much harder to find than plain odd time anyways!

In this case, the whole thing here’s all just 4/4, but there’s mostly 5/16 (5/8 counting at 2x tempo) polymeter floating atop it from 1:15 - 2:08 (3:25 - 4:18). The way it’s presented (or at least the way I interpret it), it’s actually sort of unclear whether or not it makes sense to interpret a “reset” after every 2 4/4 bars or every 4 4/4 bars. but regardless of how you feel it, it’s definitely groups of 5 looping constant 16th notes that ignore the downbeat/barline to some degree! and that presents the cool feeling polymeter gives to things that I love so much

DAY 1775) The Magic School Bus Explores the Human Body - Liver

Composer: Jared Faber

Happy Month/Day 5/16 Time Day!!!!! the saw lead channel (3rd one down in the visualizer) is mostly polymetric 5/16 all the way through on top of the 4/4 everything else. There’s a few bits where it ‘resets’ itself to realign its start with the barlines, but at least for the lengths of 4 bar phrases it’s usually continuous 5/16-over-4/4 going on here!