Repetition legitimizes (to the rhythm of "Blue Rondo a la Turk")
Count: One, two, three! Four, five, six! Seven, eight,
9/8 is an odd time signature
Now, yeah
That can mean that it's an unusual time signature and it is but strictly speaking, "odd" is numerical clarifier. 9 is an odd number
Unlike many other odd time signatures, like 11/8, or 5/4, 9/8 can be felt isochronously
Isochrononal pulses are regular in nature, which help with entrainment or synchronizing motor activity with external stimuli
"Dancing", in other words. Humans are the only species who entrain to music.
Parrots will sometimes move their body to regular pulses as well as sea lions, believe it or not.
And it goes deep. EEG research shows that newborns can detect regular pulse in music.
Yes, early internet sensation "Dancing baby" is an accurate reflection of the isochronal neural response of infants. Go figure
Count: Nine! Ah ah ah!
9/8 can't be evenly divided in groups of two because it's an odd number
But it can be divided into three groups of three eighth notes making it
Isochronal and because of that it's actually more common than you might think
As the rhythmic scheme behind the powerful brass of Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries",
Otherwise known as "Kill the Wabbit"
Elmer: Kill the wabbit! (To the tune of "Ride of the Valkyries")
Not to be outdone by Elmer "Siegfried", Mickey Mouse felt the puls this way in Fantasia as he
Conjured brooms along to the Sorcerer's Apprentice by Paul Dukas
Irish slipjig music is also felt this way in three groups of three
Steady pulse but odd time signature
Count: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,
9/8 can be divided differently as well. Pulses don't have to be the same for entrainment, they just have to repeat. After all,
Repetition legitimizes (pitched down, to the rhythm of "Blue Rondo a la Turk")
In his 1973 book "Problems of Ethnomusicology",
Romanian composer Constantin Brăiloiu uses the term "aksak" to refer to rhythmic cycles
which alternate between two and three eighth notes to create a sort of uneven, "limping" effect.
"Aksak" in Turkish literally means limping. The music ends up being
bichronal, where there are two separate units of time that are being measured that do not divide evenly
Into one another. Two cannot be evenly divided by three.
There is a very rich dancing tradition in Balkan countries that is based on this aksak rhythmic concept where groupings of two are called
"quick steps" and groupings of three are called "slow steps".
Tina: They switched your music for something with a 9/8 time signature
Jimmy: That's like dance kryptonite
Maybe it is for Jimmy pesto jr
of Bob's Burgers, but for many people in the Balkans
It's not really that much of an issue because there are many dances from many different countries which are felt in 9/8 as
2 + 2 +2 + 3, or quick-quick-quick-slow
Dancer Laura Shannon writes that this pattern of three steps forward one step back can also be seen as a
"metaphor for the year's seasonal cycle which requires us to rest in order to grow.
There is a feeling of being held."
It's like a measure of 4/4 except the last beat is a little bit longer than the others. It's held longer
It's the winter season of the four seasons of 4/4 if we're gonna lean into this analogy
Which admittedly I'm quite tickled by so yeah, 4/4 is the four seasons. Why not?
Count: The number of the day is...
Count [distorted]: Nine!
What's cool about 9/8 is that you can actually slice it up both regularly and irregularly in the same piece of music.
With that in mind, let's check out a song off. My band Sungazer's latest EP, "Bird on the Wing".
Let's first check out the verse guitar riff
This is kind of like that held pulse in the measure of 4/4 from before but now the held pulse is on the
second beat in the measure of 4/4 so you could subdivide it like 2 + 3 + 2 + 2.
Shifting where that held or slow beat is placed gives you a different traditional Balkan dance
This one in particular is called the "Грънчарско хоро", or the Potter's dance.
Bird on the wing is slower than this so we can actually subdivide one layer further
instead of dividing nine eighth notes into pulses
We could divide 18 sixteenth notes. The higher the number the more intricate pulse patterns
you have to work with. So in the second half of the second verse
we have a 2 + 3 + 2 +3 + 2 + 3 + 3 pulse pattern
Let's add more instruments for context
It doesn't have to be this complicated you could divide 18 by 3 and get 6
evenly spaced pulses in the same amount of time as nine eighth notes in other words a
a six against nine polyrhythm. Background: "Heyooo!" [airhorn]
Let's check out how that sounds in the second half of the first verse
If we just listen to the kick drum, it sounds like this:
Which sounds super regular like it's in 4/4 almost. You'd bob your head to it like... like this
But in the context of the full groove, it sounds like this, your body is entrained differently:
This is kind of what a polyrhythm is, or a polypulse: multiple pulses or stimuli to which your body can react
Most music is conceived with some form of bodily entrainment in mind:
how the musician is feeling the pulse is how the listener is also supposed to feel the pulse.
Some theories of how humans came to be musical in the first place suggests that this collective entrainment
is important for developing social bonds, which is why newborns can feel the beat
Listening to a piece of music and not knowing how to tap your foot along to it can feel very strange because
on a neurobiological level the music isn't working for you. It's not doing its job.
This is why if you come from a culture that doesn't have non isochronal pulses listening to a metric scheme like 9/8 can feel
somewhat alienating, and so for the chorus and the solo sections of "Bird on the Wing"
we have a steady quarter note kick pulse of two eighth notes apiece:
Now two doesn't divide evenly into nine, but if we have two measures of 9/8 the kick pattern eventually comes back around:
A very effective way of using odd time signatures is to include some form of even element that goes over the bar line
something that I'm gonna call the isochronal entraining element™.
This is my video, I get to invent whatever jargon I want, so we're gonna' go with that
In "Bird on the Wing" it's the kick drum which makes 9/8 feel super regular
In modern syncopated metal, otherwise known as
"djent", the isochronal entraining element is often the china cymbal
It's the thing that makes you unaware of the unevenness of the other rhythmic elements
Their potential odd meter complexity simply washes over you
and you're just left with the beat, the thing that you headbang to, the thing with which you are entrained.
This isochronal entraining element doesn't quite fit with Balkan ideas of rhythm.
Remember the whole thing about quick and slow steps?
Well, it turns out that they don't always fit into Western ideas of subdivision.
Those 2:2:3 relationships sometimes are a little bit more rhythmically nuanced.
A study of Romanian gypsy musicians from Transylvania
Count: Nine! Hahahaha
found that the relationships between quick and slow pulses in certain styles of music
could actually be manipulated in real time for expressive effect.
A guidebook for dancing the "Eleno Mome", a folk dance from northern Bulgaria, suggests that musicians
may select metre 7/8 (2, 2, 1, 2), 11/16 (3, 3, 2, 3), 12/16 (4, 3, 2, 3), 13/16 (4, 4, 2, 3), or "in-between"
"In-between"? An "in-between" time signature? What does that mean? Like 11.2/8? Color me intrigued.
The exact time signature for this dance isn't clear
because the concept of a time signature that neatly subdivides all the pulses in the same way
doesn't quite fit with the culture. In this way 9/8 is almost a metaphor
It's a bridge between different cultures' rhythmic concepts.
In this video, we talked about how I as an American musician might feel 9/8, but we also talked about how
Irish traditional dancers might feel 9/8, as well as people from the Balkans as well as
Mickey Mouse. But we haven't talked about things like how, say, Cameroonian musicians might feel 9/8. That's a whole 'nother topic.
David Bruce composer talks a little bit more about it on his video on rhythmic allusions (link is in the description).
So today we've been talking a little bit about rhythm
how our bodies respond to rhythm and how different cultures interpret rhythm and so as this video and this day come to a close
my question for you all is: Why?
In "Problems of Ethnomusicology", Constantin Brăiloiu offers a fairly
tongue-in-cheek overly flowery definition of rhythm:
"It is the psychophysiological function of the being and a dynamogenetic condition of the universe
analogous in scientific value to that which forms in biology Life and Being."
Brăiloiu goes on to wryly note,
"Such sentences do not very much move the musician, with whom they hardly concern."
We do these technical analyses of rhythm and music in order to better understand
how different cultures feel rhythm and feel music, how they move their bodies along to music.
Saying that rhythm is the "dynamogenetic condition of the universe" or whatever is useless in that regard.
But saying that Balkan music can be felt in groupings of two and three is useful for understanding that particular culture
Entrainment is real and it's a way that we can connect with other people.
The more that we understand, the more that we can connect
and the more that we can get out of music and cultures that we previously were unfamiliar with
Ignorance is not just not knowing things. It's also the inability to connect with people and that can lead to ugliness.
So I hope this little video about 9/8 has not only made you a better musician, but maybe just maybe
made you a
more beautiful human.
Thanks for watching
[Warping sound] BASS