I Wrote A Thousand-Year-Long Song By Accident

What if, with just a couple simple rules, you could make a piece of music over a millennium long? I'm not the first person to ask this question, not by a long shot, but I kinda stumbled onto a pretty cool answer just by playing around with rhythms. Well, polyrhythms to be precise, or to be even more precise, polymeter, which spell-check is telling me isn't actually a word, but I know better. So how does it work? How can we make something that sounds ordered and coherent at short time scales when the whole thing lasts an order of magnitude longer than most humans do? That's, uh... That's what this video is about, so I guess watch it if you want to know the answer? Or don't. I'm not the boss of you.

SOURCES:

Huge thanks to our Elephant of the Month Club members:

Susan Jones
Jill Jones
Ron Jones
Howard Levine
Duck
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Ken Arnold
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Anton Smyk
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And thanks as well to Corvi, Henry Reich, Gene Lushtak, Eugene Bulkin, Logan Jones, Abram Thiessen, Anna Work, Oliver, Jc Bq, Adam Neely, nico, Michael Fieseler, Rick Lees, Ben LaRose, Justin Donnell, rhandhom1, Dave Mayer, Thomás, Davis Sprague, Justin Aungst, Harold Gonzales, Paul Quine, Alex, Marc Himmelberger, Chris Borland, CodenaCrow, Nikolay Semyonov, Daniel Gilchrist, Arnas, Sarah Spath, Skylar J Eckdahl, billy roberts, Elliot Burke, Alex Atanasyan, Amlor, Greg Borenstein, Tim S., Elias Simon, Caroline Simpson, Michael Alan Dorman, Jerry D. Brown, Lauren Steely, Fabian, Nathan Petchell, Blake Boyd, Trevor, Michael McCormick, Lilith Dawn, Jonathan Beck, Dmitry Jemerov, Ian Seymour, Charles Gaskell, Luke Rihn, Rob Holton, Ohad Lutzky, Jon White, Kurtis Commanda, James A. Thornton, Benjamin Cooper, Kevin, Elliot Jay O'Neill, Elliot Winkler, Payden Nissen, Tom Evans, John Bejarano, Brian Dinger, Nervilis, Stefan Strohmaier, Adam Wurstmann, Kelsey Freese, Shadow Kat, Adam Kent, Max Wanderman, Lee Rennie, Richard T. Anderson, Angela Flierman, Mark Feaver, Tyler Lukasiewicz, Kevin Johnson, Brian McCue, Stephan Broek, Hape Company, Matt Giallourakis, Marcøs, Ryan Nicholls, ml cohen, Sylvain Chevalier, Darzzr, Roger Grosse, David Hardin, Rodrigo Roman, Francois LaPlante, Jeremy Zolner, Matthew Fox, Paper Coelacanth, Britt Ratliff, Koen Hoogendoorn, Tae Wook Kim, Eddie O'Rourke, Ryan, Jon Bauman, Vincent Sanders, John July, Volker Wegert, Paul Koester, Danny, Matthew Kallend, Patrick Callier, JH, Joshua Gleitze, Jake Lizzio, Ben Straubinger, Emilio Assteves, Alex Keeny, Alexey Fedotov, Charles Hill, Harry Hume, Valentin Lupachev, Joshua La Macchia, David Conrad, John Paul Welsh, Lisa Lyons, DSM, Gary Butterfield, Niko Albertus, Luke Wever, Elizabeth von Teig, Steve Brand, Rene Miklas, Connor Shannon, Chris Chapin, max thomas, Jamie Price, Kennedy Morrison, Red Uncle, Tiago de Caux, Toby M. Schreier, Daniel Garcia, Kirk Natoza, Doug Nottingham, Scott Howarth, Barendo, Smackdab, Nicholas Wolf, Ben Phillips, Hex86, Scott Nystrom, Douglas Anderson, ZagOnEm, Robert Beach, Todd Davidson, Fahzbehn, chaoticgeek, Lionel Dresta, veleum, and Kevin Boyce! Your support helps make 12tone even better!

Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold for proofreading the script to make sure this all makes sense hopefully!

[tone]

Some additional thoughts/corrections:


1) I am aware of the technical distinction between songs, tunes, and pieces, and I know that this is probably better described as a drum piece than a song, but also that distinction is boring, has very little relevance, doesn't reflect colloquial usage, and places undue primacy on a single instrumentation factor, so I see no point in worrying about it. Terminology fights are, in my opinion, one of the least interesting ways to do music theory anyway. If it makes you feel better, though, feel free to imagine that, instead of a crash cymbal, I included a sample of a vocalist singing the word "Crash".

2) I should note that I'm basically 100% sure I'm not the first person to do this, because it's really not that hard to come up with once you know the underlying ideas.

3) That also opens up some interesting questions about ownership: Can I really be said to have written this if I've only ever heard the first 10 minutes or so, which are, to a reasonable approximation, 0% of the complete piece? I don't know. I'm not sure it matters, since no part of this is really copyrightable anyway, but hey, it's a question.

4) My default MIDI workstation doesn't support tuplets more advanced than triplets, so that massive polyrhythm around 5:39 took _forever_ to make. It just sounds like chaotic noise, but if I hadn't done it correctly _someone_ would've noticed, ya know? It's actually 5 separately exported tracks where I measured in 64th notes and then changed the tempo so they all played in the exact same amount of time. Just a little behind-the-scenes for y'all.

[mariocisemusic]

9:49 “I’m actually an entire human being”
*Draws elephant-primate hybrid thing*
We’re on to you, 12-tone...

[alias_hallow]

i too write excessively long songs by accident, merely by accidentally clicking the tap tempo button in my daw once and thus setting the bpm to 1

[DominicAirola]

I programmed this beat. Only problem is I have this OCD thing where I have to listen to pieces of music until their completion so now I have to write it into my will that this song must play on speakers above my grave for the next 900+ years.

[rolanddeschain]

get 10 000 musicians to listen to separate time frames and extract the grooviest grooves

[aminhaddeoui]

You drew bender just when you said "the year 3000"
This is quality content hahah

[MagnusMoerkoereJohannesen]

Can we just take a minute to admire that well-adapted finch 2:52 :D

[BALAGE]

This is the music equivalent of a hash function.

[coryman]

I was gonna make a comment about how you could just write "repeat 10^500 times" or something at the end of a short piece, but then I thought "surely that wouldn't be worth making a whole video about, this has to be something more. Probably abusing math". I have to say, I was not disappointed :D
Though I am a little upset I didn't recognise that you used the prime numbers before you pointed it out.

[aestheticaltwat]

3:39 - When I do a simple 4/4 beat on the drums in GarageBand, but it automatically quantises it.

[islandkol]

2019: Wow, this beat is fucking awesome
3009: MAKE IT STOP!!! MAKE IT FUCKING

[LovroZimak]

Nice Grindcore song there in the middle.

[chaotik]

5:40 sounds like someone who has never touched a drumset trying to play Painkiller

[scrambledmandible]

5:40 *PHIL I TOLD YOU GETTING THE KIDS A DRUM KIT WAS A BAD IDEA*

[InfinityPotato]

"As Slow as Possible" by John Cage
"Longplayer" by Jim Finer

[shadowhenge]

"Related" (draws two pigs kissing).

Youre great.

Edit: would be neat to have a vst that could just scroll forwards and backwards in the equation to control drumkits.

[theletter]

Classic mistake, it happens to the best of us.

[jerryorg]

Google: "help I accidentally built a shelf"


12tone: "help I accidentally *made a thousand-year-long song*"

[xencage]

“Like staring into a fire” love that analogy!

[stilts]

In addition to the general content of the channel and this one, in particular, I love it when you draw a penny farthing every time you say the word "six".

Be seeing you.