New Horizons in Music: Polyrhythms | Loop
Why Hacker News recommends it
Commenters recommend it for the mind-blowing connection between rhythm and pitch and as an approachable intro to music theory.
What it is
Adam Neely's Ableton Loop 2017 talk links rhythm, pitch and synaesthesia. He shows that polyrhythms sped up become chords, so tempo and pitch are related by ratios.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2018 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec patmorgan23 · 2023-09 · on “Show HN: Learn piano without sheet music”
Yeah, it even goes down to the physics of harmonics. There's this absolutely wild video by Adam nealy about how polyrhythms are actually cords. (It's very approachable if you know just a smidgeon of music theory). Highly recommend Adam's channel if you're interested in music/music theory. [this video]
Recommends exabrial · 2018-09 · on “We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?”
We're able to recognize simple ratios instantly. The fact is without number the actual digits, we know they instantly simplify into a handful of fractions. That is mind blowing. What's even more mind blowing is Adam Neely's explanation of pitch ratios and how they're related to tempo. The short incorrect explanation is if you layer beats 4:4, 5:4, 6:4 ratios (which is the ratio of pitches against the root in a major chord), then speed it up to a ridiculous frequency, our ears hear a major chord. It would seem that Tempo and Pitch are very much intertwined and our brains decipher that very quickly without evening consciously dividing the frequencies. Major chord demo: [this video]
Recommends graup · 2019-10 · on “The Color of Noise: What Do Hues Have to Do with Sound?”
There's a great talk by Adam Neely going into some interesting relations between sound and color: [this video] (timestamp where he starts talking about color, but the whole talk is interesting.)
Cites badosu · 2018-03 · on “Making music using new sounds generated with machine learning”
With regard to tonality: you might enjoy some microtonal works, traditional turkish music [0], electronic music [1] and many other non-european musical traditions (indian, arab). For rhythm there's a wide range for experimentation: from really slow tempos [2] to really fast and (seemingly) chaotic [3]. I like this study from Conlon Nancarrow [4], where the tempo between two voices evolve in time in coordination with each other. So this 'different' music exists, and has existed for a long time in human history, it's just not very popular. E.G. In [1], apart from Wendy Carlos's invented microtonal scales there are some songs that take from other cultures [5] (See how the 7th track is similar t