GMH's music-posting thread

edited 2013-12-17 23:15:03 in General
A thread for me to post musical thoughts.

These will generally be crude vocaroo recordings of bits and pieces of music, especially if they're existing songs and I don't want to get in trouble.



[from earlier]
http://vocaroo.com/i/s077Uw07SjKa

excerpt from BARK AT THE MOON
Symphogear OST vol. 3
composer: Elements Garden

http://vocaroo.com/i/s14jJjdzcnEY

excerpt from KINZYOU
eXceed 2nd - Vampire (Brynhildr&Siegrune boss theme)
composer: Shibayan
note: (NOT the remake)
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Comments

  • http://vocaroo.com/i/s1OV4SfFtF6O

    excerpt from Itsumo Soko ni Hohoemi ga
    Symphogear OST vol. 1
    composer: Elements Garden
  • http://vocaroo.com/i/s0nPTuR30BSt

    another excerpt from BARK AT THE MOON.

    DOSE CHORDS
  • Circle of Fifths!

    http://vocaroo.com/i/s1jwTgD3NGJ2

    excerpt from first movement, second theme section
    Sonata in F major
    composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
    catalog info: K. 332
    performer: Alicia de Larrocha
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    d00d, that is not "Bark at the Moon." This is.


  • No, volume 3 track 8 of the Symphogear OST is indeed called BARK AT THE MOON.  All caps.

    Anyway...

    http://vocaroo.com/i/s08YqqthhYAk
    Kimi to Iu Oto Kanade Tsukiru Made
    Symphogear (sung by Minami Takayama (as Kanade Amou))
    composer: Elements Garden, probably

    Em C D G
    i VI VII III
    Humoresque Progression!
  • edited 2013-12-17 23:17:11
    http://vocaroo.com/i/s02JUcYUcAnC
    Doko Made mo, Donna mono demo (Gyakkou no Flugel)
    Symphogear OST vol. 1
    composer: Elements Garden (again since they did all the music for the series)

    Yeah I have this on the mind lately.  In my defence, the music is good.
  • [minor] i (b)VI III (b)VII ostinato is more tolerable than I V vi IV ostinato

    because (b)VII (subtonic chord) looping to i (tonic chord) is an authentic-type sequence

    while IV looping to I is a plagal-type sequence and does not have harmonic momentum, thus stalling the music
  • http://vocaroo.com/i/s0rWBQBEQDG7

    excerpt from Kaleidescope
    #8 in Sora no Koe (Voice of the Sky)
    composer: KATSU (Katsunori Hirasato)
    performed by angela (band)

    dat A-flat minor
    Abm Bb7 Eb7 Abm Fb Cb Db Eb

    dat secondary dominant, Bb7
  • http://vocaroo.com/i/s1AoskD3pv73

    that's the intro to this:


    This is an oddly catchy theme.
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    Wikipedia sez that is a Sega Master System game so why come it sez Game Boy
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    oh, I guess there was a Game Boy port. Odd.
  • With totally different music, too, apparently.
  • edited 2013-12-19 03:09:10

    that isn't to say that harmonic ideas can't be interesting


    but like if all you have is a bunch of chords and a melody and whatever it's gonna get pretty boring pretty fast







    Your point is invalid.
  • the first one sounds like a man playing a bland sad thing on the piano, possibly while moving intently about


    the second one does have some fun timbres going on, but it does not seem to be anything special


    Bach once again leaves me cold. baroque, classical and romantic music bore me intensely more often than not
  • edited 2013-12-19 05:33:37
    Fair enough, maybe you're a timbre and texture person, in contrast to me being a harmony person.

    (This is not an insult or judgement, just an observation.)

    I've actually wondered why that's the case -- that i'm not as much of a timbre person.  It may have to do with me growing up with 8-bit videogame tunes and then trying to beatbox them and play them on the piano; in all three cases, timbre is extremely constrained but the content is expressed via rhythm, melody, and harmony.
  • "timbre and texture person" sums me up rather perfectly.
  • right now: Chris's theme / BARK AT THE MOON, but in C# minor.

    something like this: http://vocaroo.com/i/s0QV6anxi2dl
  • another i VI VII III (Humoresque Progression) song

    Endless Tears
    artist: CLIFF EDGE

    excerpt: http://vocaroo.com/i/s1Zd74qOukKW (just the intro, contains that progression, twice in a row, in F minor)
  • so apparently CLIFF EDGE is inordinately fond of the Humoresque Progression
    the song SHIZUKU (feat. Sally Miura) is full of it
    as is the song Aishiteru by Sally Miura (feat. CLIFF EDGE)
  • Looking back at another song I really like (especially the piano version): "relations" from the Idolmaster series.

    One of the best parts is the beginning of the refrain.

    Guess what chord progression it has?
    F#m D E A
    ...yep.  The Humoresque Progression again.  it really is my favorite progression.
  • edited 2014-01-01 21:27:35
    http://vocaroo.com/i/s10W96XGZ3s7

    :D to you if you recognize this.  Shouldn't be too hard for the gamers around here.


  • This still sounds good in F-sharp major old-style-tuning G major!
  • edited 2014-01-11 23:42:53
    So I can't believe it took me so many years to think of something this obvious, but...

    Someone should totally merge the Castlevania Dracula X Rondo of Blood (alternatively, Dracula XX Vampire's Kiss) final stage theme with the Prologue theme (for "Final Stage: Bloodlines") from the beginning of Symphony of the Night.  They're even supposed to represent the same event, just in two different presentations.

    And it shouldn't be too hard, considering that they're roughly the same tempo AND in the same key (B minor).

    Just have to rework the instrumentation a bit so that the first track is a bit less bare and the second track is a bit less rich and more texturally distinct.

    For reference:

    Castlevania: Rondo of Blood - "Den"


    alternate version: Castlevania Dracula X (Dracula XX: Vampire's Kiss) - Stage 7, "Den"

    Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - "Prologue"


    (I'm personally fonder of the second version of "Den" than the first.)
  • so at the climax of Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D minor -- like, at
    about the 9 minute mark or so (if the performance is 10 minutes long) --
    you get these nine chords, which are:

    A, Dmin/F, Gmin, A, Dmin/F, Dmin, Emin7b5/G, Amin, Bb
    or in other words,
    V, i 6, iv, V, i 6, i, ii ø65, v, VI

    Y'know what would be cool?

    Make them ALL seventh chords.

    A7, Dmin7/F, Gmin7, A7, Dmin#7/F, Dmin(natural)7, Emin7b5/G, Amin7, Bbmaj7
    in other words,
    V7, i 65, iv7, V7, i 6#5, i7, ii ø65, v7, IV7
  • Currently in my head: Curse of IRON PIPE, from the game La-Mulana

    Enjoy the Ashguine 2 reference!
  • Copying from the main thread, some things I posted a while back:

    some Humoresque Progression songs (i VI VII III / vi IV V I) (not a comprehensive list):
    Supercell - Let's Promise (D major)
    EGOIST - Planetes [Guilty Crown] (E major)
    Mike Oldfield - Moonlight Shadow (C# minor)
    Elements Garden - Synchrogazer (D# minor)
    Tomoyuki Nakazawa - Makenai ai ga kitto aru (C# minor)
    Toshihiko Horiyama - Storm Owl (A minor, C# minor)
    Jun Maeda - from the world of the end (G# minor) - G#m7 EM7 F# B / i7 VI7 VII III
    Antonin Dvorak - Humoresque in Gb major, Op. 101 #7 (F# minor)
    Tarou Fukuda - your wind is blowing / for your winds shall blow / anata no kaze ga fuku kara [Rockman DASH / Mega Man Legends] (D minor)
    Toshihiko Horiyama - Jet Stingray (G minor)
    Ian Stocker, Nelson Everhart, Gene Rozenburg, Christopher Sabat, Pawly Pickens - title screen theme [Monster Tale] (A minor) - A(maj) F G C / I VI VII III
    COOLON - Canvas (Db major / Bb minor)
    Tomo - Avalon Blue [BLAU] (E minor) - Em7 C(M9) D G / i7 VI(9) VII III
    Satoshi Yaginuma - only my railgun (Ab minor, G minor)
    Satoshi Yaginuma - LEVEL 5 -judgelight- / LEVEL 5 -judgement- (Ab minor) - Abm Ebm7 FbM7 Gb Cb / i v7 VI7 VII III

    variants:
    Ayumi Hamasaki - Another Song (feat. Urata Naoya): Bbm7 Ebm/Gb Ab+6 Db / vi7 ii6 V+6 I
    atsuko, KATSU - Brilliant Road to Tomorrow / Asu e no Brilliant Road (G minor): Gm Eb (or Cm7/Eb) F Bb / i VI (or iv65) VII III
  • The internet seems to have barely any mention of the (admittedly horribly cheesy) remix of the song "Proud Mary" that was used at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.  This disappoints me.  Because I wanted to look up the lyrics.  All I remember is a very silly "John Kerry keeps on tryin'...tryin'...tryin'...tryin' to make a difference".
  • edited 2014-01-16 02:03:50
    Question: what genre of music is this?

    (N.B.: This song is NOT "Proud Mary".)
  • 80's soft/pop rock?
  • edited 2014-01-16 02:54:22
    Ah, my guess of "country" was off, I see.  So was my second guess of "folk".
  • you could be right for all i know, that was just my best guess from listening to it


    apparently there was some sort of small regional scene/sound this dude was a part of, small enough it doesn't have an english wikipedia article
  • edited 2014-01-17 08:59:28


    Was listening to this the other day.  Now it popped back into my head.  Notably, the last track of the sub-album is a remix, which sounds way different, and I didn't notice it as a remix at first until I listened to it again.

    Yes, sub-album.  Because this game's soundtrack is actually featured as part of a three-soundtrack album, containing the soundtracks of Fairy Bloom Freesia, Ether Vapor Remaster, and what I think is Ether Vapor's original version.
  • edited 2014-01-25 20:03:44
    Chopin wrote several waltzes in A-flat major.

    For some reason, none of them are ones I particularly like that much.  Op. 34 #1 and Op. 42 almost run together in my head because they sound so similar when I'm not paying attention.  Op. 69 #1 has a second theme that seems vaguely relevant to the first two, and I even completely forgot about Op. 64 #3 until I went and looked up Op. 69 #1 on Wikipedia.  There's also Op. 70 #2, which runs together with Op. 69 #1 in my mind sometimes.  Then finally, there's a last one that has no opus cataloguing, and is probably the most distinctive one if only because it is written in 3/8 time rather than 3/4 time.

    Yet, for some reason, people seem to really like Op. 42.  And Op. 69 #1 too.

    On the other hand, some of my favorite waltzes are the more distinctive -- and non-A-flat-major -- ones.  These include the A minor waltz (Op. 34 #2), the F major waltz (Op. 34 #3), the C# minor waltz (Op. 64 #2), the E minor waltz (no opus cataloguing), the (other) A minor waltz (no opus cataloguing), and probably my personal favorite, the B minor waltz (Op. 69 #2).
  • Incidentally, the Polonaise in A-flat major, op. 53, nicknamed "Heroic", is also one of my least favorite polonaises, yet is almost certainly the most-frequently-performed polonaise.
  • edited 2014-01-25 20:09:42
    Op. 44 (F# minor) for the win

    (though admittedly it's a bit repetitive)

    But Op. 53 does some sort of strange fuckery with rhythm that always throws me off.  That makes me dislike it.

    Op. 40 #1 is one of my favorites on the other hand.  It's in A major and nicknamed "military".  Heck, I think "heroic" should apply to this one instead.

    Op. 61, the "Polonaise-Fantasie" in Ab major, doesn't suffer from my disliking it, though that's probably because it's got other weirdness and is also not frequently performed so I haven't gotten sick of it yet.

    Op. 40 #2 in C minor is also good.
  • speaking of op. 40 #2


    dat "b" subsection in the "A" section, with its dreamy G major contrasting with the dark C minor
  • y'know
    what with the many (well, at least two) very different versions of the waltz in B minor
    I should take that as license for artistic liberty on my part
    I should play it however I want
    not just mixing-and-matching but even adding a few embellishments as appropriate

    the hell with you, competition circuit convention
  • y'know what I hate, at music competitions?

    everyone playing the same damn piece

    if I were a judge, I would be absolutely sick of it by the end of the day, even if it were my favorite piece
  • So once I was at the Bartok-Kabalevsky-Prokofiev competition

    and there were multiple skill levels age brackets, from little kids about age 7 or 8 or so up to near-professional college students

    pretty much everyone from the age 10-ish bracket all the way up to the college kids ALL PLAYED THE FIRST MOVEMENT OF KABALEVSKY'S THIRD SONATA.

    I could practically hear a noticeable gradient of skill as I hung around the performance hall during the auditions.

    I was fucking sick of it by the end of the competition.
  • edited 2014-01-25 23:01:41
    “I'm surprised. Those clothes… but, aren't you…?”

    Chopin wrote several waltzes in A-flat major.

    For some reason, none of them are ones I particularly like that much.  Op. 34 #1 and Op. 42 almost run together in my head because they sound so similar when I'm not paying attention.  Op. 69 #1 has a second theme that seems vaguely relevant to the first two, and I even completely forgot about Op. 64 #3 until I went and looked up Op. 69 #1 on Wikipedia.  There's also Op. 70 #2, which runs together with Op. 69 #1 in my mind sometimes.  Then finally, there's a last one that has no opus cataloguing, and is probably the most distinctive one if only because it is written in 3/8 time rather than 3/4 time.

    Yet, for some reason, people seem to really like Op. 42.  And Op. 69 #1 too.

    On the other hand, some of my favorite waltzes are the more distinctive -- and non-A-flat-major -- ones.  These include the A minor waltz (Op. 34 #2), the F major waltz (Op. 34 #3), the C# minor waltz (Op. 64 #2), the E minor waltz (no opus cataloguing), the (other) A minor waltz (no opus cataloguing), and probably my personal favorite, the B minor waltz (Op. 69 #2).

    Well, think of it like this: In the irregular tunings favoured in the 18th century, A flat major was the one of the least consonant major keys because the major thirds were fairly sharp. The effect is one of brightness but little restfulness. This works to make their minor equivalents, such as C sharp minor, more dramatic, but it also keeps them from having the truly smooth harmonic resolutions available in, say, C major or E minor. Chopin was composing to these specifications.
  • Interesting.  I've heard a little bit about it.  You just prompted me to go look up a some videos about it.  I remember I've had an "original instruments" performance of some Chopin chamber music works, though other than the piano sounding a bit more muffled, it didn't seem to make a huge difference.  To me, at least.

    Taking a video like this one:


    ...I can, kinda, hear that the tuning is different.  (I checked out as well but I have no idea whether it's the same sort of unequal temperament.)

    That said, maybe I just don't have my speakers turned up enough, I don't hear the beats (of the frequencies not matching up), and it's definitely not something that I hear very much.  It probably doesn't help that the player here:

    ...is blurring the effect with dragging the pedal from the "first" chords (Bb min) to the "second" chords (Gb/Db), making it hard to distinguish from the effects of tuning and pedaling (and dynamics too...accenting the first chord more).  (It also doesn't help that my net is slow right now.)

    But still, the effect is minimal, to me.  I can appreciate that for some people the effect is a lot greater, but one of the weirdest things is this:

    Tuning doesn't seem to matter very much to me.

    As long as the notes are roughly where they should be, my mind mentally "bins" into the intended frequency.  A quarter-step off is off by too much, but tiny adjustments being illustrated here are not part of my mental music replay simulator.  (That said, I haven't even tested the in-tuned-ness of my mental music replay simulator anyway...)

    Maybe it's a result of me being a pianist not tuning my own piano (as opposed to, say, a violinist, who tunes their own instrument all the time).  Or maybe it's the result of me (or my parents) just waiting a long time between tunings.  Or the result of my playing on lots of different pianos, including ones that some people might consider crappy (which I often find interesting to play on...quite possibly in part because of unusual tuning schemes that come with things going out of tune).  Or even listening to a lot of videogame music (I have no idea why this would do it but I guess some old games have their note frequencies defined from scratch...).  Who knows.

    I mean, I can tell when stuff is out of tune.  But my sensitivity is significantly lower than that of one of my piano teachers.  I remember I played something for her over the phone once, and she was astonished at how out of tune my piano was, but I wasn't.

    The oddest thing is that I have absolute pitch, yet I also have this pitch "binning" mechanism.  Most people would probably expect that me having absolute pitch means that stuff being even slightly out of tune annoys me to no end.  But it doesn't.
  • “I'm surprised. Those clothes… but, aren't you…?”
    The effect is subtle, but it is important to understanding why certain composers wrote certain music in certain keys.

    Maybe your problem is that you are naturally inclined to think of equally tempered thirds as "in-tune," where were one to proceed from a natural fifth harmonic-based third (386.3 cents rather than 400), one would have a different perspective. This would be true of composers of that period, who would likely have at least a passing acquaintance with things like meantone tuning from church organs and the like where a modern musician would generally not.
  • edited 2014-01-26 02:20:27
    But I also do perceive the keys as having significantly different flavors.  Such that changing the key something is in can change, for me, a significant part of its meaning, and the keys themselves have meaning to me.

    It's possible that my mental music renderer isn't actually equal-temperament itself, though.  Alternatively, it could just be me reacting to different pitches...?
  • “I'm surprised. Those clothes… but, aren't you…?”
    I think that it depends on how the piano (or whatever other instrument) in question is tuned. Piano tuning, contrary to what some would have you believe, tends to be a lot more nuanced than simply stacking equal semitones atop one another, at least partly because the lowest and highest keys do not behave acoustically like strings the way that the middle keys do.

    But yes, pitch probably has a good deal to do with it, as well as other factors. Are you synaesthetic, perhaps, or on the autism spectrum?
  • I might be mildly synaesthetic, or I might just have associations.  Some keys are closely associated with mental images, such as E major being associated with a yellow light of dawn (or sometimes dusk) while B major is associated with mid-day lighting.  So is C major, though the difference between the two is that B major is about brightness while C major is about simplicity and clarity.  Or something like that...not sure how many other such associations I have.  F# minor, for example just feels troubled, but doesn't really have an attached color.  I associate letters with colors, but I'm not sure how much that figures into this.

    Ehh, they sound more like associations.  Probably derived from certain key pieces (no pun intended) that were particularly memorable or something.

    (Also, not on the autism spectrum as far as I know.)
  • “I'm surprised. Those clothes… but, aren't you…?”
    I understand. That makes sense.
  • edited 2014-01-26 02:55:03
    ...hmm...what kind of tuning system would the diatonic circle of fifths sound most sailent in?

    What about the strength of a IV to V progression?
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