Patting Your Head and Rubbing Your Stomach
Syncopation for Musical Optical Illusions
Dear reader, are you familiar with the optical illusion where, if you stare at the following image of a cube for long enough, you can “trick” your mind into seeing it alternatively like:
- A cube popping out of the screen towards you (so that the lower-left square is the back), or
- A cube going into the screen away from you (so that the lower-left square is the front)?
This song, “System” by Brotherly, is the musical equivalent of that illusion. Start listening at about 2m15s, and go until 2m45s, to (hopefully) see what I mean—it’ll sound like something in the song has suddenly shifted, despite the fact that actually everything in this entire song, from beginning to end, can be counted within 6/4 time (with each of the 6 beats having 4 subdivisions) or within 4/4 time (with each of the 4 beats having 6 subdivisions):
Like how nothing changes in the image of the cube, only the perspective from which we look at it, 2m15s to 2m45s in that song represents solely a shift in what our brains focus on in terms of grouping the notes together into a coherent pattern!
YouTube music-theory-explainer sensation and drummer Yogev Gabay does an amazing job of explaining it here, but I wanted to see if I could tackle it from the reverse angle.
That is: while Gabay diagrams it out in 6/4 throughout, and thus interprets the rhythmic shift at ~2m30s as basically a “layering” of 4/4 onto this 6/4 grid, I wanted to see if I could train my brain to hear the entire song in 4/4 (like switching from cube-popping-outwards to cube-pushing-inwards), to see what the… majority of the song (the song outside of the 2m20s to 2m45s portion) would look like from this angle. So, here goes…
To fully navigate the song in 4/4, you have to start the bassline on the… very last beat of a sequence of sixteenth-note sextuplets. But, after that, it starts to feel a little more possible. Meaning, if you were to play it in real life with the 4/4 count throughout, your brain might be salvageable if you had your drummer count like
- One two three one two three
- Two two three one two three
- Three two three one two three
- Four two three one two three
And then the bassline, kick drum, and hi-hat all started exactly on that bolded three at the end of the fourth set of sextuplets…
Rather than trying to write out any more words trying to capture how cool it is, I figure an even better way is to write it out in 4/4 on a score, so, here it is with the 4/4 count-in and 4/4 metronome running throughout, so you can see how, while it is possible to count it as 4/4, you would really need to
- Train your brain to subdivide each of the 4 beats within a bar into a sextuplet, and then
- Train your body/fingers to become really good at hitting a drum or playing a note exactly on one of those six sub-beats that go into each sextuplet…
So, without further ado, here is the score with the 4/4 metronome! (Apparently you need to turn the metronome on manually, using the little icon to the right of the play button—I can’t find any way to set Flat.io to have it on by default… but otherwise Flat.io is dope!)