Radiohead and the Rhythmic Illusion

there was a video a while back on the vox channel that talked about a confusing rhythm in Radiohead's video tape song the video made a great detective story about the confusion and you should definitely check it out on the link below but to quickly summarize the song had what sounded like a simple four chord piano pattern after some investigation teacher Warren Lane worked out that the song is actually conceived with the piano chords falling on the syncopated eighth note before the beat [Music] and the funny thing was this caused such confusion that even Thom Yorke the lead singer of Radiohead was filmed at a gig struggling to get his head around the intricacies of the music they'd created [Music] to make it even clearer here is a simple beat that it sounds like the chords belong to and here's a beat that's closer to that hidden beat as the band conceived it will get back to this song and what makes it so special in a moment but when I watched the video I was reminded of a whole bunch of rhythmic illusions that I've noticed over the years in different genres of music where you completely mistake where the downbeat of the piece actually is I think the first one I noticed was in the brand New Heavies self-titled 1990 album which starts like this the downbeat is right but as soon as the bass arrives you realize you've got things horribly wrong [Music] to understand what's going on in these illusions we need to think a bit about how we perceive rhythm and in particular the idea of meter so a pulse is a short unit of time just like a tick of a metronome but a meter divides that pulse into stronger and weaker stresses WT Fitch calls musical meters trees in time because of this subdividing structure which progresses from strong main beats to ever smaller and weaker beats most genres of music player gentle but constant game with the listeners expectations missing out a stronger beat here emphasizing a weaker beat there but there are different degrees to which the game is played level one is straight undifferentiated pulse there's some evidence to suggest that even animals can perceive pulse but non to my knowledge that they can detect hierarchies of stress beneath that level two starts to have a meter but has a very little syncopation this is the category of music most enjoyed by young children by the time they reach adulthood most people whether they realized it or not will have built up a sophisticated understanding of meter and where they can expect the stronger and weaker beats to fall within certain types of music that just leaves one final category of the highest level of rhythmic sophistication for most music is playing with our expectations it's just doing so to varying degrees depending on the rhythmic sophistication of the music and these rhythmic illusions we're talking about stem from a composer or performer pushing that sense of meter to its limit here's another example from Herbie Hancock's hang up your hangups [Music] these examples come from the jazz-funk tradition and that isn't so surprising both jazz and funk have rhythmic ambiguity baked into their style which probably reveals their debt to the complex Pali rhythms of West African music one pop music example bring on the night by the police still shows the African influence this time in Stuart Copeland's reggae inspired drumming all the examples so far have used the same hi-hat pattern made up of two short eighth notes followed by one quarter note hearing it alone it's impossible to tell whether the quarter notes come before the beat or on the beat throw in an off-putting accent and you're all set with your rhythmic illusion what may surprise you is that this kind of trick actually goes a lot further back Brahms for example isn't known as one of the funkiest of composers but he is always shifting the beat in his music phrases that you think are at one point in the bar suddenly emerge somewhere else [Music] and here's one from joseph haydn written in 1789 the hidin is very much in the same mold as the pop & jazz examples its purpose is to teasingly trick the listener the Brahms however is slightly different he's not really putting the downbeat in the wrong place to have a bit of fun with us it's more of a compositional device we the listeners may not actually realize we're on the wrong beat of the bar but Brahms certainly does and this forces him to squeeze and stretch his music until he gets himself back on track it's one of a range of techniques Brahms uses to keep his music in a constant state of development finally let's look at a couple of examples from traditional and world music the Scotch snap is a rhythm associated with the traditional Scottish dance the strats pay it reverses the normal pattern you find in music with a dotted rhythm so instead of the usual long short rhythm you have the short accented note on the beat and the longer note second however if you mix the two together as tends to happen in the stress Bay it can become a challenge to find the downbeat here's a tune that researcher Phil tagged found illustrating this point [Music] [Applause] [Music] do check out Phil's fascinating video all about the Scotch snap linked below the last example and perhaps the most rhythmically sophisticated comes from the forests of Cameroon like the strafes Bay here the ambiguity is built into the essence of the music I was so fascinated by this piece a few years ago that I used the rhythm as a starting point for one of the dances in my clarinet quintet gumboots and I'll try and post a video about that soon this is the orchestra back at green a forest living back a musicians on the Cameroon Congolese border opening guitar is in a 9 8 pattern with a three plus two plus two plus two rhythm to my ear the downbeat sounds like it's at the start of the group of three but then a contradictory bass drum comes in on the third eighth note of the pack [Music] what's fascinating and what stands out in the Radiohead example is that in the recorded version of videotape there's no moment when the true downbeat is actually sounded when the drum track briefly emerges later in the song it just gives us a backbeat with nothing on the downbeat there's a danger that some people might find this a bit of a dumb thing to do it's like setting up a joke and withholding the punchline and I have to confess I do enjoy the video of the so called Bonnaroo version of the song where the real beat is heard with slightly more emphasis but part of me also really admires the brazenness of what they've attempted here to my knowledge is the only example anywhere where the syncopation lasts so long it out lasts the piece itself thanks for watching I'd love to hear from you if you have any ideas for future videos please do subscribe like and comment below [Music]

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 340,032

Rating: 4.9499798 out of 5

Keywords: Radiohead, Brand New Heavies, Herbie Hancock, Phil Tagg, Orchestre Baka Gbine, VOX Radiohead, Warren Lain, David Bruce, Gumboots, Strathspey, Scotch Snap, The Police, Bring on the Night, Jazz Funk, Brahms, Haydn, Downbeat illusions, Rhythm Illusions, Rhythmic Tricks

Id: kBNvPb331SQ

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2017