Maibasojen
By Isoraķatheð Zorethan F.
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Cover art by Isoraķatheð Zorethan F.
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isoraqathedh.github.io
Other.
Released 7/30/2011.
Duration: 3:13.
Listen on Bandcamp or YouTube.
Read artist commentary.
Tracks that reference Maibasojen:
- From Fandom:
Artist commentary:
Isoraķatheð Zorethan F.: (booklet commentary)
Well, what have we... Felt (SI: HS\MUS:B0) got me thinking about time signatures, and also lumping multiple together. This is the fruition of this endeavor. Granted, it's not any good, but this may be the one piece where you have a 30/30 time signature (4/4 overlay 5/5 overlay 6/8). It's a little bit tired; stumbling; drunk... much like the first time when I first found this comic, I would assume. That was about two years ago.
(On an unrelated note, this applies to table tennis very well.)
Isoraķatheð Zorethan F.: (wiki communications over email, excerpt)
Hello.
Maibasojen[1] is a piece of music that I made as part of a long-ago project to make 26 pieces, one for each of the alphabet.[2] It turns out that at the time I was really into Homestuck, and also I learnt about hemiola[3] and thought that the time-warping nature kind of felt similar to whatever mess the Felt was doing, so the idea was that I put the two together and tried to work that in as a submission. I remember distinctly that it was almost meant to be discarded from the list because it doesn't feel particularly Homestuck,[4] but clearly it made it in the end.
With that in mind, here are some specific tangents:
[1] Sometimes the B, S and J are flopped around each other because the name has never really been fixed; pronunciation is IPA except that <j> is /ʔ/.
[2] The entire album is called Palokrai and is cut into two parts. The reference to the alphabet was not planned out at first; instead the first few pieces I wrote just happened to avoid each other by first letter and I thought to continue that down that road until it ends. Letters are picked without decision. As described later, M is picked 3rd from the end. Looking at the album art of the others, it appears that the box at the bottom is to ensure that the presence of the box and the colour together uniquely determine which song in the album it is.
I believe that every piece has a four-syllable name, and if it won't fit on one line in the default font then it's split into two visually. There is however never a space in the name.
[3] The three-against-two pattern which forms the primary impetus in the piece; I actually first heard it as a sample on Wikipedia and I thought it was probably good enough to continue as a whole song. Later on quintuplets show up for a 2:3:5 polyrhythm. At the time, I did not know the words "hemiola", "quintuplets" or "polyrhythm", and so the concept looked mysterious; now less so of course, and I would have approached it slightly differently. I was lacking in music theory knowledge, ironically enough.
[4] The idea of making fanart subtle enough that it doesn't scan as such at first pass as such continues today in my current creative output - a lot of it is technically "fanart" but it has so many things that are distinctly me-shaped that it never looks like it. Also to conform to my creative limitations they aren't really visual art.
Additionally, the polyrhythm is what the grey figure represents. Every song in Palokrai has one of these in the album cover. The pair of axes I forget what the axes represent, but only what kind of quality each one has relative to each other.
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I have had no idea what "(SI: HS\MUS:B0)" would refer to at all; I never recalled writing it. The lime numbers shows that it is a piece of music (3), and it's the 23rd piece I've made that lives in this categorisation system, and it's the audio version (2). The sheet music version, which I have considered to be the authoritative one with the audio version being a digestible alternative, would be No. 3.23.01. Nowadays I use a different categorisation system - two actually - and basically can't keep up with this one.
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As you do note it's been a duodecade since the piece, and if I want to explore the idea of "time-warping music" I now have more theory to back it up. It would be xenharmonic and xenrhythmic and backed by ideas that I developed during my time with my own conworlds too. Would I do it? Probably not, and almost certainly not as a "Homestuck fan-music" as I don't remember a whole bunch and looking things up is sure to bring up some embarrassing (though ultimately harmless!) memories.