so the most frequent comment I've got since I did my time signatures in Radiohead video has been what about pyramid sung and I agreed what about pyramid some I didn't do it I should have done it so here is a whole video dedicated to explaining what on earth is going on in this confusing song so like many other people I've often thought about pyramid song as being in a very weird time signature I've not really know what the time signature is but it feels really odd so what I did is I just looked up the
sheet music for it and I looked at what time signature was listed on the sheet music and it was 4 4 well there you go four four okay it's a bit more complicated than just four four see different songs written in the same time signature can have drastically different rhythms here's an example I used in the previous video the first two bars are a normal straight 4/4 rhythm but the second two bars are a syncopated 4/4 rhythm [Music] so even though both of those segments are both in 4/4 they have drastically different rhythmic fills and
pyramid song basically takes this idea and goes even further with it pyramid song is based on a repeating two bar rhythm [Music] the rhythm is actually symmetrical is a bit like a pyramid made of two dotted crotchet a minim and then another set of two dotted crotchet or you could think about it in quavers as 3 3 4 3 3 so you can see there the symmetry this repeating 2 bar rhythm actually acts quite a lot like larvae which is an idea I've talked about in previous videos Clara is a Latin American technique when a
short one or two bar rhythm is repeated throughout the entire piece to underpin it to glue all together so pyramid song has this repeating 2 bar rhythm that acts like a claw they throughout the whole song and interestingly enough this carve a is actually just a slowed down bossa nova' rhythm [Music] now I think this is just the coincidence but it is quite interesting that this Riven that's acting a bit like larvae is actually the same as a traditional Latin American rhythm so you might be thinking at this point how can pyramid song have a
repeating to bar rhythm and yet still sounds so disorientating and unn repeating well that's because this 2 bar rhythm is getting complicated by something else it's getting complicated by where the chords change so this is the 2 bar Riven that we've been talking about and I've written out twice it so we've got 4 bars of it in total see where the chords change in the bar has a big impact on where we perceive the strong beats to be where the accented beats should be a beat where a chord changes on has more rhythmic impact than
a beat where the chord stays the same and the thing is for our pyramid song the beat on which the chord changes keeps getting moved around it's inconsistent so even though the rhythm is the same every two bars different beats keep getting accented which keeps making it sound different [Music] back [Music] to [Music] I used to see Oh so you might be thinking now if this rhythm is so odd why is it written down in 4/4 which is the most common time signature surely it should be written in an odd time signature and that's a
good question but what we should be thinking about is why do we need a time signature why do we want to use a time signature to write this down technically speaking you could write down any song including pyramid sung on sheet music without a time signature all it would mean is you don't have any bars you just have effectively one long constant bar and you still would be able to play this music because you've got all the rhythmic information in your crotchet sing quavers in your quarter notes and eighth notes [Music] the point of a
time signature is to make this some easier to understand and easier to read it's a way of communicating information [Music] so if we wanted to use a time signature that matched the accents of pyramid song to communicate where the strong beats are and to break up the rhythm then I think the best bet would be using free eight and then four eight so you're switching back and forth between 3a and 4a [Music] so writing it down this way can have advantages it can make it a bit clearer exactly how the rhythm Falls but it does
make it a lot harder to track where the rhythm is repeating where one section ends and enough it begins and it makes the sheet music a lot Messier by having loads and loads of different time signatures that keep changing if we write it down and fall for instead the rhythm may not fit into the bars as perfectly as we might have liked but at least now we can see whether sections repeat as I said before our rhythmic pattern repeats every two bars so if you're in 4/4 you can see that quite cleanly and it makes
it a lot easier to understand where the rhythm is repeating [Music] so though it might seem unintuitive to write down an odd song like pyramid song in 4/4 time which is usually associated with simple straightforward rhythms it is actually the simplest way to get across this rhythm as sheet music but there is actually one more element of this music which is making a sound weird an element which is actually quite difficult to write down on to sheet music that is because pyramid song is swung now swing as most of you will know is when quavers
or eighth notes are all equal in duration like they are in most music but instead each pair of quavers has a longer beat and a shorter beat so you get a longer quaver and a shorter Cueva now the easiest way to hear the swing in pyramid song I found is to put pyramid song against a swung metronome so here is pyramid song with a swung metronome [Music] and here is pyramid song if it were actually straight so I've straightened out the rhythm and I've put it against the straight metronome [Music] [Applause] can you hear the
difference that is quite subtle but it definitely have us give pyramid song it's one key almost Roberto asked feeling now swing and swung rhythms as I'm sure you know is usually associated with jazz and this is actually where Tommy York got the inspiration for Pyramid sung in an interview in the June 2001 edition of Mojo magazine Thom Yorke said pyramid song is me being totally obsessed by a Charlie Mingus song called freedom and I was just trying to duplicate that really our first version of pyramid even had all the collapse that you hear on freedom
unfortunately our crap sounded really naff so I quickly erased them this mewling from Moscow so there you go all along pyramid Sun was just in fall for it just had a weird set of accents that repeated every four bars and it was fun and it's a great example of how Radiohead can do very sophisticated things in music but still make it sound unbelievably beautiful a musical so if you have any other suggestions about videos I can make about Radiohead what other artists please leave a comment below thank you for your services there's not miss Alice
plea but a madman this most incandescent boom whose love the soul as imperfection in this most lustrous moon
