Full transcript
0:00In alchemy, the moon is represented with this symbol.
0:04Isn't that strange?
0:06The ground intersects the most obvious cycle in the sky,
0:09and the resulting symbol represents the second most obvious cycle in the sky.
0:14It's a pretty direct visual reference, but
0:17generally, cycles are represented with circles.
0:21And that makes sense.
0:22What's more cyclical than a circle?
0:25One of the most fundamental kernels of knowledge,
0:27one that everybody seems to intuitively understand,
0:30is that music is movement.
0:32And that journey is often cyclical.
0:35You need to establish a home, then travel away.
0:41Then, usually, but not always,
0:44you come back home.
0:46This applies to harmony, but it also applies to melodies.
0:49A melody that doesn't leave home is just a tone.
0:56When I say music is about the journey,
0:58this is what I mean.
1:00If C is the destination, how do we get there?
1:03You could plot a melody as a trip around a circle.
1:10Just as you can only travel halfway into a forest,
1:13you can only go halfway into an octave.
1:15anything past F#, up or down...
1:17it's going to bring you closer to C.
1:20That's circles.
1:22This...
1:23is salt.
1:24A perfect bisection.
1:26In our circle of notes, it depicts a tritone.
1:29A rather dissonant pair.
1:30Every obvious shape does this.
1:32Triangle? That's an augmented chord.
1:34Square? Diminished chord.
1:36or really just two tritones.
1:38These shapes show the liminal areas of our circle.
1:42You can travel here, but it takes tremendous effort to stay here.
1:45the tritone wants to bend, to resolve.
1:50The augmented chord wants to scalene, to resolve.
1:55The square, or more commonly the isosceles,
1:58wants to move forward.
2:01I guess there's one more shape you can add here:
2:03two triangles.
2:05But now we're just hitting every other note.
2:07I think I saw someone expand on this once...
2:10Ah, but you can pull magic from this arrangement.
2:12Just rotate the star.
2:17That's the circle of fifths:
2:19a cornerstone of music theory and analysis.
2:22And it's built on a lie.
2:25See, the power of the circle of fifths,
2:27the reason that musicians keep coming back to it,
2:30is in its name.
2:31Each note is a fifth away from the last,
2:33and they circle back around after visiting all 12 notes.
2:37A fifth is defined as a frequency ratio of 3/2,
2:40but the fifth that we use?
2:43It's off by a third of a percent.
2:45Less, actually, but it adds up.
2:47Look.
2:56And we're back at C,
2:57right?
2:58Wrong.
3:00We're off by 24 cents, give or take.
3:03A Pythagorean comma, formerly.
3:05The "circle" of fifths is actually a spiral.
3:24There's this weird, shockingly prevalent notion that
3:27music theory is a hard-bound set of rules that you must follow
3:31to make your music sound good and boring.
3:34I want you to know that's just not true.
3:37Music is squishy witchcraft.
3:39Theory is a popular way of navigating that, but
3:42you can write your own spells.
3:44You'll probably end up reinventing several wheels, but
3:46who cares?
3:48Have fun first.