Yes, hundreds upon hundreds of websites CAN all be wrong
One day a couple of years ago I happened to hear an old song called “The Endless Enigma,” by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, that I remembered from when I was a teenager. Listening to it again reminded me that there was a line in the lyrics that I’d never been able to understand: I’m tired of ________, with tongues in their cheeks… This …
This topic is closed for new posts.
Anarchist's cookbook
Why are you so sure those errors which resulted in self-maimed bombers were accidental?
6/8 time...why not 3/4 time?
I suppose there is a reason some compositions emphasize the eighth note rather than the quarter note. I'm just curious why some state their time signature as 6/8 rather than the reduced form 3/4 (which sheet-wise has the same effect--three quarter notes last the same amount of time as six eighth notes all other things being equal).
Re: 6/8 time...why not 3/4 time?
Apparently it's down to the fundamental note length not being 1/4 note, but half as much again, ie, 3/8ths (a dotted quarter-note in sheet notation). Three/Four time is typical of waltzes and has a ONE two three and ONE two ... beat structure, but I'm not sure how to describe how 6/8 time sounds, or even whether it necessarily has a fixed place to place the emphases.
Anyway, while reading this article, quite a few thoughts came to me. Several posters have brought some of them up already, but not all..
re: the xkcd strip... is the word order even right in that?
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005424.html
re: "kiss this guy" I believe (I read it somewhere on the Internet :) that Hendrix became aware of this mishearing and on some occasions actually sang the modified lyrics. Certainly one time I saw him on a BBC program it sounded more like "kiss this guy" than "kiss the sky" to me. Also, this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Scuse_Me_While_I_Miss_the_Sky
I loved The Smiths, but lots of their lyrics were indecipherable to me... "horn-shoed bicycle on a hillside desolate???" And forget about My Bloody Valentine....
Getting back to time signatures, I hope you mentioned Time Out by the (sadly) recently-deceased Dave Brubeck. While he didn't write the famous Take Five with its 5/4 time signature, all the tracks on the disc have unusual time signatures. It still sounds great today...
Re: 6/8 time...why not 3/4 time?
It's all about the beat. 6/8 divides the bar into two groups of three, e.g. a polka instead of a waltz.
The start of "Money" by Pink Floyd has a 7 note beat, which can only be danced to while inebriated...yet the song was included in a compilation album of "Greatest Dance Tracks".
“No matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as the truth.”
― John F. Kennedy (as copied and pasted from some random website)
Re: 6/8 time...why not 3/4 time?
"Apparently it's down to the fundamental note length not being 1/4 note, but half as much again, ie, 3/8ths (a dotted quarter-note in sheet notation). Three/Four time is typical of waltzes and has a ONE two three and ONE two ... beat structure, but I'm not sure how to describe how 6/8 time sounds, or even whether it necessarily has a fixed place to place the emphases."
I'd been wondering about it for years, and now I have some insight. Dotted quarters with plenty of other eighths in the sheet--maybe in triples (producing a da-da-da rhythm) and/or following a quarter (for a daaaa-da rhythm). Now I can visualize it and can recall plenty of music that had these types of rhythm. Thanks.
Re: 6/8 time...why not 3/4 time?
yeah, that might not have been the best example for deciphering a time-signature. 6/8 time is normally played as something weird called a "compound time signature", though it is less frequently played straight (each eighth note gets a beat). There isn't enough information in the time signature to know which way it is intended-- sometimes the music itself will clue you in (e.g. by breaking the eighth notes into groups of three).
House of the Rising Sun is a nice example of how this time signature feels and why it's called "compound"-- you can feel properties of both 3/4 and 2/4 in each bar-- the lyrics are clearly two beats to the bar (there is- a house) while the guitar part is going 1,2,3 1,2,3. . . it's a pretty distinctive sound.
Re: 6/8 time...why not 3/4 time?
As others have said, it's mostly a "feel" thing. 6/8 time is also syntactically useful for cases when the music is played in triplets, but the music has a "1 2 3 4" rhythm to it. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata is a good example for the "feel" of 6/8 music, although Beethoven didn't write it as such.
Re: "Kiss this guy... "
There's a live recording (the Isle of Mann?) where he sung "'scuse me while I kiss this police man..."?
Re: 6/8 time...why not 3/4 time?
Why? Consider the 6/8 march "The Washington Post", which was a popular two-step dance tune in its time. Try doing that with an extra beat to the bar...
Re: Consider the 6/8 march
Surely marches must be 2/4 --- because you have two feet, and always lead with the same one.
Re: Consider the 6/8 march
A 6/8 signature can operate as a for the purposes of marching while also allowing triplet beats for the music (since 2 and 3 both divide cleanly into 6). IIRC the jig "MacNamara's Band" is based on marching music, but you can hear the triplet pattern of the notes within each third or "step" beat of the song.
Re: Charles 9
Thanks. I was thinking that anything like that would be 2/4 or 4/4 with tuples. I guess that is not the case.
Not that I have thought about it much, or ever got any real musical education, but the nuts and bolts can't help but occasionally fascinate a music lover.
Re: 6/8 time...why not 3/4 time?
The start of "Money" by Pink Floyd has a 7 note beat, which can only be danced to while inebriated...yet the song was included in a compilation album of "Greatest Dance Tracks"...
Yeah, I wondered about that, too. Could be because when it goes to Gilmour's big solo in the middle, it breaks down into a regular 4/4, almost a kind of a swing groove; then, when the solo winds down, it goes back to the 7.
Jethro Tull's "Living In The Past" is another long-time fave of mine. To this day I'm amazed that any band back then could get onto Top Of The Pops and have a massive hit with a song played in 5/4.
I think that these (often very funny) "lyrical confusions" are driven by both the............
...........the artist's endeavours to fit the lyrics to the musical focrm the producer wants and/or the artist's own idiosyncratic take as far as pronunciation goes. The Nat King Cole classic "Mona Lisa" contains the following lines:
"Are you warm, are you real, mona lisa?
Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art? "
If you listen to it it sounds for all the world as if he sung "are you warm are you rill mona lisa?" which does sound a touch peculiar. Oh, Happy New Year everyone!
Of course you also get examples of people using the internet to spread misinformation on purpose (for fun) - like the often regurgitated "you eat x spiders a year while you sleep" which was in fact an experiment to see how quickly misinformation will spread around the internet and become fact. It works in the same way - people republish the information until it becomes the definitive answer when you search. A quick Google search however several years after it was revealed that is was in fact a lie - shows that most of the results on the first page point to the fact it was a made up statistic. So in this example, yes - the web has corrected itself.
re: "you eat x spiders a year while you sleep"
Or the one about how the daddy long-legs (crane fly) is the most poisonous creature in the UK/Ireland, and has venom that can kill a man. Only fortunately for us, it can't bite through our skin...
(yes, this is a myth, but a very often repeated one).
Re: daddy long-legs
No, no, lol. Not crane flies, but Pholcidae. And I thought they were meant to be the most venomous creature in the world. Anyway, Mythbusters disproved that: http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-database/daddy-long-leg-spiders.htm
Nevertheless, they do an excellent job of keeping down the spider population in my abode.
Jessie J
Whenever I get bored I go round the web correcting articles that assert Jessie J was born in Essex. It doesn't help that she states this in the first page of her autobiography.
"The web makes it effortless for anyone to copy and “republish” any information that’s out there, regardless of quality."
That and any medium of copying. Since time began. But we can still go back and check and correct where ever possible.
Wikis to the rescue?
My lyrics source of choice is LyricWiki (lyrics.wikia.com)
Crowd-source your lyrics, get the community to verify and maintain them, and back it all up with Gracenote-sanctioned versions (though sometimes Gracenote gets it wrong too - for example in Moby's "Lift Me Up", they list one line of the chorus us "[Unverified]". So very helpful.).
They even have the correct lyrics for The Endless Enigma ;)
I got serious grief from an ex gf who said I ruined her fave song when I sang:
"I'm like a bird, I'll only fly away.
I don't know where my phone is..."
I'm mad after midnight
A friend accused me of having ruïned the ABBA song "Gimme Gimme Gimme" for him after having pointed out to him that the words are "... a man after midnight" and not "I'm mad after midnight".
All this presumes...
That the bands involved were going with the written\published lyrics and not forgetting them and\or making their own variants up in the studio (or just having fun and doing some leg pulling)
Re: All this presumes...
Someone I knew (?) told me that his band sang "Ten days of felch" instead of "Ten days of hell", just because they were bored. (btw felch is a silly rude word).
Printed books are just as bad...
I mean, there's even some weird zombie death cult with an obsession with crosses - all because they've got a book that says its true.
The most famous balls-up...
.. involves the writer Philip Roth. He wrote a story (as writers do...) which some reviewers misinterpreted. The Wiki picked these misinterpretations up and published them.
Philip Roth sent them an e-mail pointing out that what the wiki was saying was not true. The wiki refused to change it - because it had cites for the error, but only an email (from the original writer!) for the correct version. Eventually Roth had to write a magazine article pointing out the error - and the wiki took that as an adequate cite.
The story is here: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/alih/201209/2090/
No surprise
I constantly find incorrect technical information posted online. When you try to explain to the unknowing that it's incorrect, they assure you it MUST be correct because it's posted at 4,286+ websites or threads - so it MUST be true...or NOT!
The same applies to PC hardware testing where the tester doesn't use appropriate test procedures and then gets an incorrect result. People who know no different will argue that the results MUST be correct because they are published on a website. They completely miss the importance of proper testing methodology.
Re: No surprise
yes, and they usually forget to say WHAT OS they are using!! - the wrong one, causing more crashes... :( :(
- only use a forum, and if no answer, forget it!!! :(
The same thing happens with chord charts. Many, perhaps the majority of, chord charts on the Internet are wrong - sometimes egregiously so. But most of them are identical, so clearly they're copies of the original wrong chart.
I have bought guitar tab and chord books before that were obviously wrong. They can be a good starting point for a song, but you need to change it to suit your own style and voice and correct the wrong chords / voiceings.
Playing the exact recording version of a song is very boring and not a lot of bands are faithful to their original recordings.
I'm currently playing The Smiths covers with a country feel to them. Makes people laugh and sing along in silly voices.
Beer because the ultimate stage fright relaxant.
Only us dumb morons here!
And I bet you were also watching Idiocracy last night
error
The most obvious error demonstrated in the article was the assumption that accurate information could be looked up consistently in a general web search at all. The nature of the web itself as knowledge base is hit and miss with as a rule unauthorized sourcing. It's always more about connecting and making connections, information and people wise. Sometimes the impression can arise one can use it (the web as collection) as some kind of fast encyclopedia and supplier of arcane or trivial fact from a global data store but it just really isn't designed to do that. It was just one of those popular things that grew out of it, wholly imperfect but since people are not really looking for exactness when looking for song lyrics or music notation on a random site, this is perfectly okay. It's not something to worry about in itself. What is something to worry about is that large amount of people who have at some point bestowed certain qualities on the web which are not there and should also never be expected by professional users.
Misheard Lyrics....Alison moyet:
I grow wigs for the president of Newquay...
Case in point: Hogmanay.
Over the last few years I've seen a new myth appear and it's all over the sodding internet: the claim that "Hogmanay" (Scottish for New Year's Eve) comes from the Gaelic "Oge maidne"... which doesn't exist. There is something similar -- "òg-mhadainn", but this means the very start of a morning (predawn, I believe). And yet it has spread so profusely that you'll even see someone posting pictures of his New Year's parties under the heading "Oge Maidne".
It's being copy-and-pasted around so much that it's killing genuine truth....
15/16, really?
I've come across a few exotic time signatures in the course of my amateur choral career, but 15/16 is a new one to me!
Of course, having read the article, now I don't dare search the Web for an example...
Oh yes........ For some reason I don't even understand myself, "I am not a dance music fan" I love the song "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" By Eiffel 65. Its even the ringtone on my phone.
But there is not ONE site on the internet that has not twisted the "Da Ba Dee" part into misheard lyrics. Not a single one. And if I argue the point someone will say, "You are wrong! I checked the official site!" this OFFICIAL site always tends to be Lyrics Freak or something of its ilk, where the Lyrics are contributed from the readers. Worse are the people who purposely contribute bad lyrics because the think its funny.
It's about the Scots
I'm blue, in Aberdeen I will die, Aberdeen I will die...
Re: It's about the Scots
You think you are funny, but you aren't....................
Re: It's about the Scots
I believe it was a famous Scots comedian that came out with that originally, but hey ho.
sue lawley!! sue lawley!! :)
Ok, can anyone name the song this comes from???? ROFL ROFL...
Re: sue lawley!! sue lawley!! :)
Yes, it's by Sting. The actual lyrics are:-
Salami. Salami.
Re: sue lawley!! sue lawley!! :)
ROFLMAO!!!!! best yet....:)
Its The Police, not Sting (there is a difference you know) :)
and don't forget the classic "Massage in a Brothel"
Money!
How can we hold this discussion on time signatures without mentioning the amazing Pink Floyd number "Money" which is in TWO time signatures (4/4 & 7/4) sometimes simultaeneously.
For the non-muso's try tapping one foot in time with the rhythm and the other in time with the melody.
:D
Other Great Classics :
I'm Shaving off my muff for you (Houston)
Excuse me while I kiss this guy (Hendrix)
We built this city on the wrong damn road (Jefferson Starship ? Airplane ? Spruce Goose ?)
Here we are now, in containers (Nirvana, or was it Chinese immigrants ?)
And one of my favourite :
My anus is the center hole (J. Geils Band)
I'm sure there's a website somewhere.
What is "right"?
I heard (!) Dave Edmunds got to play with Carl Perkins and was told his intro to Blue Suede Shoes was wrong, you're playing it like the record, I fluffed it in the studio it should go like this...
I have published sheet music that is less like the recordings than some on line tabs - although plenty of on line tabs that are v. wrong!
Dave
The web ISN'T a library.
The hard copy in libraries is better vetted and verified, unlike the cheaply replicated slop that emerges from a web search. Data Integrity is carefully guarded in most life/death institutions (aka medical, military, financial). We're not talking about if it remains uncorrupted on some cloud platform or if the media (hard drives/dvd/flash/etc) will retain it correctly, but if the facts themselves are correct.
Music is another animal entirely, a mish-mosh of human rhythm, vocalizations, but perhaps the one most ignored is 'presence', or the direct affect by a performer on immediate persons physically present. I used the word AFFECT rather than EFFECT for purpose. (rather than effect :))
Money (and ownership of today's so called 'music") corrupts the process, removes the performer from the listener by insertion of duplicating process. And that is the only thing the big corporate RIAA and Sony types are in, duplication and shipping that around. They cannot be performers, artists or anything similar, so they steal the very heart of the artist's value from their work, and no one is the wiser.
STOP buying music, go only to concerts, LIVE concerts, where the artist can do what they do best, touch and see the people who care enough to show up.
Eliminate the greedy corporate overhead from the real art of music and communication.
Any artist of worth is not in it for greed, but for the love of the art. If their art is worth showing up for, they will never be hungry.
Out of the millions of performers, decide who are the real artists and who are the false profit takers, the cheap duplicators and clueless parrots.
Re: The web ISN'T a library.
"STOP buying music, go only to concerts, LIVE concerts, where the artist can do what they do best..."
Hmm, I'm a musician, but I produce electronic music and don't perform live. I and others who do this surely appreciate your dismissing us as non-artists and cheap duplicators of heartless fakery.
Also, there are plenty of musicians whose most prominent talent is indeed touching the people who show up, but I'm not sure how many aim to do so in the way you envision.
This topic is closed for new posts.
