Most Complex Time Signature ever!?

A random pattern of every possible time signature in one song would be the most complicated.

Just Found Out that "Rational Gaze" by Meshuggah is in 4/4!

Edited by Abstrakt - September 30 2006 at 10:44

Abstrakt wrote: It sounds very complex because it's put together very complex. Probably with 16th notes, which technically makes it 16/16

    

No it doesn't! Actually, making it 16/16 makes the sixteenth notes slower because the 16th note gets the beat.

Philéas wrote: A random pattern of every possible time signature in one song would be the most complicated.

Yes, it's called spontaneous music, like the Dead on a good night or maybe KC's 'Thrakattak'.
    

Jim Garten wrote: I remember Bruford saying in an interview that KC are the only band he's played in where he gets to use a 17/16 time signature & still stay in a decent hotel.

I wrote in 11/16 once. The first four bars took me 2 complete hours to do something coherent. But it ended up very well. I'll upload the sheet if i can find it...


Edited by Revan - November 08 2006 at 13:15

A big band tune by Don Ellis called "33 222 1 222."  It's in 19/4.  If you don't think that's too complicated, just look at the title.  That's how each measure is subdivided.  There's another Don Ellis tune called "27/16."  Guess what time signature it's in. 

"Retropolis" by The Flower Kings - 9/8 and 11/8 in the intro

I just found that out

I think you'll find 16/16 is more likely to start
Onetwothree onetwothree onetwothree...!

Abstract you are the one who is wrong here. I understand what you're thinking, but musically it is not correct. More notes in a measure do not change the lower number of the time Sig.    

If the measure were to be broken down into irregular groupings of 16th note pulses then and only then would you use 16 in the lower number. Even then as Guest notes, the correct way to set up the time sig. would be as guest put it (3+3+4+2+4 / 16). Larger top numbers are only used as reverie points out to avoid "clutter" in a score. No real musician will count that measure as 16/16.

If the sixteenth notes are organized in groups of four (like the example you gave) you are in 4/4 time. The quarter note (the lower 4) can go at any tempo you like making the 16th notes go anywherer from really, really fast to not so fast, to almost slow. A 16th note is not a guarantee of a certain speed. The organizing pulse is still found at the quarter note level.

One might just ask well as what the most complicated mathematical equation is. The equation might take up many pages and the answer could turn out to be 1. The time signature thing is exactly the same. The gibberish time signatures you all are putting up DO NOT EXIST musically, they only exist mathematically.

The measures in question all break down into sub groupings of 2, 3, or 4 pulses. No player will ever count to 27 (or even 17 or 11) as he reads his part. He will look at the music and break it down into sub-groupings, take out his pencil and mark the score accordingly.

Similarly, a conductor will not beat time in groupings of anything more than 4 beats. These "complex" time signatures are a figment of the over-active imaginations of some guys who want to appear clever to their gullible fans. I know no one wants to hear this because its fun to think of how "amazing" all these time signatures are, but musically, it's a fallacy. Sorry.

As for this stuff:
Historically, this device has been prefigured wherever composers have written tuplets; for example, a 2/4 bar consisting of 3 triplet crotchets could arguably more sensibly be written as a bar of 3/6. Henry Cowell's piano piece "Fabric" (1920) throughout employs separate divisions of the bar (anything from 1 to 9) for the three contrapuntal parts, using a scheme of shaped noteheads to make the differences visually clear, but the pioneering of these signatures is largely due to Brian Ferneyhough. Thomas Ades has also made extensive use of them, for example in his piano work "Traced Overhead" (1996), the second movement of which contains, amongst more conventional meters, bars in such signatures as 2/6, 9/14 and 5/24. A gradual process of diffusion into less rarefied musical circles seems to be underway, hence for example, John Pickard's work "Eden", commissioned for the 2006 finals of the National Brass Band Championships of Great Britain, which contains bars of 3/10.

Show me a 6th note or a 14th note and I'll play it. Of course they do not exist and so, cannot be the pulse level "beat" of any composition. This is just another example of the self-important composer attemptiing to prove he knows more than his audience.

The pulse level of the pieces in question are NOT at those levels. This is an overly clever way of changing tempo without marking a simple tempo change in the score. Elliott Carter invented this concept in the 1950s and called it metric modulation. In brief, he took the tempo of a triplet or quintuplet and made that the new tempo of an eighth or quarter note, thus speeding up or slowing down the tempo of the piece. Carter accomplished it without changing the time signatures though, which made playing and conducting his pieces much simpler.

The current adaptation of Carter's concepts seem only intended to antagonize the player and conductor and prove the superiority of the composer's wonderful mind. The listener won't hear it and the player won't feel it, but the composer still insists it's real. In short it's gobbledygook.    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    

Edited by Trademark - December 01 2006 at 11:50