BEHIND THE SONG: Room 101

"'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101.  I told you that you knew the answer already.  Everyone knows it.  The thing that's in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world."  - Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (movie clip of this scene)

My last post talks in detail how I turned a pattern into a rhythm and then into a song. Like "Rule 34," my song "Room 101" is based on a cellular automaton. The rule is, predictably, rule 101:

After playing with some different initial conditions under this rule using Mathematica, I got this pattern. To recap earlier posts, my idea is to use this pattern to define rhythm where a dark square signifies an eighth note and a white square signifies a quarter note. The top line represents the song intro, and then it proceeds.

I hope it's clear that this pattern is different from the one in "Rule 34." There are two features: (1) for the first few lines, this pattern is totally bonkers and (2) after that, it's just alternating white and dark stripes. I decided to run with that, and that's why "Room 101" starts with an intro that's rhythmically bonkers and then stabilizes into something normal.

I think showing off the clave part is sufficient. I let the top line define the first four measures of 5/4, and then each line after that gets a measure. Notice how every bar practically has a new time signature:  15/8, 5/4, 6/4, 13/8, 11/8, etc. You could say this isn't very musical (and I would have a hard time defending myself), but like with "Rule 34," I could just listen to my computer play this, and I got some ideas for at least some simple parts. The starting bass part doesn't match the claves exactly, but I think they sound good together.  Here's an image of it, and the version you hear on the record and live is still pretty much this:

When the song gets crazy, the key features are the bass and some strummed acoustic guitar chords that match the crazy measures. It certainly gave Mattias (and Kiko, another drummer who played with us) headaches on what usefully to play along with it, but I think we have something on the record that works. Usually live, Luis and I maintain the crazy structure together as best we can, and Mattias tastefully adds some percussion to match some of our accents in the background.

After the craziness, the song goes into alternating 4/4 and 8/4 bars, which was easy enough to structure normal music around. And then after that, I decided to take my license and split the difference—the rest of the song simply rocks out with a more free solo section in a steady 6/4. Nothing particularly nerdy or mathematical about that, but it's a lot of fun to perform.

A key mission for this project at least for me is to convince students and myself that nerding out on this math stuff can only enhance your creativity. As Luis says, it only adds, never subtracts. I could go on the computer in front of a class and say "cellular automata evolve in these four ways, etc., etc.," and show off the pictures, but especially working where I do I think it's helpful to back this up with "yeah, we looked at these things, and it inspired creativity in these ways."

It certainly worked for me, and even though I've been a musician for a long time, I needed the help. And I also now love Big Brother for some reason.