I’ve never looked into trying to convert game music data back into a tracker- or sequencer-readable format, but after a bit of Googling I came across this list of tools. It looks like a few popular formats, including SPC, can be converted into MIDI files. Cool!

I’ll have to try to find that Carmina Burana example you mentioned. I like rhythmic irregularity of all kinds, not just irregular meter! :-)

Speaking of software, now that we have access to the actual code and data for the tracks, it would be really cool to see the internal representation for these rhythmic effects. (Not to mention the timbral tricks of the NES era!) Do you know whether there’s any way to “decompile” PSF, NSF, or SPC files and edit them with, say, a tracker-style interface?

Finally, that’s a very interesting observation about the “double-time” arpeggios in “Closed Door.” My first thought was that it’s more of a notational than an audible effect, since you could just write the whole thing in 5/8, but you’re right — it’s fun to try to hear the quarter-note pulse in the melody against the arpeggios. There’s a movement in Carmina Burana (I think it’s “Uf dem Anger”) with a similar effect pitting an irregular phrase ( |: 4/4 3/8 4/4 6/8 :| ) against a quarter-note vamp.

Well! I guess I should get working on Final Fantasy VIII, eh?

The easy geometrical interpretation of this is that symmetrical meters are nests of regular polygons on a beat-class graph. If any polygon in the nest is irregular (i.e. rotationally asymmetric), then so is the meter.

“Clocks” can be heard either way: as an 8-pulse pattern subject to symmetrical duple divisions, or as an asymmetrical pattern of three beats, two long and one short.

Cool!

In any case, I certainly agree with your greater point that there can be rhythmic interest without metrical asymmetricality; I just find irregular meter interesting in and of itself.

(Also, it occurs to me that calling irregular meter “a mix of duple and triple pulses” is an oversimplification. I don’t think of “Clocks” by Coldplay irregular even though it has a 3 3 2 pulse, for example…)

One of my favorite rhythmic moments in FF7 is near the end of the game, in a march (I forget the title, but it’s something about the Shinra army). I wish I could transcribe it here. Basically it’s the Shinra theme, an ascending melodic minor scale. Half note on G, half note on A, then quarters up on B-flat, C, D, and E, but instead of F# on the downbeat there’s a dotted-quarter rest, and THEN the F# on a super loud chord in a new key. Here’s a bit of the Lilypond code, on the off chance that someone here can read it:

g2 a |
bes4 c d e |
r4. fis8->~ fis2 |

(It just occured to me that it’s a lot like what Mahler does in the middle of the finale to the 1st Symphony)

Anyway, it’s not actually a metric irregularity — you could count or march right across it into the next bar — but it interrupts the rhythmic pattern so profoundly that it has a similar effect, to my ear anyway.

First, I should point out that the time signatures I used in my more complicated transcriptions are largely arbitrary. In the last post, for example, I could have written the Ocarina of Time Ganondorf battle theme in 23/16 instead of alternating between 13/16 and 10/16. I also could have transcribed the Jet Force Gemini battle music in 24/16 instead of a cycle of 9/16, 9/16, and 6/16. My fluctuation between time signatures is really just for the sake of score-reading convenience, and not because the rhythmic subdivision is inconsistent.

Anyway, these posts have been working from an assumption similar to Cohn’s: irregular meter is a mix of duple and triple pulses. You’re right that other musical cultures might not find such meters unusual (and “meter” is a Western concept anyway, as you point out), but our tools of musical analysis can still be useful. When I studied West African music, for example, we were given staff notation transcriptions chock full of polymeter and irrational rhythms. It wasn’t representative of how actual Ewes or Dagombas understood their music, but it grounded us enough to learn the music quickly, in a situation where learning by rote wasn’t practical. I suppose a little ethnocentrism is inevitable in that approach, but I personally find it pretty harmless.

Some theorists (e.g., Richard Cohn) would say meter is irregular if it doesn’t factor evenly into twos and threes. For them, 5/4 is an irregular meter. If you break it into 2 3 or 3 2, that’s a pattern of rhythmic accent, not a meter by Cohn’s definition.

But there are lots of musicial traditions, particularly in West Africa and Central/Eastern Europe, that build meters up from additive units of two and three pulses (rather than dividing large time units as in traditional time signatures). So in these traditions a meter of 2 3 3 isn’t more “regular” than 2 3 2, just because it happens to add up to 8 instead of 7.

My liberal academic and political instincts push me toward the latter definition. And honestly, I find “Take 5″ way too rhythmically monotonous to call it irregular. (But one could chalk that up to overfamiliarity.) On the other hand, there is something fun and agile about odd, non-triple patterns that seems categorically different from “regular” meters. What do you think?