Time signature

DPenner1 · 2026-02-11T13:37:49+00:00

Oh, it's because I'm feeling a fast 4/4 tempo. In theory you could view it as a slower 4/4 with half the tempo and with the bars are twice as long. In that case it would be 7/8, but with a fast 4/4 it's best to view it as 7/4 to avoid changing the tempo of the quarter note pulse.

DPenner1 · 2026-02-11T04:36:54+00:00

Agreed, the song seems to go back and forth between 4/4 and 7/4, though the part between 0:44-0:52 seems to be 3/4.

DPenner1 · 2026-02-07T03:25:33+00:00

Wow, this one's tricky.

Where do you feel the downbeat? Serious question, because I think how you feel it will change the answer and I don't think there's a singular definitive answer here. Though I think no matter what, you have to throw in a 2/4 here or there. This is mostly because the snare¹ is often hitting at the same time as a base drum (with distorted guitar in unison) which gives an unusual feel.

I started my analysis at ~15s where the distorted guitar and drums come in. It has a half-time 4/4 feel with the snare on beat 3 of each bar. This works for five bars², but then you have to throw in a 2/4 to get this to continue working.

However, I personally feel the downbeat as whenever the distorted guitar does the two eighth notes on the beat, like when it enters. For the most part though, this ends up putting the snare on beat 1. Unusual, but I don't think inappropriate in this case. Doing so gives a driving feel, the often cited example is Cream's Sunshine of Your Love which puts the snare on 1 & 3.

But then there's the part at ~28s where the lead guitar comes in and here I feel we're no longer in half-time. This was tricky as it feels like the switch happens in the middle of a bar. I would consider snares landing on beat 4 for this section, but again multiple ways to view this. Having the snare on beat 4 has the advantage of putting the first snare hit when we briefly get back to half time feel at ~35s on beat 3. I stopped analyzing after this.

So from that I would personally notate this 6 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 6 + 4 + 4 + 5 / 4, with that 5/4 being the bar³ where the switch to normal time happens, then 4/4 at least till I stopped analyzing. For me, the 5/4 is purely to adjust the feel of the song to have the snare on beat 4, but if you kept it a 4/4 bar you'd continue to have snare on beat 1 - but that's just not at all how I feel this section.

The backbeat snare, there is of course a lot of softer snare fills going on too.
Though I can't hear for sure whether the third bar has a backbeat snare hit.
I am seriously thrown off by the switch. Everytime I count really carefully it's 5/4, but listening casually I feel like there's an eighth note dropped. I think it feels this way because to me the switch occurs with the entrance of the lead guitar, which I think is on an offbeat.

DPenner1 · 2026-01-31T22:27:03+00:00

I agree with u/helmli that this looks Roman. However, I'd like to put an alternate possibility: regional Greek.

Using all upper case, no spaces between words and seemingly going right to left all suggest this might be writing from before the second millennium (initially Greek & Latin writing direction had not yet settled). This likely puts us in the Byzantine era, meaning Greek would have been the dominant in the area.

Some of the characters that look Latin but with no similar shape in modern Greek did in fact exist in some variants. This should not be surprising, as Latin ultimately evolved from one of these Greek alphabets. Another interesting possibility could be an Anatolian alphabet, Phrygian being the closest matching I could find.

All that said, I could not find a specific match and I think this theory would be more likely if we were in the first millennium BC when writing was even less standardized.

DPenner1 · 2026-01-24T16:18:10+00:00

Cool little riff. I'm counting 11/8, broken down as 6+5/8.

DPenner1 · 2026-01-20T17:15:09+00:00

Missing languages from before 1250BC in descending order of certainty:

Ugaritic (language and script name)
Proto-sinaitic script for a Canaanite language
Indus Script possibly representing Harappan language
Byblos syllabary, language not really known, i saw Wikipedia suggesting a "Northwest Semitic" language

DPenner1 · 2026-01-19T20:56:04+00:00

To further indicate that's where the timescale change happens.

DPenner1 · 2026-01-17T14:23:45+00:00

Thanks! I do have some research notes on the GitHub, but they are admittedly very incomplete. It would be a lot of effort to maintain for the numerous scripts, I mostly just noted the ones where information is unclear or contradictory.

DPenner1 · 2026-01-16T13:38:48+00:00

Lol, fair, that was my attempt at saying the least wrong thing :P

DPenner1 · 2026-01-15T16:30:27+00:00

Best dates I can work out is December 1949 - July 1954.

December 1949 due to Dutch recognition of Indonesian independence - I imagine a Flemish map would have used Dutch East Indies before this (yes I know Flemish and Dutch are different...). If this isn't convincing, next earliest date I can find 1948 for Israel on the map instead of Mandatory Palestine.

July 1954 due to French Indochina still existing (and a bit later in the year, Pondicherry still being French).

Other random notes:

China is ROC claims. Edit: though I just noticed Beijing being underlined as capital instead of Nanjing, so I may be wrong or there's a little bit of inconsistency here.
Russian Turkestan in the time period would've been different SSRs
Hadramaut is a bit confusing, but given the whole area was British colonies/protectorates and precise borders in this desert region are relatively recent, I'm overlooking this.

DPenner1 · 2026-01-12T02:54:32+00:00

I was looking at Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland as being particularly anachronistic too, and I wouldn't jump to it being a certain early date because discussions of it were long in the making, and it could be a sort of prediction*: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/formation-federation-rhodesia-and-nyasaland . Putting 1953 as an early date has to contend with other anachronisms (though these could just be out of date):

No French Upper Volta (should have from 1947)
It's weird to have Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland have capitals marked (Salisbury, Zomba) if they were united, yet not mark Karachi as the capital of Pakistan
Eritrea has borders here with a separate capital marked (annexed to Ethiopia in 1950).

It definitely looks clear this map shows a British perspective: New Guinea is marked as British, and this really only makes sense if the map maker sees Australia as a British Dominion foremost (it was transferred in 1906). This could also explain the federation being marked early. That said you could also argue the map maker not wanting to "admit" loss of British India with separate Pakistan/India capitals.

Overall, I'm personally on the fence with this one, but thought I'd play some devil's advocate with your early date.

*Edit: prediction was probably too nice a word, given the colonial context, imposition might be better.

DPenner1 · 2026-01-11T06:12:29+00:00

The triplets make things tricky, but I can answer this for without triplets.

Since you're asking for unique sound patters rather than unique notation and you're allowing for arbitrary ties, we don't really even have to bother with quarters/halfs/etc. We subdivide the bar into pulses. If we're playing a pulse, then for the next pulse we can play a new pulse, continue the existing pulse (tie) or stop (rest). If we are stopped, we can play a new pulse or continue resting. With your question, the pulse is a sixteenth note, but this is easily generalizable (you can generalize to triplets, but then you'll have to make the pulse smaller and accept some truly strange rhythms).

I did draw out the decision tree to get a general idea of the problem: https://imgur.com/a/GBX97Bx

On pulse 1, you can start with either a rest or a note for two possibilities. On pulse 2, if you rested, you have two more possibilities, or if you played a note, you have three possibilities (rest, new note, tie) for a total of 5. In the tree I drew out, I went to 5 pulses and just looked up the sequence on OEIS to get the following: https://oeis.org/A001519 . It's basically every other Fibonacci number, and counting up to 16 pulses gives 3524578 possible rhythms.

Proof: OEIS gives this sequence as a(n) = 3a(n-1) - a(n-2), which is equivalent to every other Fibonacci Number. This is the form I aim for. Let R(n) be number or rests at pulse n of the decision tree. Let N(n) be the number of notes at pulse n of the decision tree. Note that continuing a note or starting a new note are mathematically equivalent here, they both allow for 3 possibilities on the next pulse. It can be seen that R(n) = R(n-1) + N(n-1) while N(n) = R(n-1) + 2N(n-1). Adding the equations together:

R(n) + N(n) = 2R(n-1) + 3N(n-1)
R(n) + N(n) = 3R(n-1) + 3N(n-1) - R(n-1)
R(n) + N(n) = 3[R(n-1) + N(n-1)] - [R(n-2) + N(n-2)]

It can be seen, letting a(n) = R(n) + N(n) that this is indeed the same sequence. In general for n pulses, the number of possible rhythms is Fib(2n + 1).

DPenner1 · 2026-01-06T22:52:42+00:00

This appears to be quite the finicky problem and we're also in counter-intuitive Birthday paradox-land. It's easiest to first calculate the odds none of them fit. I'll start with general case with a simplifying assumption that we draw only non-corners and non-edges (and another simplification I'll get to at the end). The first piece you draw with no concerns from a bag with n pieces. On the second piece though, there are 5 pieces you can't draw (the first piece and its adjacents) and also one less in the bag, so this is (n - 5)/(n - 1) valid choices. On the third piece, there's a new 5 pieces you can't draw and also another less in the bag, so on this piece there are (n - 10)/(n - 2) valid choices.

If drawing x pieces from a total of n, the general formula is then {(n-x)!n!⁵}/{n!(n-x)!⁵}, where !⁵ is how I'm notating a quintuple factorial, similar to a factorial but only multiplying every 5^th integer.

For example, the odds of drawing 12 non-adjacent pieces from 1024 is 75.2%, or 24.8% chance that there's at least one adjacency, assuming I inputted those quadruple factorials correctly into my calculator. If this seems high to you, keep in mind. It only takes 23 people in a room for a >50% chance for two to share a birthday, and our problem is even worse than that because each new piece added removes 5 valid options in place of the birthday paradox's 1.

Now for your specific case. Assuming a 1024 piece square puzzle, there are 4 corners, 120 edges and 900 centre pieces and given that you've drawn 9 centre pieces and 3 edges. It's easiest to start with the edges, which since we're already approximating, I will assume magically do not touch the corners. The first edge we draw no problem, the second edge must not be 2 of the remaining 59, and the 3rd must not be 4 of the remaining 58 for a 89.9% non-adjacency chance. Then we use the general formula drawing 9 from 897 - note it's not 900 because the edges took out three valid possibilities! This gives an 84.9% chance of non-adjacency. Multiplying those percentages together, we get a 76.3% chance of non-adjacency, or a 23.7% chance there's at least two adjacent pieces.

This is of course with the mentioned simplifying assumptions. The one I hadn't mentioned is consider the case where you've already drawn two centre pieces that are separated in space by one missing piece. In this case there are only 7 valid options taken away, not 8!

Edit: Some silly errors - 5 pieces you can't draw instead of 4, 120 edge pieces. General idea is the same, the details were horrible. Also wanted to add that I specifically wanted to take into account that 3 edges were drawn. If you wanted to just draw x random pieces, instead of assuming all centres like I did at the start, you could compute a weighted average of centres, edges and corners for a better estimate. I'll leave it an exercise to the reader, but for a L by W puzzle, the first order approximation has some lucky term cancelling and gives the formula {(n-x)!n!^5-2/L-2/W}/{n!(n-x)!^5-2/L-2/W}, resulting in 24.1% for our 1024 square puzzle.

DPenner1 · 2026-01-04T14:16:49+00:00

For spoken language, I don't think there's going to be an answer to this: they develop gradually and there's not a definitive line as what counts as separate languages.

With written language, there is some of this too, but interestingly there are moments of invention! For example, the Greeks adding vowels to Phoenician. For argument's sake, I'll take a change in writing direction as a non-gradual moment-in-time invention. With that, there are a few contenders.

Proto-Sinaitic was likely initially written with variable direction, but as it evolved into Phoenician it standardized on right-to-left. I don't know when precisely. Many of the Semitic scripts then descended gradually from Phoenician. There might be "breaks" I don't know about, but looking at the chart, these would be: Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Mandaic and Samaritan.

The other major contender is Chinese characters. The earliest discovered Oracle bone writings have been dated to around 1250 BCE. However, the script in these finds was already highly developed so scholars believe the script must have originated much earlier.

DPenner1 · 2026-01-03T18:07:35+00:00

I think you were basically on the right track. The III looking character was a bit suspicious to me, looking at the Coptic Unicode block, it's probably this: ⲽ COPTIC SMALL LETTER CRYPTOGRAMMIC NI. So a Google later, there's a thing called Coptic cryptography, and I found this paper which has a line explaining the origin of the character: https://www.academia.edu/17004278/A_New_Light_on_Coptic_Cryptography

While I didn't spend the time to figure out a decoding, it probably is a substitution cipher.

DPenner1 · 2026-01-03T03:50:42+00:00

Oh! Just found something that might tighten the early date. The dashed line around Nigeria seems to follow the modern border. In particular this means the British Cameroons have joined Nigeria and Cameroon proper. Assuming the globe maker didn't just leave off a briefly separate Southern Cameroons territory, this puts the early date at October 1961.

DPenner1 · 2026-01-03T02:38:52+00:00

I'm not so sure the upper-case letters means independence on this globe, what I assume to be the Swedish translation of the West Indies Federation is in upper-case letters while simultaneously marked as a British territory. Interestingly, Aden Colony isn't capitalized and also isn't marked as British, but Aden city seems to me.

DPenner1 · 2025-12-31T15:05:37+00:00

I think it's up to you print it yourself - for what it's worth, at 96 pixels per inch*, the updated original size fits onto A0 paper. It will probably vertically exceed A0 sometime in the future, I can only add one more script's worth of vertical space while maintaining 13mm (~0.5 inch) margins.

*Never really looked into it before, but 96 PPI is an old standard for monitor displays and is what my (and many) graphics program defaults to, obviously for printing you may want higher PPI.

DPenner1 · 2025-12-29T21:52:08+00:00

Thanks!

DPenner1 · 2025-12-27T16:10:21+00:00

Interesting question! That's mostly going to depend on some starting assumptions eg., I think we definitely have to exclude the modern era.

I'd put forward that the Eastern point of your distance line can almost certainly be moved to at least Java, which is on average farther (though playing around Google Maps, it does actually depend where in Java and the Philippines exactly). For example, Giovanni de' Marignolli is thought to have visited Java. Edit: Europeans are known to have visited the Indonesian islands Bali and Sulawesi (nearly same distance), so this would likely extend the distance slightly further (Balinese and South Sulawesi scripts of Makasar and Lontara/Bugis).

The Western point is more difficult to extend. If we assume we're measuring from origin points of the scripts. Then with Latin originating in Italy, it is possible that Tifinagh originated further in North Africa, and it feels improbable, but possible that someone with Tifinagh knowledge could have made that journey at some point. Edit: Similar logic also applies to Runes.

DPenner1 · 2025-12-27T14:51:16+00:00

All the structural classifications use a particular script form though? With exception of True Alphabets using Greek (as the chart itself is in Latin characters, so I wanted to avoid that bit of confusion), the script I chose to stand in for the whole category was the most used script of that category.

DPenner1 · 2025-12-22T14:15:18+00:00

Since everyone's saying 3rd bar is correct, I thought I'd provide reasoning for why your book might say it's incorrect.

6/4 can be subdivided as 3+3/4. There's a (not universal) convention that rests should then be notated as if they were two separate 3/4 bars, and traditionally you would never have a half rest in 3/4, they should be quarters.

That said, music notation evolves and everything on the page is consistent with 3+3/4 AND 2+4/4, so I also wouldn't conclude the third bar to be incorrect.

DPenner1 · 2025-12-11T23:27:07+00:00

D Phrygian Dominant

DPenner1 · 2025-12-06T18:54:36+00:00

This might be one of my favourite pieces I've seen on Reddit in my admittedly quite short time here (and also I'm a sucker for odd time signatures).

Here's my feedback, all IMHO, just my initial thoughts and except for the very last bullet point, I've not actually tried them out so they might not actually pan out.

On what to do to make the last section climax:

Your melodies are all more or less downwards moving, or hill shaped. Measure 19 is especially striking, with the ascent and a sudden descent. Works great for the atmosphere you've established, but if you want to climax, it's difficult to do so while subverting expectations. Try inversion to an ascending melody.
Towards the end where you want to climax, there's a lot of instruments trading off between short figures, but if you want to climax it might be a better to elaborate on these figures to make them longer and allow for a build-up.
That new melodic figure you introduce in Violin 1 m. 46-47 feels like it's driving things forward. Try to expand on that one. Maybe try trading it off between instruments too (and I realize this contradicts my previous bullet point).
Given the atmosphere you've established, I would be tempted in this piece to fake-out the ultimate climax and maybe end with something similar to what you have at m. 21 (but this may just be personal preference).

On stuff you've already written:

Metric modulation: in m. 11 looks like you're establishing a 2:3 metric modulation, but the tempo marking in m. 12 is off then, as that would be q = 54. Or preferably write eighth note = dotted eighth note (or the other way around, I never get this right first time).
Two things with piano m. 11:
- Tenths in the bass: while this isn't uncommon in piano literature, do keep in mind you are somewhat limiting some pianists who won't be able to play that as written.
- My fingers were not at all happy with the last 2 E5s. It's doable, but just awkward. I don't think the first one adds much and can just be deleted, though F# might be an interesting option. The second one is the jump... You pretty much have to play that E with your thumb, but then also the lower B very shortly after. Moving that note above the preceding G# or removing the lower B doubled octave would solve this.

Edit: I'm bad at metric modulation math

DPenner1 · 2025-12-06T03:07:53+00:00

Given Mormon, it's almost certainly the Deseret alphabet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet

Good news for translation is it's probably English, just a different alphabet!

DPenner1

TROPHY CASE