The Irrational Planet Thing

A few years ago, I was sitting in computer science 101 and thinking about music instead of paying attention. I was mentally stuck in 5/4 time, a seldom-used meter with five beats to the measure(famous examples of pieces in 5/4 include the Mission Impossible theme, Take Five by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and a Gorillaz song simply titled 5/4*). One nice thing about being stuck in 5/4 is it makes you nigh invulnerable to earworms. After a great deal of thinking and tapping out rhythms with my pencil, I wrote in my notebook a rhythmic pattern of three dotted quarter notes and an eighth note. This would become a bass line. I chose E minor simply because I hadn't composed anything in E minor before. I added a repeating motif above the bass that would become the central theme of the entire piece. I had a random idea that the melody could be split between measures, taking up two-and-a-half beats each from the measure preceding it and the measure following. If only all my random ideas worked out so well. It would take two more years of listening, tweaking, and learning before I was able to finish the piece. I began to feel that I'd painted myself into a corner with weird overlapping rhythms and wonky chord progressions.

While listening to the tune, I had a funny notion that it might be considered dance music on some other planet inhabitated by many-legged Far Side-esque aliens(I've often thought that in a perfect world, Take Five would have inspired a dance craze instead of just a trend in jazz). So I decided that the name of the piece would reflect this idea, although it would take a lot of brainstorming to come up with the final title, Irrational Planet. And Irrational Planet: The Song Thing led to Irrational Planet: The Album Thing, and now I'm posting it on Irrational Planet: The Blog Thing. This rendition of the tune was created in Logic with software synthesizers.

Irrational Planet: The MP3



*Video game fans should also recall the Ridley boss theme from the Metroid games, the battle theme from Final Fantasy VIII, and the final overworld theme from Secret of Mana.