Agronesia

When I tried decoding the 10th measure of Beethoven’s Fur Elise (sheet) by keyboard, I realized that it sounds just like a cover song by the disbanded Japanese idol duo W, Jounetsu no Hana!

Well, I do remember reading Jounetsu no Hana’s lyrics at the Hello! Project lyrics collection archive site projecthello.com, and it was written there that the composer is Ludwig Van Beethoven. However I couldn’t figure out what song it was at that time.

Now it’s glaringly obvious. The melodies are just Fur Elise, which is in 3/8 time, adapted to 4/4 to conform with the norm of pop songs. This time adaptation makes them not 100% same tune by tune, which is why I didn’t realize it the first time. To make the chain look more tangled, the song W is covering is a 1959 song by The Peanuts (a very old Japanese duo), which is actually a cover for an American song Passion Flower.

To compare the songs, listen to Fur Elise and then Jounetsu no Hana.

Oh, and don’t complain that I wrote Fur Elise instead of the fancier Für Elise. Jounetsu no Hana is also actually 情熱の花 :)!

I was looking for information about the chord F#m7-5. I know the basics of intervals already, so I just need someone to tell me what this chord type is (e.g. major triad, dominant seventh) and the components of this seemingly-bizarrely chord (e.g. root, major third, and perfect fifth for a major chord).

A cursory browsing around Wikipedia’s music theory articles didn’t bear any fruit. I actually expected it to be in the chord articles which has a handy list of chord symbols/notations with their components.

And then I found this Complete Chords site which has chords for guitars and piano. But to see it we must download a hefty 20+ MB pdf file! The file probably has chord diagrams for C, C#, D, D#, etc. I don’t need that bloat! If I know what Cm7-5 is, I can get the others (just shift all the notes to the left or right by the same amount, though in guitar finding a convenient configuration by oneself might be quite challenging).

And finally, accidentally, by Googling with “only Japanese pages” currently set, I found a convenient Japanese site which provides just the info I need! Go visit the site (shoshinsha, which means beginner). It shows the piano keys which needs to be pressed for a certain chord, some with its inverted chords. Just regard the kanji and stuffs as a beautiful graffiti. With the chord sidebar on the left and the image, you can easily get the chord you need.

So, when you find yourself asking “how do I play this chord?”, you know there’s a handy reference around. I’ve downloaded all the chords with C as its root, which will be a convenient chord cheat sheet.

Btw, it turned out that F#m7-5 is just F#m7 with the perfect fifth component replaced by a diminished fifth. Now I know that the -5 part means “diminished fifth”. So in other words it is an F#dim chord (diminished chord) with the added minor seventh component.

MixMeister BPM Analyzer - analyzing DOES take time

The BPM (Beats per Minute) of a song can be stored as an ID3 tag on your MP3 files. In essence, the BPM is the tempo of a song which indicates how fast or slow a song is.

Programs like iTunes can display the stored BPM number and utilize it. If your song collection has BPM value, you can for example make a playlist for the fast songs and another for the slow songs. The fast songs can then be copied to your MP3 player for your gym activity, for example.

The problem now is that this value is initially empty. We can even insert a random number on programs that supports MP3 metadata editing. Luckily, there are programs that analyze BPM and store the computed value on the files. One such program is MixMeister BPM Analyzer which is free to download. Using this freeware is very easy, you just need to drag and drop the files or folders you want to analyze. It’s computationally quite heavy so if you have tons of files be prepared for a long wait.

(I wonder whether there is an open-source program for this purpose)

The result in iTunes after the BPM is analyzed

I tried searching for such programs because I wanted to know the BPM of songs I want to try playing on the keyboard. The calculation output is quite interesting. For most files, the program seems to be accurate. However, for some files the software computes a BPM which is actually 2x faster than the seemingly real value or else half of it. For example, the program gives 82.42 BPM for a song (Berryz Koubou’s “Gag 100kaibun Aishite Kudasai“) despite it being a fast one, so the double value 163.84 BPM seems to suit more. There’s also a slow song (Morning Musume Sakura Gumi’s “Sakura Mankai“) which is given 160.03 BPM, but clearly 80.015 BPM is closer to the real answer.

But theoretically, a musical score written in x BPM can be easily rewritten in 2x BPM or 0.5x BPM. We just need to double or halve every note’s duration. Of course, by this modification a note might be moved to another measure. In a sense the program is correct.

What kind of baffles me is that I can probably sense the beat of a music intuitively, but I wonder how one makes an algorithm that can find BPM. Ah, sound processing, an area where I have practically null experience.

I ripped this quite a long time ago from a Japanese song chord site. Not as easy as saving the pages, since the pages has a nasty Javascript that makes the page displays nothing when viewed from the disk. I had to make a program that extracts the contents out of it.

So there, you can have your guitar chord/piano chord/whatever of the H!P songs. Included artists are Momusu, Berryz Koubou, Matsuura Aya, Abe Natsumi, Fujimoto Miki, Goto Maki, Iida Kaori, Melon Kinenbi, Mini Moni, Nakazawa Yuko, Pucchi Moni, Tanpopo, v-u-den, and W. Download here.