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 :)!

On a previous post I discussed about the results of a Windows BPM finder program MixMeister BPM Analyzer. It sometimes produces values that are 2 times or half the seemingly actual value. And then the doubt grew on me, “Is that program even accurate at all?”. So, I was set to program my own BPM finder.

But I don’t know any sound programming stuffs, so I went for the easy path of a human-assisted program in which the algorithm is very intuitive. A human would tap the beats while playing a song and the program will do the simple mathematical calculation (it’s “beats per minute” for a thing, so it’s basically just a division).

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