Hey everyone! We’ve scraped our way to the end of another bloody week (hopefully not literally) and can finally enjoy the weekend! Also it’s a Friday so I need to post another video. But not just any video. No no, this is a cover video. And not just any cover video, but Tool‘s Lateralus. So I hope you’re ready for some recreational math, because this song is chock full of references to the Fibonacci Sequence, a major mathematical component in the arrangement of the building blocks of the universe. I’m gonna try my best not to go overboard with the math talk, but for those who do not know, The Fibonacci Sequence is a series of numbers in which you add the previous two integers to arrive at the next number in the series. Essentially it goes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc. Now this sequence of numbers shows up all over the place in this song, from the main riff being a repeating pattern of time signatures 9/4, 8/4, and 7/4 (987 is the 16th digit of the sequence, or 17th if you count 0 as a starting point in the sequence), to Maynard staggering his vocal lines in the chorus to match the sequence (Black [1], then [1], white are [2], all I see [3], in my infancy [5], etc.)
I need to stop diving into the mathematics of this song, otherwise we’re never gonna get out of here. The video’s a long one, because the song’s a long one. No surprise there, it’s freaking Tool we’re talking about, and the next track of theirs I’ll be covering is somewhere in the 17 minutes range. That’s almost longer than my main camera can even record in a single clip, so that video will be a god damn struggle to say the least. In terms of this video though, things start to slip a bit towards the end as I kinda fall into a stoner/doom metal trance and start playing a bit behind the beat. That’s not until like minute 7 though, so don’t worry about it, everything’s fine. Honestly, Tool songs are some of the hardest to play I find, not because of any technical challenge, but each instrument in the composition plays a major role in time keeping. For example, during the breakdown of this track each person is playing a different time signature over each other, syncing up at certain overlapping moments to create a sort of cascading effect, a ripple through our expectations of the flow of time in relation to music.
See? There I go again, getting distracted by the maths. I need to leave it here, otherwise this is gonna evolve into a 20 minute breakdown video of all the quirky aspects of this song, which let’s be honest, there’s too many of those videos out there already. Anyways, hope you dig the video, and as always give it a like and subscribe to the YouTube channel to keep updated on all the new things!
