Viginti Tres

I would just like to revisit the 10,000 days synchronization topic, hopefully for the last time. We've established that the ideal synchronization is to line up the event occuring on or around the 9:14 mark in 10,000 days with the one in wings for marie after having been appended to viginti tres. The way I did this was by simply inserting silence at the beginning of a track consisting of viginty tres+wings for marie of about 1.4 seconds (i arrived at this figure by finding the difference in event times in the unmodified tracks). Once accomplished, every single thing lines up perfectly until the strange series of echoes past the 9:14 mark. If this ~1 second offset is not included (at least with the rips I have) then everything will be around 1-2 beats out of sync. This makes the songs clash almost always, and makes the echo part seem random. In fact, unless you get the tracks to within 0.1 (or less, preferably) seconds of each other, you will notice significant problems, because of what I'm about to explain:

The fact that the tracks sync perfectly up to and including this point indicates that Tool records with a digital metronome of some sort in order to attain precise rhythm. This is supported by the fact that most of Tool's mystique is derived from the mathematical precision which they employ in songs, which definitely includes precise rhythm and tempo. I'll come back to this in a second.

Let me first deal with the section where the two songs stop being in the same key. The main riff continues in tool's foreboding minor mode, while an entirely new theme comes in on top. This theme is major, rather than minor, and its key happens to be one "tritone" above the underlying riff. A tritone is exactly half the number of semitones (semitone = the smallest discrete step between pitches of varying frequency recognized in traditional western music) from the root note to that note's first higher octave. Think evil-sounding organ music, it incorporates many of these, as do all "diminished" modes. In antiquity, tritones were referred to as the "devil's interval", and were to be avoided in music, especially religious music. The song is integrating a major theme over the original minor riff exactly one devil's interval higher. The irony here is that the major theme sounds sinister due to the dissonances inherent in tritone relationships, while major keys generally sound bright and promising.

Now as for the rhythms, since they stay in sync up to a point until the cacophony at the end, it is not unreasonable to surmise that this cacophony is in fact simply the two songs moving in and out of phase with each other due to intentionally misaligned time signatures. This creates the illusion of differing tempo, when in fact it creates extraordinarily complex mathematical ratios between the rhythms. I didn't analyze the rhythms to the point to be able to make an accurate guess as to what these ratios might be, but I am positive that the clues are there for someone to find; and besides, someone could determine this by carefully examining the songs side by side. I will speculate that these ratios involve fibonacci numbers, prime numbers, and/or the number 23.
There is no doubt, when the songs are properly aligned, that this is what is occurring. I too am a trained musician, and I know the difference between complex polyrhythms and "neat sounding coincidences". This is no coincidence. If you're having trouble understanding the things going on in this mix, I venture to suggest that you listen to some african tribal drumming. Some of that stuff has unbelievable mathematical complexity, and it's certainly the spiritual predecessor of Tool's music (as well as much other popular music in western culture).

If I lost anybody with all that, I'd be glad to try and explain if anyone has any questions. If you'd like to flame me, go ahead, but I'm probably not going to pay much attention. If anyone would like to directly challenge any of what I said, I'd welcome the discussion and I certainly don't profess to fully understand what exactly is going on with these songs - they still retain some indication that there is more than meets the eye, or, ear.