Saturday, February 17, 2007

You Go To My Head

The first song I decided to look at off of the Great American Songbook Volume 1 was "You Go To My Head." This song was originally performed by Billie Holiday, than Frank Sinatra, and than obviously covered by Rod Stewart for the Songbook.

I'll take each version one at a time:

The Billie Holiday version is 171 seconds long. There are a lot of instrumental points throughout the song that come close to the fibonacci numbers, but not close enough in my estimation to really say that it conforms. The big instrumental climax starts at 160 seconds in with a beautiful saxaphone.

171/160 = 1.068..not a golden section song

The Frank Sinatra version is a little bit longer, clocking in at exactly 3:00 minutes. It was hard to pick an instrumental climax for this song, but I decided to go with 2:16 when a violin plays for a few seconds.

180/136 = 1.32...closer but still not a golden section song

Last but not least, the Rod Stewart version. This version is the longest, with a duration of 4:17. There is a very long instrumental climax starting at 2:11 and going until 2:35.

257/155 = 1. 658...this is using the end of the climax. While it is close to the golden section, I can not put it on our list because the end of the climax was the only part that was close to it.

To recap: none conformed to Fibonacci or the golden section, but Rod's version was the closest.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

there's something about rod...this is pretty awesome. after this we should look to see if we can find any other big artists who have alot of golden section songs...but for now i guess we have some more work to do on rod.