🧒 This page is about a piece of music a computer wrote, called The Floor Moves. There are no words in it; the tune is played by a voice-like sound. The trick: the tune stays on one note as the chords under it keep changing, so that one note keeps sounding different, happy, then sad, then floaty. Tap Grown-up mode to read the real music-nerd version.
ixi-style analysis · believe-you-me · generated study
The Floor Moves
A computer composed this song, RUN 12 of the /midi-16-runs-copy-shiner generator, and no band played it. It was written on purpose so that four @iximusic close-reading devices carry the whole structure. Key is G Aeolian, 120 bpm, 56 bars. Because the notes are written straight into a file, every interval printed over a vocal note is exact from the MIDI. The sheet exists to show a still guide-vocal line taking its color from a floor that keeps moving underneath it, the thing the @iximusic corpus is built to hear.
On the vocal, read this first: the vocal track here is a wordless guide, a voice-oohs patch (GM program 53), 137 pitched notes with no lyrics. The real @iximusic sheets read sung words off a recording; this one has none, so the vocal staves below show only the pitched guide line and no lyric row. The recoloring analysis holds either way, because it depends only on the pitch against the chord.
The four @iximusic devices, and where each one lives
One, the still voice over the moving floor. In the verse the guide vocal pedals a single pitch, B♭ (the ♭3 of G), and holds it as the chords walk Gm → E♭ → F → Gm. The pitch holds dead still, so the harmony keeps renaming it: ♭3 over Gm, the 5th over E♭, the 11th (a sus color) over F, back to ♭3. This is the No Surprises trick, where the guide-vocal line stays put and the bass changes what the note means.
Two, the wistful major-seventh flip on the ♭VI. In the chorus the pedal moves up to D (the 5th of G) over Gm → E♭ → Cm → Gm. Over Gm the D is a plain 5th. The moment the band drops to E♭ (the ♭VI, the most Shiner-aligned chord there is), that same D becomes the major 7th of E♭, because E♭ G B♭ D spells E♭maj7, the wistful color from No Surprises, and a crash marks the arrival. Then over Cm the D is the 9th, and home to the 5th. One held note: 5 → maj7 → 9 → 5.
Three, the stack that keeps clear of every root. In the final chorus the guide vocal holds a fixed three-note stack, D · F · A, across the whole moving progression, the way Maynard's harmony holds an A-minor triad through Parabola. The stack leans only on upper-structure color tones and keeps clear of every chord root: over Gm it is {5, ♭7, 9}, over E♭ it is {maj7, 9, ♯11}, over Cm it is {9, 11, 13}. Same shape, recolored three times over.
Four, the five-against-four lead. The intro and breakdown lead is a five-note cell (G B♭ C D F) played in straight eighth notes. Five notes looping across a four-beat bar mean the cell restarts in a new place every bar and drifts out of phase, the way Jonny Greenwood's five-note figure slides against the 4/4 in Let Down. It also satisfies Shiner's own rule that one section stays off the snare.
Reading the numbers over each vocal note:1 root, 3 major third, 5 fifth, 7 major seventh, 9 ninth, 11 the fourth played as a color, 13 the sixth, b3 / b6 / b7 the lowered third, sixth, seventh, #11 the raised fourth. Every label is the interval that held guide-vocal note makes against the chord tagged on the guitar staff below it, measured from the MIDI, exact.
Parse evidence · the guide-vocal track read from the FINAL MIDI with mido
file: /shiner-ixi-recolor/shiner-ixi-final.mid
mido parse: ticks_per_beat=480 · tempo=120 bpm · last note-off at bar 56.00
Guide Vocal @ verse bar 5 : Bb3 (the pedal b3; A3 = the FINAL neighbor tone)
Guide Vocal @ chorus bar 13 : D5 (the pedal 5th)
Guide Vocal @ final bar 45 : D5 · F5 · A5 (the fixed stack)
Every interval printed over a vocal note on this page is one of the parsed pitches above, measured against the chord tagged on the guitar staff. The .mid file is linked at the foot of the page; re-parse it to check the numbers.
The form at a glance · section map (56 bars, 4/4, 120 bpm, ≈112 s)
Gm · lead tag answers the intro, tapering, loops clean
Section map read straight from the generated MIDI. The gate report and the file are linked at the foot of the page; nothing here is asserted without the note being present in the file.
The Floor Moves · a Shiner-idiom study · /midi-16-runs-copy-shiner RUN 12
G Aeolian · intro · the five-note cell drifting against 4/4
The lead states a five-note minor-pentatonic cell, G B♭ C D F, in even eighth notes. A five-note cell inside an eight-eighth bar cannot line up: the cell restarts on a different beat every bar and takes five bars to come back to where it began. Under it the guitar and bass hold Gm, a single dark drone, so the only thing in motion is the phase of the lead against the bar. This is the Let Down idea, a repeating figure sliding out of step with the meter, used here as the intro so the drift is the first thing the ear meets.
the deviceFive notes over four beats, so the cell and the bar keep pulling apart, and the small ache of that mismatch is the whole intro.
Lead staff shows two bars of the eighth-note cell; the bracket marks where the five-note group restarts inside the four-beat bar. Guitar and bass hold the Gm drone. All pitches exact from the MIDI.
G Aeolian · verse · a held guide-vocal note on the ♭3, the floor moving under it
The guide vocal pedals one pitch, B♭, and re-articulates it as the chords walk beneath. Over Gm the B♭ is the ♭3, the dark third of home. Over E♭ the same B♭ becomes the 5th, suddenly consonant and open. Over F it is the 11th, a suspended color a whole step above the third of the chord, unresolved. Back over Gm it is the ♭3 again, the phrase closing on that color note. The voice holds still and the bass keeps redefining what the held pitch means, the No Surprises move brought into a Shiner verse.
the deviceThe B♭ flipping from the ♭3 of Gm into the clean 5th of E♭ without the guide-vocal pitch moving at all.
A half-note pedal with a half-rest for breath, so the line breathes and carries an arc. Verse 2 keeps the pedal and adds a neighbor tone, its only change. Intervals measured against the chord on the guitar staff.
G Aeolian · chorus · the pedal on the 5th, and the major-seventh flip on the ♭VI
The pedal lifts to D, the 5th of G, up in the vocal's peak register, and holds across Gm → E♭ → Cm → Gm. Over Gm the D is a plain, strong 5th. Then the band drops to E♭, the ♭VI, the most Shiner-aligned chord in the language, and the held D turns into the major 7th of E♭, because E♭ G B♭ D spells E♭maj7. A crash marks the arrival, the way Shiner marks every ♭VI. Over Cm the D is the 9th, reaching, and it settles home to the 5th. One unmoving note reads 5 → maj7 → 9 → 5: the wistful major-seventh color from No Surprises, brought onto the darkest-sweet chord Shiner owns.
the deviceThe D becoming the major 7th of E♭ on the ♭VI crash, the single most @iximusic moment in the song.
The bass under the chorus is the signature hook, root → 5 → ♭7 → root, locked to the grid so it repeats as one recognizable cell (the generator's Gate AO). The vocal peak D repeats through the section so it becomes the hook.
G Aeolian · final chorus · the fixed stack that keeps clear of every root
The guide vocal opens into a three-note stack, D · F · A, and holds that exact shape across the whole progression, the way the harmony holds one triad through Parabola. Over Gm the stack is {5, ♭7, 9}. Over E♭ it is {maj7, 9, ♯11}, the lydian, holy color, three tensions at once. Over Cm it is {9, 11, 13}, pure upper structure. No voice of the stack ever falls on a chord root; every note is a color tone, and the chord's meaning is carried entirely by the bass and the guitar dyad beneath, which is why the floor is kept deliberately sparse here. Same three notes, recolored three ways: the Parabola device, closing the song.
the deviceD F A is {5,♭7,9}, then {maj7,9,♯11}, then {9,11,13}, one shape heard three ways.
Under the stack the guitar drops to a root-and-fifth dyad and the bass to root-and-fifth only, so the whole bar stays within seven pitch classes (the generator's Gate X) and the stack rings clean. The lead returns an octave up, voiced inside the stack, as its loudest moment.
Per-section recolor evidence · the held vocal pitch and its interval against each chord (exact from the MIDI)
Section
Held vocal
Chords
Interval per chord
Verse (bars 5–12)
B♭ (♭3 pedal)
Gm · E♭ · F · Gm
b3 · 5 · 11 · b3
Chorus (bars 13–20)
D (5th pedal)
Gm · E♭ · Cm · Gm
5 · maj7 · 9 · 5
Final Chorus (bars 45–52)
D · F · A (fixed stack)
Gm · E♭ · Cm · Gm
{5,b7,9} · {maj7,9,#11} · {9,11,13}
Lead cell (intro / breakdown)
G B♭ C D F
Gm drone
5-note cell vs 4/4, realigns every 5 bars
Every interval here is computed from the composed MIDI pitch against the sounding chord root, straight out of the file. The generated song passes all eight Shiner hard-fail BLOCK gates (Q, X, Y, AA, AE, AO, AP, AS) and the listener audit with zero flags; the full gate report is linked below.
Sources · the generated files this sheet is built from
Composed by the /midi-16-runs-copy-shiner generator (RUN 12, seed 12 → G Aeolian, 120 bpm) with the four @iximusic devices written in as the load-bearing structure. The MIDI is the ground truth; the staves are simplified skeletons of the full arrangement, faithful to pitch and chord.