This page is a close look at one song, The Outsider, by A Perfect Circle (Thirteenth Step, 2003).
We split the song into separate tracks (just the singing, just the bass, just the guitar chords) and turned them into computer notes.
The page walks through 4 sections of the song, and each section shows the singing, the guitar, and the bass all lined up on top of each other so you can see how the notes and the chords fit together at the same moment.
Built from the split-apart stems, the vocal and bass transcribed to MIDI with librosa pyin, chords read off the Moises audio chart. C-sharp major with borrowed flat-side chords at 92 BPM. The verse cannot decide between the major and minor third, the chorus rides the reverse Andalusian descent C-sharp to B to A under a held fifth, and the post-chorus sinks the whole voice onto the flat-6. Every device on this page is one the iximusic framework names on the sibling songs: parallel-mixture on the tonic, held-note-recolored by a moving harmony, borrowed flat-side chords. Below is the vocal-note-versus-chord-stack close reading, one section at a time.
The verse vamp cannot pick a third.
The chords swap C-sharp minor and C-sharp major on the same root, and the transcription shows the vocal doing the same thing: the heaviest note is E, the flat-3 (weight 6.6), with E-sharp, the major 3 (weight 2.8) right behind it.
The singer voices both thirds over the same tonic, so the verse never settles into major or minor. It stays suspended between them.
The parallel-minor chord is the tension engine: every time the vamp touches C-sharp minor it darkens the home chord, and the descent to A, the flat-6 (bVI), and up to F-sharp (IV) keeps the ground moving under an unsettled melody. This is the same parallel-mixture device The Noose runs on the subdominant, moved back onto the tonic.
The chorus drops the floor a step at a time.
The loop is C-sharp to B to A, the I to bVII to bVI, the reverse Andalusian descent, two borrowed flat-side chords pulling the home major down toward its parallel minor's territory.
Over that fall the transcription shows the vocal leaning on G-sharp, the fifth (weight 4.3), held while the chords move.
That one held note recolors as the ground drops: it is the 5th over C-sharp, the 6th over B, and the major 7th over A.
Everyone will have his day to die rides a fixed pitch while the harmony sinks underneath it. This is the iximusic held-note-many-jobs device the framework page uses on Weak and Powerless (one B, five chord duties), applied here to a falling bass instead of a moving one, so the shifting interval carries a downhill feel instead of a floating one.
This is the emotional floor of the song.
Over a long C-sharp pedal, they were right about you sits the vocal squarely on A, the flat-6 (bVI), and the transcription makes it unmissable: A is the heaviest vocal note in the section by a wide margin (weight 11.0, against 6.5 for the next).
The flat-6 is the borrowed, lost color, the note that leans outside the major and refuses to brighten.
Nothing moves. The chord holds as a pedal drone, the voice holds the flat-6, and the resignation in the line is written straight into the pitch choice. On the ixi ledger this is the opposite of the chorus: there the chord moved under a held note, here the note is the outsider sitting above a chord that will not move.
The last chorus adds a chord and lands heavier.
The descent gains E major, the flat-3 (bIII), turning the three-chord fall into C-sharp to E to B to A, a four-step drop borrowed wholesale from the parallel minor.
The bridge into it saturates the vocal on E, the flat-3 (weight 6.0), so the arriving bIII chord and the vocal land on the same borrowed note at the same moment.
A song that spent its length refusing to choose major or minor ends by stacking the flat side, the bIII and the bVII and the bVI, and letting the borrowed chords carry the last word. The iximusic reading for The Outsider is that every section names the same problem, the third is contested, and the ending is the parallel minor winning by inches.