IMPERMANENCE: a river that never returns to the key it started in
IMPERMANENCE is Song 21 of Out of Your Mind: change is not the enemy, clinging is. A river that never returns to the key it started in, a piano ripple that never rests, and every clinging note letting go. CC BY 4.0.
Watch on YouTube. IMPERMANENCE is Song 21 in the Out of Your Mind series. Change is not the enemy. Clinging is.
Licensed CC BY 4.0.
The first version of this film sat in G major from start to finish. So did the film before it. A river that stays in one key is a pond. That was the note, and it turned into the whole design.
The river never returns
Every section moves to a new key, each one a fifth above the last.
G flat, D flat, A flat, E flat, B flat, F, C, G.
It starts in Schubert's own key, the key of the impromptu the piano figure comes from. It ends in G, a semitone above where the water started. It never comes back.
The changes do not jump. The last bar of every section is its own dominant chord, and that chord is the next section's home. So the key changes on a chord both keys share, and the melody holds its fifth across the bar line, where it quietly becomes the new tonic. The harmony slides. That is the only way a river changes course.
Three rules, checked before render
A claim in a lyric is just a claim. So the score has to obey it, and a function walks every note of the finished film before it is allowed to render:
- No key is ever revisited, and every move is a fifth up.
- The ripple sounds on every triplet eighth of the film. It speeds up to sextuplets when the song is busy and relaxes to triplets when it breathes. It never stops.
- Every clinging note lets go. One step down, inside its own bar.
The third one is the small drama of the film. A melody note holds on over a chord that no longer wants it. Then it releases into the flow. That is the whole lecture in two notes.
The bass has a fourth rule nobody checks: it only walks downhill. Water knows one direction.
The water is real to the bunny
The paws are tracked from the rig. When it scoops, the water sits in its hands. When it pours, the stream falls from them. Every drip lands on the surface at the exact instant the sound effects stem plays it, pitched in that section's key, and rings out where it hits.
The picture follows the score's eight keys with eight waters. Pre-dawn violet. Morning blue. Bright teal for the hook. Silver-green for the reflection. Pearl grey for the bridge. Green for the build. Deep blue for the flood. Rose-gold dusk at the end. Each one slides into the next across the pivot bar. The sky finishes warmer than it began.
In verse two the camera tilts into the water and the reflection becomes the shot. The picture shivers. The bunny stays still.
In the bridge it presses the river into a stone. Holds it four bars. On the glass bell the stone lets go and runs out between its fingers. It smiles anyway.
A song, not a reading
The old vocal was a reading. Narration with a lot of river in between. This one is a song. One line a bar, the rhyme on four, couplets, a cold open inside the first second, and the hook three times.
Two checks did most of the work, and both are now gates rather than guesses.
Every line lands on the grid by construction. Each line names its section, bar and beat, and the builder places it there. Then it measures the take and gives it the smallest whole number of beats it fits without rushing it. It never slows a take down. A slowed take is the hang you hear before you can say what is wrong. On the first build, a whole run of lines slid a beat late behind one rounding bug. Fixed, the gate reads clean: every onset on the beat, nothing overlapping.
The flood was burying the hook. The mix gate measures voice against bed in the speech band, line by line. The lines at the start of the flood came back with far less room than the rest of the song. It was not the duck and it was not the sound effects. It was the clarinet holding long notes straight through "Float. And you are the floating." So for a few bars the clarinet rests, and then it answers. Call and response. The hook is clear again.
Then I listened again
The first finished mix sounded right on the meters and wrong in the room. The hats were there in the score and all but gone in the mix. The bass had body on paper and none in the speakers. Most of the energy sat in the low mids, where the piano and the voice fight.
So the bed got remastered. Crisp hats that actually cut. The bass and the sub at full body. The ripple and the clarinet down a little, the colour instruments up. The flood is now the loudest thing in the film, the way the song always said it was. Then three voice treatments went head to head, judged by ear, and the cleanest one won. Every line still clears the bed.
The lesson is now a gate: before the film mix, check that every instrument in the score can actually be heard.
The film in numbers
| Song | 21 of Out of Your Mind |
| Runtime | 4:28 |
| Keys | eight, one per section, each a fifth above the last, none revisited |
| The ripple | every triplet eighth, 1,152 notes, never resting |
| Voice timing | sped up at most 1.28 times to land on the beat, never slowed |
| Voice over the flood | 4 to 5 dB of room before the clarinet rested, above 6 dB after |
| Picture | 1280x720 at 12 frames a second |
Made on a laptop
Stick figures in Python and PIL. An original ChipForge score generated from numpy, no samples. No GPU, no subscriptions, no stock footage.
More from Napkin Films
- SUNYATA. Emptiness, and a song that makes room.
- TAT TVAM ASI. The looker and the looked at are not two.
- CERAMIC. Where the series started.
License
This film is licensed CC BY 4.0. Remix it, repost it, drop it into your own thing. Credit "Napkin Films / Organic Arts LLC" and link CC BY 4.0.
Engine code (Napkin Films, ChipForge) is GPL-3.0-or-later. ElevenLabs voice audio is licensed content and is not redistributed. The words are adapted and compressed from Alan Watts, Out of Your Mind, not the original recordings. Schubert's Impromptu Op. 90 No. 3 was a model for the figure only; no recording was sampled.
