Tubular Bells (Exorcist Theme): The Loop Your Brain Can Barely Hold

The opening of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells (1973), the theme from The Exorcist, is a loop that's hard to hold: thirty quick notes, and you can't quite tell where it starts again. It isn't the notes, it's how our brains keep time, and this loop sits right at the edge of what we can feel as one cycle. Seeing the notes on a keyboard in my mind is how I get a grip on a loop like this, and it's what Keystitch trains: the first one thousand people who redeem the code ORIGINALMEMBER get Keystitch on iPhone free, for life (details below). Psychologists who study rhythm have measured how long a cycle we can feel as one, from one downbeat to the next: about five or six seconds. The Tubular Bells loop takes about six. So people break it into pieces, and the people who wrote it down didn't agree where. Oldfield says he wrote it in 15/8, two halves of fifteen. David Bedford, who played piano at the first live performance, barred it as three bars of 7/8 and one of 9/8. I play both against the loop, then put it on the clock face Justin London uses for meter, next to the Habanera from Carmen and Dave Brubeck's Blue Rondo à la Turk. It turns out to be thirteen beats of twos and threes: short, short, long, three times, then once more with one extra short beat, and that extra beat is what tells you where the loop comes round. By the end you can follow the sevens, catch the extra two, and feel the whole loop. Oldfield's two fifteens, Bedford's 7, 7, 7, 9, 13 beats of twos and threes, or something else: what sounds natural to you? Tell me in the comments. When I listen to a loop like this, I see the notes on a keyboard in my mind, where each one sits in relation to the others. That visual positioning of notes is what I built Keystitch to train. It's on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6785419772 The first one thousand people who redeem the code ORIGINALMEMBER get Keystitch on iPhone free, for life — everything the app does now and everything it ever does, for as long as the app exists. Anything beyond it — the Mac app when it comes, the website — is a separate thing; the first thousand get the Early Adopter price on those. After the thousand are gone, the price you see in the app is the Early Adopter price. It will go up. If you join at it, your price stays yours for as long as you stay subscribed. Redeem the code: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=off... (Apple's screen will show "Regular Price: $199.99" with Free next to it — that's the lifetime membership's real price, and yours is free. You pay nothing, ever, and nothing renews.) Offer code terms: https://keystitch.net/terms#offer-cod... What "free for life" covers, exactly: https://keystitch.net/terms · Privacy: https://keystitch.net/privacy Instagram and TikTok: @keystitchapp Chapters 0:00 Tubular Bells, 1973 0:20 Where does it start again? 0:56 Seeing the loop 1:42 The beat is in you 2:45 Meter as a clock face 4:03 How long a cycle can last 5:22 One cycle, about six seconds 6:06 Oldfield's 15/8 7:09 Bedford's 7, 7, 7, 9 8:40 Beats of two sizes 10:43 Tubular Bells on the circle 13:36 Feel the whole loop 14:21 Why it works for The Exorcist 15:27 Seeing the notes in your mind 16:26 Back to the record "Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfield, Part One (Virgin Records, 1973). The piano versions and clicks are my own, played from the scores, as are the Habanera (Georges Bizet, Carmen, 1875) and "Blue Rondo à la Turk" (Dave Brubeck, Time Out, Columbia, 1959). Justin London, Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter (Oxford University Press, 2004; 2nd edition 2012). Mike Oldfield on 15/8 and "a little bit missing": interview with Helen Brown, The Daily Telegraph, 7 March 2014. David Bedford's 7/8, 7/8, 7/8, 9/8: his analysis in the Tubular Bells songbook (Wise Publications, 1973). Images: Mike Oldfield, c. 1973 (Charlie Gillett/Redferns); Mike Oldfield, 1974 (Michael Putland); David Bedford, 1973 (Ron Bull/Toronto Star); David Bedford, 1977 (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive); William Friedkin directing Linda Blair, 1974 (Alan Band/Keystone); The Exorcist bedroom set, 1973 (Steve Schapiro/Corbis), all via Getty Images; Hearing in Time cover (Oxford University Press); Justin London (Carleton College); The Exorcist posters by Bill Gold (US one-sheet) and Andrzej Młodożeniec (Poland); Tubular Bells cover (Virgin Records, 1973).