An eye: a white pupil burning at dead centre, a blush (F) and spring green (A) iris, grey-blue lashes at the rim. The percussion, barely a mark across the first quarter, floods in as the gospel arrives, 5,000 voices gathered from his own audiences, and at the loudest, most crowded moment the wobble drops to its lowest reading of the entire song. The crowd arrives and the harmony exhales. The image is the witness. It's with you.

Four bars of drums, then the Clavinet. All that motion runs in place: dusty rose (Bb) and blush (F) hold the centre from first second to last, and the whole loudness span is 4.2 decibels. The drama lives at the rim: 1,004 sharp attacks against 441 available beats, more than 2 hits for every pulse, evenly furious all the way around. A groove doesn't crescendo; it rides.

She sings crisis as the place she most wants to stay. Three pitches share the field within a single percentage point, soft violet (Ab), spring green (A), jade (E), a harmony that declines to name a home. The beats are different material: clay and terracotta marks in colours belonging to no pitch, erupting at the rim. The last strike lands at 3:54, and the final 72 seconds carry no marks, the largest bare arc in the image. The eruption ends; the strings hold.

The title is a diagnosis, and the harmony agrees: the song opens and closes on the same two pitches, warm coral (C) and spring green (A), co-dominant and never settled. The verses travel everywhere; the ring edges stay smooth, motion narrated from total stillness. The first 43 seconds carry no percussion at all. Then, past the nine-tenths mark, the edges finally shake and the white vocal thread nearly doubles. Believing it is harder than saying it.

Everybody knows the four words. Spring green (A) is home here, leading 10 of 11 sections, until one 6-second window around 2:20 where it falls out: the rings thin, the edges reach their most violent wobble, and the vocal thread opens its longest silence. Through the collapse the violet percussion holds its fullest density; the pulse never lets go of what the harmony dropped. The despair gets 6 seconds. The green gets the rest of the circle.

The sinking is the letting-go, and the image draws it in light, not harmony. The weave stays anchored on spring green (A). Two-thirds of the way through, the brightness falls from 6,665 hertz to near 1,000, and near the lower edge the weave opens: bare single threads over black, 'hit the bottom' engraved on the rings where the song touches it. The loudest moment comes just past the bottom, on the turn back up. Escape.

We know the promise: get out while we're young. The rings say nobody leaves. Jade (E) holds the key in 14 of 18 sections, and the dynamic range is 3 decibels, one sustained roar. The voice is present just 14% of the running time. The loudest moment lands at 88% of the way through, and the words run out before the voice does. The most exhilarating escape song ever recorded is a circle.

There is no last note, only a chord that refuses to become the past. The loudest instant falls early, at 2:14; maximum tension waits until 5:10, where one held E major chord dissolves into shimmer and the ring edges fray. The centre goes grey because no single pitch wins: 40 instruments through nearly every pitch at once average to colourless. Half a century later, the ring at the edge is still trembling.