Music isn’t supposed to sound good but it does (PART 1)

And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

– John Keating (Dead Poet’s Society)

It’s not with this concept that I have an issue with. My issue is with the fact that, as an electronic music artist, I just don’t understand why music fundamentally sounds good. What makes organized sound so connected to emotion? I tried to google this question that’s been bugging me for years with no answers found. So I decided to take matter to my own hands and be the first to write about this musical investigation 🙂

[Source]

Plug your headphones in as I share you guys this my journey, where someone I managed to come up with more unanswered questions than answers to my previous questions 😛

 

Why do people appreciate other art forms?

It made sense to me that visual art would be appealing. You look at it, and it reminds you of real life scenarios you might have experienced (or seen before). Visual art often pulls on your sense of empathy to wring emotions out you. Yes, you don’t need to have experienced the situations, you just need to experience the feelings. You can then draw from your darkest moments and your most elated experiences to be able to say yeah, that drawing/painting/photograph/CGI is good. Or bad.

Films, plays and fiction literature are even easier to connect to emotion. Story telling is a significant part of human development, making it possible for children to understand situations without experiencing it themselves. Stories let us experience life beyond our own.

Figuring out why dance is enjoyable was tricky, but I realized that dance connects to the human need to coordinate, move together, and act as one. High level professional dances even hit on putting audience members in awe of the incredible technique required to perform the dance. Dance is also very much intertwined to courtship and sex, as made evident by the dancing in clubs and parties.

Then comes music…

Here’s a piano song I composed, released just before this article came out:

Let’s dissect this song into its itty bitty components.

In general, there are two forms of music. Just two. It’s song and dance. Although we have explained the appeal of dance, I found it impossible to isolate song because most music is a combination of both (well, certain songs such as funeral music would be all song, no dance) Renegade Red certainly contains both. Another way to think about dissecting music is through the components of sound. They are the pitch (song) and the rhythm (dance).

Let’s focus on pitch.

Here’s a music theory crash course: a unit of music can be thought of as a “musical phrase.” So what is a musical phrase? You can probably figure it out intuitively of you listen to a song. Here are examples of song lyrics that constitute 1 musical phrase from some recognizable songs:

“Mary had a little lamb”

“Baby you light up my world like nobody else”

“Hey Jude”

“Happy birthday dear ______”

They don’t even have to be vocals. Clarinet solos and dubstep drops both have musical phrases. Renegade Red’s first musical phrase occurs from 0:00 to 0:02. It’s only two melodic notes but a phrase nonetheless.

I found that they’re very recognizable since human beings talk in the same manner as musical phrases. There’s even what’s called a “question” phrase and an “answer” phrase in music theory. Going back to my piano song, 0:57 to 1:00 is a question phrase. Somehow, our brains are programmed to interpret that section as a question. This question is then answered on 1:01 to 1:04.

Was I thinking about theory when I wrote this song? No. It just sounded good so I kept it.

While I found a Eureka moment here, this realization turned out to be a lone piece in the 100 piece jigsaw. Stay tuned for Part 2 for the rest of the jigsaw puzzle, plus some other cool tracks 🙂

Featured image here.