Sing Our Own Song


"Sitting in a classroom doesn't make you a student, any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car."
- Me, apparently

I am one step closer to becoming my hero, Dr Gregory House.

Having somehow managed to fall upstairs and gained some bruises in surprising parts of the left foot, I'm walking around with the help of a stick.

I'm just waiting for someone to ask me what happened, so I can tell them my Hallux has turned purple. But I'm using my long knobbly pole as a third leg.

Politics on Saturday. Anti-Climate Change demo in London, and a conference on "what have socialists been doing wrong for the last three decades, and what should we be doing now?".

That's not the official title, but it's what we'll be discussing.

For the past few weeks, I've been trying to invent a "Song Theory". I don't mean a theory of "How to Write Songs", I mean a theory of the purely musical aspects of songs - as opposed to imagery in lyrics, fashions of subject matter, choice of instrumental backing etc.

Put it another way. Some songs are catchy, some less so, some aren't. What, at the level of tonality and rhythm, makes the difference?

When we say a song sounds like a nursery rhyme, or has an "Irish" feel to it, or makes us think of the sixties...what are we actually talking about?

What is it in the rhythmic and tonal structure of a song by The Temptations that makes it different from a song by Duran Duran?

I'm on my third such theory - the previous two having come crashing to the ground when (a) I tried to apply them or (b) I heard something on the radio that instantly disproved them. But here's some general remarks. Skip if music theory baffles you.

* Most songs are pentatonic. Specifically, their "comfort zone" is the tonic, medial, subdominant, dominant and leading note below of the key used. If you're singing in A-Minor, your "home" notes are G, A, C, D and E. If you stray outside these notes, you'll almost certainly stay pentatonic, but in adjacent octaves.

* If your time signature revolves around 2, 4, 8 or 16, there is a pattern of "Strong-Weak-Strong-Weak" in the beats. More than that, there's the same pattern in breves, minims, crotches and quavers. If your time signature involves 3, 6, or 12 (or uses triplets) the pattern is "Strong-Very Weak-Weak". There is therefore a fractal pattern to stress.

* The immensely complex four level stress pattern of English sentence intonation is flattened into a two level system when singing.

* Time boundaries between lines, phrases and verses may be sharply defined, by phrasing boundaries are not. If each bar is divided into sixteen ticks, then for any given bar, the final two ticks of the previous bar and the first tick of the subsequent bar can be part of that bar, as well as part of their own, for purposes of phrasing.


In principle, it should be possible to write a computer program that could generate a song - minus the lyrics - that (say) Jimmy Somerville could have written...but didn't. In other words, I'm talking about codifying style.

11 comments:

  1. You lost me at pentatonic but this...
    "When we say a song sounds like a nursery rhyme, or has an "Irish" feel to it, or makes us think of the sixties...what are we actually talking about?"
    I would suggest this is more to do with cognitive labelling and schemas than the music itself.

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  2. Hardhouse:

    They'll certainly come into it, but on their own they can't explain why we can say things like "This sounds like Human League, but with Joy Division-like vocals".

    If you hear a piece of music you've never heard before, then pre-existing labels for familliar music won't help you categorise it within that nomenclature - unless you have some notions of "resemblence" and "dissimilarity".

    Now, you could suggest that "resemblence" is itself another label without a need for an objective referant, but that just pushes the problem one stage further back, because you still need to categorise new resemblences by comparing them to old ones...presumably using a second-level resemblence label.

    This is (I think) the old problem of universals and particulars. What is it that binds the particulars under a universal together, apart from the universal.

    In other words, what creates the universal? Saying "similarity" won't work, because "similarity" is another universal.

    As for schemata...it's one of those words like "category" and "paradigm" that expands to include everything, at which point it suddenly explains nothing.



    MJ:

    I put my pole in just for you.

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  3. Umm ... you make me feel like a drivelling idiot.

    I suppose I'd best go and look for one, then. ;)

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  4. Camy:

    The best way to find an idiot is to look for someone who thinks their a genius.

    FWIW, you write stories and make music in what I'd call an "instinctive" way, without training or understanding of theory.

    I can't do instinct, at all. I have to build up creation from theory - which makes me a studio enginneer who sometimes sings, as opposed to a singer who does his own engineering.

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  5. ...and to prove I'm not a genius, I've just got confused about "they're" and "their".

    Bugger.

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  6. ... but, a schema being a hypothetical construct is just a category created over experience. So if music created by Irish folk becomes labelled 'Irish music', even though there is nothing inherently 'Irish' about the label, or the words, or the music... just as EVERY word is just a label.

    A category exists for a style of music in the brain, on hearing similar styled music this schema is stimulated and brought to attention leading people to say "that sounds irish". Perhaps?

    How's ya Hallux?

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  7. ... but, a schema being a hypothetical construct is just a category created over experience. So if music created by Irish folk becomes labelled 'Irish music', even though there is nothing inherently 'Irish' about the label, or the words, or the music... just as EVERY word is just a label.

    A category exists for a style of music in the brain, on hearing similar styled music this schema is stimulated and brought to attention leading people to say "that sounds irish". Perhaps?

    How's ya Hallux?

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  8. a category created over experience

    Indeed, but experience of what?

    I'm not suggesting some crude essentialist notion of musical genre, of the kind that might say "All and only Irish music uses triplet time, prominent percussion and rapid tempo" - that description could apply to half of Goldfrapp's catalogue, and some Irish music is slow or non-triplet based.

    Certainly schemas exist, created by a combination of personal experience and categories that we hear other people using. They're often vague, incoherant, and break down under analysis.

    It might be an interesting exercise is sociology, psychology and indeed neurology to catalog and contrast different schemas used by different people - but what I'm attempting doesn't actually involve schemas in this way directly.

    Let me give an example. I've just been listening to two tracks by a band called Syntac.

    In one, a song called "Angel", the chorus has words starting on the 1st, 5th, 7th and 11th semiquaver (=sixteenth of a beat) in the first bar of the chorus, and on the 1st, 3rd and 7th semiquaver of the second bar. The third and forth lines repeat the structure.

    There are other words on other semiquavers dotted around, but they are never sung with emphasis - they're what musicologists sometimes call "ornamentation".

    Now, "Angel" is a dance-floor filler of around 150bpm. The same band have a ballad called "It's a lie" which sounds superficially different.

    Except the chorus has exactly the same rhythm structure - 1,5,7,11...1,3,7. The ornamentation and melody are a bit different, but the essential pattern (and I suspect the chord structure) the same.

    You could view this as one band being unimaginative, but I think that's unfair because there just aren't that many different usable rhythms to choose from.

    What I've done is identify a recurring feature - quite a simple one - that one songwriter tends to gravitate towards.

    One more thing. The 1 and 7 ticks in the pattern are accentuated. The track is fast. If you play a 1,7 sequence at half speed, you get a 1,4 sequence (the distance between tick is cut from 6 to 3).

    Syntec are a futurepop/ebm type band. LastFM is providing me with close to 2000 tracks from bands in similar genres, and this 1,4 sycopated rhythm occurs in at least half of them.

    Specifically (stop me if I'm getting too nerdish), the first and third lines of the choruses tend to be 1,4 and the second and fourth lines 1,5.

    They might be 1,4,7 and 1,3,5, or 1,4 and 1,5,7...but the 1,4...1,5 basic pattern is very common.

    These are the kinds of commonalities that I'm measuring. Schemas are partially based, I think, on subconsciously recognising commonalities such as these.

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  9. PS, my hallux is fine. But you wouldn't want to suck on it, just yet.

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