Jonathan Shaw
  • Music Appreciation Spring 2020 (Blackwood)
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      • Activity : Judging Music
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    • 2/11 >
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        • Week 5 Assignment : Evolution of a Genre Assignment
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      • Week 5 Assignment : Evolution of a Genre Assignment
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      • Isn't She Lovely
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      • Assignment : Evolution of a Genre Assignment
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Thursday 3/2

Familiarity VS. Contrast

Harmony

Harmony :  Combination of simultaneous Pitches

This does not specify if the simultaneous pitches sound Good/Right or Bad/Wrong Together -  it simply means multiple notes played/sounded simultaneously

HOWEVER   
many times when we say harmony, it is implied that we mean FUNCTIONAL HARMONY , which is harmony that sounds good/right


RULE OF THUMB:  All Music on the Radio uses Functional Harmony ( The point of the radio is for A LOT of PEOPLE to listen to the station == Good Ratings)


This is the type of Harmony we would learn in school or private lessons

I.E.  :  Major/Minor Scales   ,  Major/Minor Chords   etc.


The difference between FUNCTION HARMONY   and   NON FUNCTIONAL HARMONY is drastic and can be heard IMMEDIATELY
(Generally we would not even hear this unless we seek them out...)

Chords

Where scales deal with groups of notes played in succession, Chords refer to notes that are played/ sounded simultaneously

 A Chord is  :   3 or more notes simultaneously 

Think of the timeline of Harmony - We started out with just one melody line of Gregorian chant,  Then they added a Drone, then a second line of Melody, giving us 3 separate notes sounding at one time. this gives us a chord!

Many of the examples of innovation in that timeline were attempts to figure out how to successfully (in a way that sounds good) put scales with chords.  


If we think of 2 components of a song :    Melody and Harmony  
in a Given Pop song  these will be represented by a vocal melody, and a chordal instrument (such as piano or guitar)
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 Familiarity in Harmony

Harmony is one big way artists and composers provide familiarity in music....

The reason some notes sound good together is because we are familiar with the sound  .. WE are used to it and we are comfortable with how it sounds

Think of how many Major/Minor Chords the average person has heard over the course of their lifetime
(Every song you or I have ever heard contains these - with the exception of song with non functional harmony)

 When we hear major and minor chords in the song, this is not the first time we are hearing that chord.   we have heard it many times before!

Therefore we are already familiar with the song ( even if it is a small aspect! )

One Important Device in Music for creating Familiarity is the Chord Progression
​


Chord Progression:   A Series of Chords played in Specific Order


Examples:

All of Me


Hello

Both songs repeat the Chord Progression right from the start of the song 

This gives us a musical home and some familiarity before the vocals come in - now that we have that home established we can focus on the melody and
lyrics

​Further Repitition  : Both songs are actually written with the same chord progression! 
(The sound a little different because they are in different ranges as adele sings higher)

So we have 2 aspects of 
repetition:  (1)   The progression repeating within the song,  (2) and the progression repeating from Other Songs

This happens a lot in popular music...

Functional Harmony 

Functional Harmony :  Which notes sound Good/Right together

AND...

HOW did we arrive standard for what sound's Right (i.e. 'right' is the mostly the same for everyone)

There are a couple answers for this question.....


One is Scientific....
All pitches are made by a frequency or sound wave

The Range of the pitch  (high vs. low) is dependent on the speed of the sound wave

FAST =  HIGH             SLOW  =    LOW

Unit of Measurement 
Hertz    or  Hz

Hertz gives us a numerical value for how many cycles per second a sound wave completes 
 MORE CYCLES = FASTER SOUNDWAVE

Tone Generator
​
​So if we think of 2 tones together ,  or ,  2 Frequencies / sound waves together  


SOME Frequencies  sound better together because of how their sound waves actually line up  
Picture
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The other is simpler...


We (all of us, others before us)  have been hearing the same notes put together for our whole lives , and those notes have been the same for along time before us

Pentatonic Scale
(****remember from the movie howard Goodall Talks about the Pentatonic Scale - a group of 5 notes that all civilizations have in common 

These notes have been drilled into us for our entire lives....   Marry had a Little Lamb,  Twinkle Twinkle... Alphabet...

Bobby Macferran Pentatonic Scale

The Pentatonic scale is a small example of how our ears have been trained to be partial to certain groups of notes when they are put together
(Some people say it is actually genetic  -  it is in our DNA that certain notes sound better together than other)


We have all been exposed to music that abides by all the same basic rules , and have trained our ears to know what
notes sound good together and what sounds bad according to those rules 



When talking specifically about what notes/pitches sound good when played together, we break it down into 2 categories:

Scales and Chords

Scale

  • Musical Scale:   In music theory, a scale is any set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch.

OR

A group of notes played in succession that sound Good/Right together 

This is another concept that we take from the greeks

  • The greeks had specific groups of notes that they believed when played together represented and would even inspire certain emotions when humans heard them 

They called these MODES
  • They believed in this so much that they would use these groups of notes to compose songs 
Depending on the USE for the song (celebration, mourning, sporting, war)
they would choose notes only from the appropriate mode


This is also something that we take from the Greeks, as even until this day we associate Major Scales/Chords with Happy and Minor Scales/Chords with Sad
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