Now what do muscles have to teach us about writing stronger melodies? Once again, I'm going to suggest that we respond to things that are similar to the natural world around us. Muscles obviously play a very important role in every movement and action that we take. The fundamentals of how a muscle works is all about tension and relaxation. How you create movement, and balancing tension and relaxation is also the key to writing music. But unlike a muscle, which only really has one way of building tension, which is through contraction, you can build tension in music in several different ways.

The main one being the use of dissonance, which can come in the form of harmonic or rhythmical, dissonance. Repetition, and pitch are other ways you can build tension in a melody line. Let's look at dissonance first. But before we do so, I think it's important to note the dissonance is pretty relative. What would be considered dissonant and the time of Bach is very different for what's considered dissonant and pop music Or even contemporary classical music, let alone if we decided to get into dissonance in the medieval time period, or in different cultures, like in Indian music, because the harmonic structure at those times or in those cultures is so different from Western music. So for the purposes of this class, we're going to focus on Western music and sort of traditional music theory.

And you can't really begin to understand dissonance until you understand consonants and consonants in western music is based upon the fundamental of a chord. And in case you don't know what a chord is, or need a quick refresher, I'll take 20 seconds here to define it. A chord is made up of three notes and two intervals, the interval of a fifth and then of a third. If it's a major chord, it's going to have a major third in the middle, which sounds like this. And if it's a minor chord, it's going to have a minor third in the middle which sounds like this. In most western music, the melody is set against a chord progression.

And when the notes of your melody fall perfectly in line with the chord that is set below it, you're going to have more of a consonant sound. For example, if this is a core that you're using in your song, this is a C major chord with C, E, and G. If your melody line falls on any of those three notes, it's going to sound consonant. If the notes of your melody fall outside of those three notes in your chord, it's going to sound dissonant. Just like we discussed in the last chapter, your melody line can fall on the spectrum between high and low dissonance. A good example for a song that has low harmonic dissonance is again twist in shot Now before we listen, let me explain what we're looking at here. The blue notes are the melody line, and the orange notes are the chords.

When the blue notes and the orange notes overlap here, those are the moments that are going to feel more relaxed or consonant. When they don't overlap. It's going to create harmonic dissonance or tension. And in the song, you might notice that it's really only this one note that doesn't line up with the chords. What counterbalances this sparseness is the fact that they start off with this note, and it leans on it through the whole phrase. And as we listen to this again, I want you to notice how this note feels compared to the others.

Just like with your muscles, tension is never sustainable, there's always going to be a pole to go from tension to relaxation. And the same thing is true with music. Any sort of dissonance always wants to find a resolution. And in twist and shout, this dissonant note pulls to the next note. And this pattern of tension and relaxation in this motif is what I think is the defining characteristic to twist and shout. Moving on.

To give you an example of a piece with high harmonic dissonance, we could easily come back to this piece by shurberg. Because he doesn't even really use chord progressions. So pretty much every note is going to be tense and dissonant. Now let's come back to the melody line that I wrote for this class. And we'll analyze this in the context of harmonic dissonance. If we were going to put this on our spectrum from high or low dissonance, I probably put it somewhere in the middle.

Okay, so here's the original melody line, which is in blue, and the chords are in orange. Now, if we were going to define a center point for this melody line, I think would have to be this note E. And not just because we repeat it more than any other note, even though we hear it seven times in this phrase, but also because our phrase is constantly revolving around this note, drifting below or above it. And since this note forms our sort of center of gravity and lines up most of the time with the courts below it, except for here, our entire phrase is going to have an overall tone of being very consonant and in harmony with the courts below it. With that in mind, let's listen to this again. And if we're looking at how tension and relaxation play a role and how this melody feels, it's probably this dissonant note right here.

That is the defining characteristic tension right there. That said, the only reason that note is dissonant is because it doesn't line up with the original chord progression that I chose for this piece. If I were to change the chord progression, it would change which notes were dissonant. To illustrate my point, let's play with this a little bit and do a version where we eliminate all harmonic tension. I'm going to use the same melody line, but I'm just going to change the chord structure so that all the notes of the melody line line up with the chords below them. Alright, so here's our melody line.

And I've changed the chords to create no harmonic dissonance. And if you look at these notes, you'll see that the melody and the chords overlap. 100% and let's hear how that sounds. Now after listening to that, you might feel like you like that version the past, which is good information to have about your own preference that you prefer there to be a lot less dissonance or tension. Now let's do another version. That's basically all dissonance, we're going to use our same melody line, but I'm going to change the chords to increase the amount of harmonic tension.

Here's our melody line again. And here's the new chord progression. Notice how many of these notes do not line up with the chords. Now there are a few notes that do overlap. I wanted our example to sound at least as musical as possible, try to make something sound 100%. dissonant is not actually that difficult to do.

I could just pick some random chords and throw them in there. But again, I wanted to provide you with a more musical example. And before we listen to this, I want to draw your attention to one more thing. We already talked about how this easy note here is the center of gravity for this phrase. And with our new chord progression, none of these notes line up with the chord beneath it, which is going to make the whole phrase feel more dissonant. And whereas this note right here was the dissonant note in the original with the new chord progression, these are now the dissonant notes.

So with that in mind, let's hear the sounds. Now that you've heard this version, you might feel you like this one the best. But the point I'm trying to make and what you'll hear me say over and over again, is that the amount of tension that you use comes down to taste The key here is to understand how harmonic dissonance serves as a tool to create tension. And next we're going to talk about rhythmical dissonance. The musical theory term for that is syncopation. And as I mentioned how Western music is all about a melody set against a chord progression.

It also centers rhythmically around a steady beat. rhythmical dissonance or syncopation happens when you have a note that is offset from the beat. To illustrate this, let's use this very simple melody line. The first iteration is going to have no syncopation at all. In this simple example, each note of the melody lines up perfectly with the beat. To make it syncopated.

We simply need to slide these notes over so that they come late or So that they come early. And here's what those sound like. You might have noticed that those are pretty similar to each other. To my ears when you jump the beat or when you come early, it's a little bit more aggressive. The syncopation is more pronounced. When you come after the beat.

I feel like it's a little bit more laid back, which kind of makes sense because you're not making the change until after the beat hits. Now, I think it's also important to note that rhythmical dissonance and harmonic dissonance oftentimes go together. syncopation is one of the main ways that you create harmonic dissonance. Let's return to our message. To illustrate this, and let's move our melodic line over even further, which will make the harmonic dissonance even more noticeable in these two spots. Because we're now extending these notes even further into an area where they don't line up with the chords, listen closer to how this increases the dissonance in those areas.

Just for fun, let's extend this even further to emphasize this even more. And as I've said before, a lot of this comes down to taste. So the purpose of these illustrations is simply to give you some ideas for how you can use syncopation to create rhythmical emphasis and also harmonic dissonance. Another way to build tension and you It is by repetition, which can either be harmonic repetition or rhythmical repetition. It's usually a little bit of both. And whenever you repeat something, it creates tension.

Whenever you repeat something, it creates tension. Whenever you repeat something, it creates tension. Whenever you repeat something, it creates tension whenever you repeat something because the listeners wondering when you're going to stop, or when something is going to change, and the anticipation is that there's going to be some sort of payoff. And I think a great example of that is a song by Katy Perry, which also has some really strong syncopation in it. Let's listen first and discuss. I told you it had a lot of repetition in it.

I mean motif plays six times. Well, I know there's that one time in the middle where it changes up a tiny bit. But it's basically the same motif. Repetition, in some ways is like a foil to turbulence. Because to get more turbulence, you can't have that much repetition. But if you add more repetition, you're going to reduce the turbulence, because this song would be definitely on the low end of turbulence scale.

But that doesn't mean that it's boring, because ironically, if you repeat something long enough, it actually increases the anticipation that something is going to change, which in this song comes in this moment right here. When the syncopation ends, and it starts right on the beat, and the phrase goes up, and that's in direct contrast to how the main motif was syncopated and went down. With all this in mind, let's listen to this one more time. Now you may have noticed that this technique, repeating a motif over and over again leading up to a big change at the end is the same one that I used in this original melody line, repeating this motif several times before we change it at the end. The last way to play with tension and relaxation and your melody lines is through changing the pitch. When a pitch rises, it introduces tension and when it lowers, it decreased tension.

And this is most easily illustrated on any string instrument including your voice which is dealing with vibrating vocal cords. To increase its pitch you have to increase the tension the string and this produces faster vibrations. So you can literally hear the increase intention Probably the most cliche example of this is the rising string sound and horror movies. The point here is that whenever the pitch goes up, it's going to increase the tension, whether that happens more suddenly, or on a more gradual basis. To illustrate this, let's revisit some of the variations we did to the melody lines in the last chapter on smoke, where we really started stretching the motif beyond its original shape. And we took this interval here, and we increased it in these two spots, which makes the repeating of this motif more intense as we go, in addition to the entire phrase going up to this point right here.

Let's listen to this section and I really want you to pay attention to how the pitch is affecting the tension All right, so we've looked at what two muscles have to teach us about writing stronger melodies. And that is about tension and relaxation. And we've looked at each one of these ways that you can increase tension in your music by using dissonance, either harmonic or rhythmical by using repetition and also by manipulating the pitch. But there's one more thing that muscles have to teach us about writing stronger melodies. And we'll talk about that in part two.