Now what does smoke have to teach us about writing stronger melodies? Once again, I'm going to propose that we resonate with art that is similar to nature. And when you look at smoke, I think the most defining characteristic is the turbulence, which can be found not just in smoke, but in fire, and water. And I think what makes turbulence so attractive to us is there's an element of surprise. It's visually unpredictable. And there's this balance between order and chaos between pattern and surprise.

When you look at the flow, smoke, there are two main parts to it. There's the laminar, and there's the turbulence. And there are a number of influencing factors that determine how long this laminar is going to last before it spins off into turbulence and how intense that turbulence is going to be. Now how does this relate to writing melodies, melodies also kind of have a laminar flow and turbulence for laminar flow. flow is how much repetition you're going to use with regard to your motif or your motifs. And the turbulence is how much change and surprise is going to be introduced into the phrase.

Because when you're writing music, you're always trying to balance, order and chaos, pattern and surprise. So let's listen to some examples so you can hear what I'm talking about. And this doesn't just become some abstract illustration, and I'll show you ones from what I would consider to be on the far extremes between having a lot of turbulence in the melody or very little. I think a great example of a low turbulence melody line would be Twist and Shout by The Beatles. The song essentially boils down to two simple motifs with a little bit of embellishment. You might even say it's just one motif, flipped upside down and repeated the kind of development that we talked about in the last chapter.

I think a great example of a high turbulence melody line would be anything by Arnold Schoenberg. Most of the pieces hero were a tonal meaning they don't exist at a particular key. Notice how this melody line goes all over the place and really never repeats itself at all. Now, despite the fact that these two examples are from completely different genres, and that pop music does tend to have a lot more repetition, and simplicity in the melody lines, then classical music, the balance that you will choose to find in your own melody lines between order and chaos and how much turbulence you want to introduce, it's going to be about your own taste and preference. Let's go back to the melody line that I used in the last chapter to illustrate how to develop a motif. And despite the fact that this is a really basic and simple melody line, I think you can help show how you can play with turbulence to further develop your melody.

As a refresher, let's listen again to this melodic phrase. We had two motifs. Here's the first one. And here's the second one. Now if we were going to analyze this melody on the scale between high and low turbulence, I would definitely put this on the low end. There's a tremendous amount of repetition here.

The first motif just repeats itself three times in a row. So now let's experiment with adding some more turbulence to this melody line. If you just want to add a little bit, here's what you might do. You could repeat the first motif a couple times, and then just change the third one by moving it to a new note. Okay, so let's say we wanted to take this even further and add more turbulence. One way to do that is to make greater changes to the motif and we could do that by Stretching out this first interval when we repeat it, which would make it less predictable, and then change this interval here from a second to a third for a little bit of surprise.

Now even though we added some turbulence to the interval, this part of the motif remained pretty consistent and predictable. Now if you want to add even more turbulence to this melody line, we're going to need to stretch things even further and reduce the amount of repetition that's happening so that we can make it more unpredictable. One way to do that would be to build on the last example where we took this initial interval and stretched it out, and we might even try truncating it or shortening this whole motif by leaving out one of the notes Okay, so we've definitely made this a lot more complex. We've removed some of the repetition, we've added turbulence, I wonder if we could take it even further. To do that, we're probably going to have to shake things up even more. So let's play with this motif.

We'll make it even shorter, just down to two notes, and stretch out the rhythm, and then take these two notes and repeat them, which kind of creates almost a third motif. As I mentioned before, this is a pretty basic melody line that I created just for the purposes of this illustration, you might have started to realize that we could have even gone a lot further. We only worked with the first motif and we didn't even touch the second one. You might have heard a version in there that you'd like to better and it really does come down to preference. What's more important and what I'm hoping you take away from this is that you learn some techniques for taking your melodic ideas no matter what style and what genre that you write in, and then seeing if there's a way that you might further develop it and then looking for ways that you can either scale back the amount of turbulence or increase it to taste.

Now let's move on to the next chapter about muscles.