4 chords

how did we get to a point where all the music on the radio is using the same four chords well the four chords shown here don't worry if you can't read Roman numeral analysis the only real reason I use them is because it makes me feel less like a music theory dork and more like a wizard writing down a spell so we have our four chords the legendary four chords at the axis of Awesome for your attention to but this chord progression actually comes from another chord progression called the 50s progression or the doo-wop progression being a non angel angel will you be mine [Music] you can see how similar these are they're the same chords but they're just in a slightly different order in fact this is more like what granddaddy Bach would have done and is due up progression in turn comes from something called the ragtime progression you know bribe time well that style of music had a commonly-used chord progression as well but this is only a portion of the ragtime progression the gaps in between these chords are all consistent so if we draw this pattern out we actually get this overwhelming monstrosity that is our full ragtime progression but this pattern is way older than just ragtime you can find it all over the place in western classical music like here's an example of it in the opening two lists liebe Strom number three [Music] so you can easily see a natural evolution through the ages that leads us to these four chords but these four chords aren't as important as people think the real trick here it's just having a looping pattern of four chords even if they aren't v4 chords a few weeks ago Rick Beato posted a video talking about these four chords and how they're actually some people who are rearranging these chords to try and set themselves apart from the crowd so it's the same chords just rearranged but if you check out Benny Davis's channel who happens to be the keyboard player for axis of Awesome he's got a few videos talking about other four chord patterns that substitute different chords but still get used on the radio all the time so what's the problem are these chords bad is having a small repeated harmonic structure bed are we not allowed to like them why are they so popular and why does everybody use them well in order to answer these questions I'm first gonna have to talk about these two pieces by Chopin you can actually find a TEDTalk by the great Benjamin Zander titled the transformative power of classical music that covers one of these pieces the same way I'm going to here it's just that this piece of music is so incredibly well composed that it's literally the perfect teaching tool this is how I learned this concept and it's how I'm going to show you so here's the score - Chopin's Prelude in E minor and here's my cheat sheet and I just want to mention that to experience the full effect of this video you should pause right here listen to this whole Prelude and then come back after you've listened to it basically the entire piece of music is this B in the melody trying to get down to that e so check it out when the piece starts we hover around this B for a while [Music] and then we move down to that a so we're well on our way then we get that g-sharp which now that I look at it isn't actually in my cheat sheet but we're still getting closer to our goal of reaching that e and that's what's important we then hear that f-sharp so we're almost there [Music] [Laughter] and in Chopin throws us for a loop with this measure in this measure we literally hear every note except for E and Chopin uses this measure to send us back to where we started we're back at that B and we have to start this process all over again so again we slowly move back down toward that e we hit the f-sharp again and then aha E except it isn't over the right chord we want to have that e over the E minor chord because this is the Prelude in E minor so we get the E but it's not in the right context he tries it again [Music] but it's still the wrong cord he tries it again [Music] but again it's the wrong chord then we get the very end of the piece [Music] and ah we've arrived home there's this big central concept in music of moving from tension to resolution moving from chaos to order and this entire piece of music is one of the most concise examples of beginning in a place of relative stability but with a clear destination and being forced to move through tension in order to slowly steadily and consistently move back to stability and ultimately ending with what the piece of music necessitates you basically need to go through the first few years of music school before you could start getting the intricacies of how this works in our Western classical music system and how this concept like developed over time and evolved and how Pythagoras cutting a string into halves and thirds has anything to do with this at all but Chopin along with all the great masters knew exactly how to tell a story that moves from point A to point B a story that has a clear beginning middle and end and we can see this in the other example that I wanted to show you his Prelude in C minor we saw our big E minor chord with Ian the melody at the very end of his piece titled Prelude in E minor so what do you expect to see in his Prelude in C minor well let's look for that big C minor chord with that Sienna melody and it's right here [Music] now I know what you're thinking hang on you just ranted about having a story or going from point A to point B why would he finish this piece early well he arrives at his climactic cadence at the end of the eighth measure but he finishes the whole piece in 13 measures so if you crunched the numbers you actually find that that big climactic moment in this piece happens at the golden ratio so if you go back and listen to either of these pieces now that you know exactly how Chopin was thinking and understand what he was going for you might start to understand our problem here what we're dealing with here is fundamentally an issue between quality and quantity Chopin has one big moment in these short pieces and uses the harmonic properties of all the chords at his disposal to make that musical journey as interesting as possible which in turn makes that arrival that resolution that much more satisfying but if you have four chords that loop over and over and over again regardless of which four chord pattern you use you have an entire journey happen in a fraction of the time and more often so even though you might still feel satisfied every eight or so seconds it still isn't gonna feel as satisfying as having that one massive arrival at the end of the piece so those resolutions won't feel as satisfying but as a trade-off you get mass appeal and accessibility in your piece of music you won't need someone to explain exactly how and why this piece of music works while at the same time that piece of music won't necessitate as much focus in order for you to still understand how it works and find it satisfying but with so many people repeating the exact same harmonic pattern those same four chords are going to get boring so we end up seeing a little variation a little while ago I posted a video with the scene where Goku goes super saiyan for the first time synched up with a passage from eric Whitaker's when David heard there's literally an entire minute and a half of build-up - one giant moment in both the scene and the music but at the same time having a buildup like this is almost impossible if you have the same four chords looping over and over again because you're experiencing that resolution every four measures effectively hitting the reset button over and over again it would be like Goku going super saiyan every eight seconds for a minute and a half straight it would be extremely difficult to develop any kind of tension so having a piece of music that has one massive build up to a single climactic moment basically has the exact same effect as a bass drop when they build up one big climax but nevertheless since the efficacy of a repeating four chord pattern has become so popular we're starting to see it bleed into realms where we'd normally see compositional patterns more similar to Western classical music namely film scoring what is that what do you think well one of the biggest requests I've had on my channel is to go over and analyze the track time from the inception soundtrack and basically explain how it works well it's a repeating 8 chord pattern but if you look closely it's just 2 4 chord patterns with one difference between them so if you listen to the track Zimmer just changes the orchestration every eight minutes whenever this pattern resets which makes each 8 chord pattern feel slightly different like it's moving or growing in a new direction even though it isn't but it's something that you're already familiar with you already liked what this piece of music was made out of before you ever listen to this piece Zimmer knew it the publishers knew it and now I'm going to show you how let's go back to that TED talk check out what happens when Zander finishes playing the whole Prelude after he's explained how it works to the crowd it's the same gesture he makes me comes home after a long day turns off the key in his car and says I'm home this is why I wanted you to pause the video in here the Chopin Prelude before I explained them because now you can go back and re-listen to those pieces of music now that you know how they work after you know what to listen for these preludes become immensely more enjoyable and those big moments become cathartic and satisfying and in my Dragon Ball Z video I had a few people mentioning that they were experiencing goosebumps if at any point you've experienced chills when listening to music they've actually recorded improving that musically induced chills uses similar parts of the brain that food sex and drugs like cocaine do but at the same time they found out that you can't just play someone's favorite part of a piece of music it won't lead to chills the researchers had to play about 90 seconds before the subjects favorite part of a piece of music before they could reliably reproduce chills it's almost like the listeners needed to have that build-up before a cadence and not just that one chord that ends the piece but just because a piece of music gave one person chills didn't mean it would work for another meaning that it isn't about the abstract quality of the composition that determines chills or not but instead it looks like those chills are based on an individual's familiarity with a piece of music as in that person knows what and how to expect what the composer's gonna do with the story of that piece of music which again is interesting because there is a study at my alma mater where they exposed students to a bunch of music that came to a variety of Cadence's and at no point did anyone get chills or dopamine or anything in fact they made a point of mentioning that one specific part of the brain that everyone else saw light up in their own studies in relation to chills and dopamine did absolutely nothing in this study where they were purpose trying to interrupt an individual sense of musical expectation but then again I didn't get chills while listening to either one of these Chopin preludes until I had a professor explain them to me so having random pieces of music being played wouldn't really allow for that dopamine response unless those students were first told about how the piece of music was going to unfold but at the same time this particular study found at during musical expectation violation the subjects were using the same parts of their brain that normally light up when someone's trying to process language syntax which must mean that even though these students weren't able to experience a predictable dopamine response they still at the very least had some understanding of the musical system that they were listening to even though these pieces of music didn't resolve in a way that they found completely predictable if we have BA GM we expect next oh that might have been a fluke let's try it again which I found kind of relatable because I know I've had a piece of music give me chills the first time I listen to it but at the same time I was raised in an environment where I was saturated in music based in a Western musical system so since I've had musical training on how to listen to Chopin Prelude and now you have to then there's a chance that listening to his other pieces of music that use a similar system of tension and resolution could also lead to musically induced chills so long as the listener pays attention so if you hear a piece of music based in a musical system that you aren't familiar with and don't understand then you can't tune into how the tension and release is evolving throughout the piece you won't understand the language and therefore the story and ultimate conclusion of that piece will be completely lost to you so if there's a piece of music that moves in a way that the listener perceives is unpredictable then there's going to be no dopamine but if the listener understands what the composer is trying to do and is able to have a prediction that the composer can maybe subvert on occasion but ultimately satisfy then maybe that's what leads to our dopamine response when listening to music so if we had a piece of music that the listener understands and the composer satisfies the listeners prediction we can get dopamine but if we have a piece of music that's harmonically similar to what you're expecting but then suddenly goes off in a direction you weren't expecting and that's like being told you're going to Disneyland and ending up at the dentist it would be like will it be like this [Music] so if you listen to one type of music and are familiar with what to expect from something like that specific type of music and you're able to tune into a consistent resolution every four chords or a ish seconds then what would happen if a different genre of music took what you expected and we're familiar with and spun it in an unexpected way maybe you like the build-up and resolution to a k-pop chorus but can't wrap your head around how someone could possibly enjoy this [Music] because you as a listener know what to expect from kpop but don't yet understand what people enjoy about this which might explain concepts like the mere-exposure effect as far as music is concerned the mere-exposure effect or the familiarity principle is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to like things just because they're familiar with them maybe you like your favorite genre of music because it's the music you've exposed yourself to the most and other bands that fall within the same genre act in accordance with your pre established predictions this might also account as to why newer genres and styles of music are met with such disdain but then a few years time can become more commonplace or even standard because more and more people will understand how and why that new genre works which makes sense when you look at how people from different genres are treated if you're having a sincere dopamine related intensely emotional and rewarding response to one type of music and you have someone tell you that that piece of music is stupid it's invalidating the same part of your brain that makes you enjoy food and sex this also leads to the massive debate in the music composition world of thinking music versus feeling music and why someone who might saturate their life and music that makes them feel good would get threatened by someone who spends their life thinking about in analyzing music because that thinking musician could easily come along draw a few squiggles and prove that a piece of music that might be capable of bringing you to tears just might not be that complicated kind of makes you feel like a cheap date right but at the same time that's why when you write a piece of music by feeling it it sounds like a distillation of all the music that you've listened to and enjoyed if you're feeling your way around the music then through trial and error you're inadvertently going to write music that has a similar harmonic and melodic structure to the music that makes you feel good similarly if you like one specific musician and that musician is writing arranging and performing music based on how they feel then that probably means that you and that musician are already listening to and feeling the same types of music so now you're equipped to understand how and why different composers structure their music in different ways and as far as the four chords go it's quality versus quantity if you know that you're dealing with a massive audience that has an average retention rate of about eight seconds and delaying that reward for an entire piece of music might not sell records but if you want to tell a story with your music and take your listener on a journey then having the same repeating figure over and over again just isn't going to cut it [Music] thanks for watching I'd like to thank my patrons for making these videos possible with a very special thank you and a birch AFN Matt and Ben leaves fogger if you liked what you saw here be sure to subscribe and check out my other videos follow me on Twitter and twitch to have your musical questions answered live and if you really like what I'm doing consider supporting the channel on patreon but that's going to be it for me for now thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Sideways

Views: 808,780

Rating: 4.9469938 out of 5

Keywords: 4 chords, chords, chord, Axis, Awesome, Axis of Awesome, Zimmer, Inception, Time, Chopin, Prelude, I V vi IV, Resolution, Tension, music theory, pop music, classical music, classical, western, western classical music

Id: M33cRNx3ohI

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/kaitlinismagic]

If you have never seen to the TED talk that he's referring to in this video, WATCH IT! Like seriously, it brought me to tears, literally. And I'm not a crier. Pretty stoic actually. I'm not particularly into classic music either.

[u/movingmoonlight]

DNA is played at 14:04 of the video.

First time poster. Mods please tell me if I did anything wrong :>

[u/Ciel_D]

Followed immediately by Mudvayne, lol!

[u/YANN_LIFE]

music theory <3!!!! love the mere exposure theory being related here :)

[u/quasialois]

I really enjoyed this! Was so immersed I kinda forgot I clicked on it because of BTS until DNA played...

[u/aominemine]

This was really interesting! The music theory talk makes me remember all the piano lessons that I used to take halfheartedly... I regret not putting effort in learning :/

[u/shieisays]

A very interesting watch, thank you! I've learnt about the tension -> resolution principle in music but relating it to familiarity does put things in perspective. It's also funny how I got a lot of satisfaction from both BTS and that metal break lol. I somehow think Fire might have been a better example - the final chorus starts off more strongly and thus has a greater sense of resolution after the suspense of the bridge. The beginning of DNA's chorus does have a bit of a unresolved feeling and so the effect isn't as drastic.. kind of like the difference between going straight home after a long day vs realizing you still have to pick something up halfway home.

Well I'm rambling.