The Music Theory Iceberg Explained

this video is sponsored by hook theory if you're not familiar with the iceberg meme it's basically just a fun way to categorize a topic starting from the well-known and mainstream ideas at the top and then going progressively deeper into unusual and obscure ideas and the great fun of these i spoke memes is seeing how weird it gets as you go down so i thought i would create a music theory iceberg and today we're going to start above ground at the tip of the iceberg and work our way down into the murky weirdness below so starting at the very top we've got a equals 440 hertz this is what's called concept pitch a standard universalized pitch that we tune a above middle c to to allow all instruments to be in tune with each other without having to coordinate which note to tune to pretty much every piece of music you've ever listened to particularly popular music will be tuned to 440 hertz we've also got some time signatures here most prominently four four as i'm sure you're aware the vast majority of popular music is in the time signature of four four but we do get some other time signatures sometimes and the two most common ones beyond four four would be three four and six eight over here we've got 12 tone equal temperament pretty much every piece of music you've ever listened to will be in 12 tone equal temperament without going into too much depth it's the way that we define how each note should be in tune with each other all we have to do to tune something in 12 tone equal temperament is to tune all of the octaves first and then divide those octaves into 12 equally spaced pictures [Music] over here we've got our three standard accidentals natural sharp and flat we've got the pentatonic scale perhaps the most fundamental and straightforward scale and all of music we've got our two most common clefs the treble clef and the bass clef major and minor which of course are the two overarching types of tonality in western music and they've also snuck in power chords here which are chords that don't have a major or minor because they don't have a third they're just a root and a fifth right level two so we still haven't gone below the surface yet but this is the tip of the iceberg with music theory at the top here we've got harmonic minor so harmonic minor is a variation on the typical minor scale on the natural minor scale where we make one modification we raise the seventh note and this makes the scale more appropriate for writing harmony in the minor key we've got a few more chord types here chord types beyond major and minor we've got diminished augmented seventh chords inversions and suspended chords and although these chord types are certainly less common than major and minor these will still turn up in a wide breadth of music in all styles over here we've got the blues scale which is exactly the same as the minor pentatonic scale but with one additional note that we could call the blue note the flat fifth now quite an important concept in this tier is circle of fifths the circular fifth is sort of a universal tool that ties together various concepts in western music on the most basic level it's a way of working out which sharps and flats are in each key or in a more advanced usage you could use the circular fifths to conceptualize how different key changes might feel brighter or darker sequence is a very fundamental element of melody writing it's basically when you take a phrase and then you immediately repeat that phrase but now at a either higher or lower pitch time should and the last thing we've got on this tier is cadences a cadence is basically just a short chord progression a short chord movement that resolves a passage the two main types of cadence that you'll hear used time and time again are the perfect cadence also known as the authentic cadence which is five to one or the plagal cadence sometimes referred to as the r men cadence that resolves from four to one [Music] and now we enter the water and starting us off we've got this selection of odd time signatures as the name would suggest these time signatures are odd they're unusual but because of that they have a really intriguing quality a really unusual sound to the western listener [Music] [Music] diatonic modes is what you'll think of as just modes mixolydian dorian lydian all of those common modes you hear about a mode is when you take the notes of the scale but then you treat a different note as the root point as the starting point so for example g mixolydian is c major but treating g as the root note they're called diatonic modes here because they're referring to the modes of the major scale modal interchange is obviously related to modes is when in a piece of music you might switch between using different parallel modes so one part of the music might be in e mixolydian [Music] and another might be in e dorian [Music] here we've got some different accidental marks we've got double accidentals this is a double flat and this is a double sharp for example a double flat would be the note g natural because we flattened a twice and the note a double sharp would be the note b because we've sharpened a twice there's various instances where you might need to use a double sharp or double flat when writing something down on sheet music down here we have the whole tone scale this is a very easy scale to remember because it's literally just whole tones tones going up now we mentioned these odd time signatures or what we might call odd meters but here we have mixed meter mixed meter is when a piece of music switches between different time signatures regularly mixing different meters together for example good morning good morning by the beatles keeps switching time signatures resulting in what you would call a mixed meter [Music] now earlier we had the harmonic minor here we've got the melodic minor the melodic minor is another variation on the minor scale this is the natural minor scale the harmonic minor scale raises the seventh degree and the melodic minor then raises the sixth degree as well effectively to bridge the gap that was created when we raised the seventh degree upper chord extensions is basically any time you have a ninth eleventh or thirteenth in a chord and it could be a flat nine or a sharp 9 or it could even be an add 9 or an add 11 that sort of thing anytime you have a chord like that it's referred to as a upper chord extension and this funny symbol here is another type of clef we already had the treble clef and the bass clef this is what would usually be called the autoclef and it's nowadays only really used for the viola now although normally when you see this symbol it will be an alto clef this symbol in its most basic form is what we actually call a c clef the symbol is a stylized c and it works that whatever line you put the c on is the c line so in a standard auto clef we put it so the middle line is passing through the middle of the c so the middle line is c this is actually the case with all clefs a treble clef is what's called a g clef so although we almost always place it on the second line up like this making this line the g line we could place it on a different line changing where the note g is and same for the bass clef this is the f clef the idea is whatever line passes through these two dots is f in basic terms a neapolitan chord is a major chord built on the flat second degree of the scale however it comes with some context as well a true neopotent chord will be voiced like this in the first inversion and will resolve onto the fifth chord of the key [Music] and in roman numeral analysis we can even label the neapolitan chord with its own unique symbol a capital n the augmented sixth is a similar type of chord where you have to use in a particular context in basic terms it's a dominant seventh chord built on the sixth degree of the minor scale so for example in the key of a minor it would be an f7 chord but the way we use an augmented sixth chord is that our f7 here needs to now move to the fifth chord of the key in this instance e major and the voice leading has to be done in a particular way the f at the bottom of the chord needs to resolve down onto e and the e flat at the top of the f7 chord needs to resolve up onto e and this is why it's called an augmented sixth chord because here we've got e flat resolving onto e we actually instead label this as a d sharp because this not only shows the player that this note is a leading note resolving up onto the e but it also avoids a bit of an awkward accidental [Music] and because we've labeled this e flat note as a d sharp it's changed the interval of the chord from a dominant seventh a minor seventh into an augmented sixth f to d sharp and the last thing to remember with augmented sixth chords is there's actually three different types of voicing for them each named after a different nationality another type of chord this time from rock music rather than classical music is the hendrix chord the hendrix chord is just another name for a sharp nine chord a seven chord with a sharp nine added on top so for example we could have e7 sharp nine this is our hendrix chord as the name suggests hendrix was quite a fan of this chord for example we can see it here in purple haze [Music] [Applause] and what makes it so distinctive is that we simultaneously have the major third here the g sharp and we also have the minor third here the g natural although the most accurate way to notate this would be with an f double sharp now of course this chord got its name by being used significantly by jimi hendrix but we can also see it in other songs like here in michelle [Music] a piketty third is when a passage of music in the minor key resolves onto the major chord for example this passage of music is in the key of b minor but resolves with a b major chord giving it a grand and complete ending [Music] an altered chord is an idea from jazz where the dominant chord of the key the fifth chord of the key has its fifth either flattened or sharpened and or could have its ninth flattened or sharpened i say and or because if a chord chart says g alt for example it's not specifying a particular type of altered chord it's just telling the player that they need to play a g dominant seven chord but with some alteration made to the 5th and or the 9th the alterations made to the dominant chord will add extra tension to the chord meaning it will have a sweeter resolution when it reaches back to the tonic chord polyrhythm is when we have more than one consistent pulse playing at the same time so for example a very common polyrhythm is three against two two consistent pulses in the same time as three consistent pulses [Music] a tritone substitution is an idea from jazz music where we substitute a dominant chord with the dominant chord a tritone away from it this is most commonly done with the fifth chord of the key so for example in the key of c major we would be substituting our g7 chord for a d flat seven chord and what allows us to work is that both those chords g7 and d flat seven both contain the same tritone so they both have the same effective resolution back to the tonic chord quartal harmony is harmony built from stacks of fourths so most of the harmony we deal with is what we would call tertiary harmony harmony built from thirds all our common chord types major minor diminished seventh ninth anything like that is built by stacking thirds up but alternatively we could make chords by stacking different intervals like fourths for example in tarkus by msn lake and palmer these arpeggiated chords played on the organ are all built by stacking fourths up [Music] and as you can see from the chord labels because our chord labeling system is built around tertiary harmony when we're dealing with quartal harmony the names can get a little bit odd you'll see a lot of sus4 for example and the last thing we've got in this tier is minor scale modes so earlier we mentioned diatonic modes these are modes of the major scale where we've taken the major scale but we've started on a different degree resulting in a new scale like mixolydian dorian etc minor scale modes are when we make modes from a minor scale so for example we might take the melodic minor scale and by starting on a different scale degree we generate a new alternative scale for example the fourth mode of the melodic minor scale is what we would call lydian dominant and this is the scale used in the simpsons theme song [Music] every musician can benefit from being able to tell how to play a song just by ear while ear training may sometimes seem like learning a new language it doesn't have to be that difficult hook theory have just released a really fun really effective ear training game called chord crush chord crash will play you a chord progression where only some of the chords are revealed to you and you have to using your ears identify the missing chords even if you've never detected chords by ear before chord crush starts you at the absolute basics and then will build up the difficulty as you progress for a limited time you can get 20 off a yearly premium subscription subscribe today at hook theory dot com forward slash david bennett right we're really getting into the depths of this ocean now metric modulation metric modulation is when we switch from one time signature to another but the two are connected by a consistent mathematic relationship for example we could switch from six eight to four four we could make the two sort of connect together by making the eighth note worth the same amount in six eight as it is in four four so the two different meters sort of get married by this consistent note value a polymeter is when we have effectively two different time signatures playing at the same time what this means is that one part will effectively go out of time with the other until a full rotation has happened when they fall back into sync together for example the song five four by gorillaz has a guitar riff in five four but a drum pattern in four four so after the first bar the two go out of sync until they've rotated enough that they're back together again [Music] an octatonic scale is technically any scale with eight notes but most commonly it's referring to one of two symmetrical scales one that goes semitone tone semitone tone semitone tone semitone tone and the other does the opposite going tone semitone tone semitone tone semitone tone semitone this second not to touch scale here that goes tone semitone is also referred to as a diminished scale and is what we hear at the beginning of the song just by radiohead [Music] the double harmonic scales are two scales that are often referred to with a variety of different names the double harmonic major sometimes just referred to as the double harmonic scale is just like the major scale but with a flattened second degree and a flattened sixth degree and the double harmonic minor scale sometimes referred to as the hungarian minor scale is exactly the same as our usual harmonic minor scale but with the fourth degree raised the double harmonic minor is also actually the fourth mode of the double harmonic major a moo chord is just a particular name for what you might think of as a add two chord a major chord with the second degree added in as well the name moochord was popularized by the band steely dan who were particularly fond of this chord type [Laughter] [Music] polytonality is when we have more than one key playing at the same time a composer well known for his use of polytonality is charles ives for example in this piece the two upper voices of the choir are in the key of c major and the two lower voices are in the key of b flat major [Music] [Music] bebop scales are variations on typical scales where a extra note has been added in for example the bebop dominant scale is just like the mixolydian scale but also features the unaltered 7th degree so we've got the flat 7th and the natural 7th in the scale or you could have b bop dorian which is just like regular dorian but also includes the major third [Music] these are the sort of scales that were used by beebop musicians like charlie parker miles davis and john coltrane however it's important to remember that the idea of the bebop scales wasn't theorized until years after the bebop era it was more of a retrospective way of analyzing how these players performed put simply the tristan chord is a half diminished chord and it gets its name from being the opening chord of wagner's opera tristan amazolda [Applause] so this is a chord we could label f minor seven flat five but that's kind of missing the point of the tristan chord the importance of the tristan chord is the fact that it's opening an opera with tonal ambiguity typically an opera would open with a very clear statement of key a clear statement of where we are tonally but when wagner opened his opera with this chord it changed that and many have argued that the use of this tristan chord was the beginnings of a tonality in western music which leads me on nicely to the last thing in this tier which is a tonality a tonality is quite simply when a piece of music avoids having any sense of tonal center any sense of key a a tonal piece of music effectively has no key this piece by arnold schoenberg very much avoids having any sense of key or resolution [Applause] [Music] all right we're approaching the bottom of this iceberg the second to last here and we start off with swing ratios swing as a rhythm is effectively when two eighth notes have unequal rhythms to each other where one eighth note is longer than the other eighth note and a swing ratio is a way of describing how much that difference is so for example a one-to-one relationship would be not swing it would be straight because both eighth notes have equal duration however a two to one swing feel would be triplet field because the first note has doubled the duration of the second three to one ratio would be a dotted eighth note swing like this the first note has three times as much duration as the latter a three to two ratio would be a type of quintuplet swing like this or we could have a four to one relationship like this which is also a type of quintuplet swing of course it's very important to remember that swing players aren't thinking in terms of swing ratios when they play they're just letting it naturally swing and the ratio to which they're swinging might even change throughout the performance but swing ratios can be very useful when you're trying to program swing into a daw overtones so pretty much any time you play a note for example on a piano you're not just hearing that note if i play an a on the piano we are hearing what's called the fundamental pitch of a but we're also hearing a series of overtones above that quieter sympathetic notes which effectively color the tone of the note and they always follow the exact same pattern of intervals in what's called the overtone series or the harmonic series the intervals start off by being very fundamental recognizable intervals like octave perfect fifth perfect fourth major third minor third then as we get into the quieter and much harder to hear harmonics they venture into intervals that we wouldn't find in our standard tuning system like a sub minor third a super major second and so on and the amazing thing is even though all of these are technically separate frequencies separate pictures our ear perceives them all as one cohesive note 24 tet so right at the beginning we talked about 12 tone equal temperament where our instruments are tuned by tuning the octave and then dividing the space between those octaves into 12 equally spaced pictures well 24 tet is 24 tone equal temperament tet is just short for tone equal temperament so 24 tet is a way of creating what you might call micro tonal music by giving us an extra micro tonal note between every standard pitch on our piano for example here's a piece of music by evan winston gretzky which is written in 24 tone equal temperament [Applause] [Music] and off to the right of our 24th here we have some micro tonal accidentals which we could use to notate our 24th music we have a half sharp so we could have for example an a half sharp which is a note pitched between the notes a and b flat we could have a half flat so a a half flat would be a note pitched between a and a flat and we could even have something like this which is a sharp and a half a equals 415 hertz so right at the beginning we were looking at a equals hertz which is what we call concept pitch the standard pitch that we tune a above middle c to the standard of a440 was only brought in around 100 years ago and before that historically a wide range of different tunings were used across different geographic areas 415 is what we call baroque tuning and is almost exactly one semitone lower than modern concept pitch but rock tuning is used when a performer wants to try and recreate the original sound of the composition closer to the original tuning it would have been written in however it's important to remember that 415 wasn't a historic standard it was just one of many different tunings a baroque instrument may have been tuned to just intervals if an interval is just it means it's been tuned to a perfect simple ratio so for example a justly tuned perfect fifth would be the ratio of three to two if you tune an instrument to just intervals it's what we call just intonation or pure intonation and although theoretically it's the purest way of tuning intervals it presents a big problem on any instrument with fixed tuning like a keyboard instrument for example you can't have pure intervals between every key without compromising other intervals for example if we tune our keyboard here in pure intonation in the key of a so for example we have a and e as a three to two pure perfect fifth unfortunately that means that by doing that some of the other perfect fifths in the key are not three to two relationships and are actually very dissonant so although three to two is the perfect and purest way to tune a perfect fifth interval for keyboard instruments and similarly fixed tuned instruments we have to have some way of adjusting or tempering this tuning system as we discussed earlier almost all modern music fixes this problem by using 12 tone equal temperament where rather than worrying about the particular ratios between each interval we just tune the octaves to perfect intervals and then divide the space between them logarithmically into 12 equally spaced pictures and although of course this means that none of these intervals are now pure apart from the octave they're close enough that our ear doesn't really mind but 12 tone equal temperament isn't the only way of fixing this problem historically other temperament systems were used for example mean tone temperament mean tone temperament for example is a system that was used historically to try and maintain justly tuned thirds and it did this by slightly compromising the tuning of a fifth now exactly how this was managed is a topic for another video but what is interesting is in old temperament systems like mean tone temperament because each instance of each interval was actually tuned subtly differently it meant that different key centers actually had different characters some key centers were more in tune than others so unlike in our modern system of 12 tone equal temperament where every key sounds exactly the same different keys could actually have different qualities in d minor which i always find is really the saddest of all keys really i don't know why but it makes people weep instantly to play a nested tuplets so a regular tuplet an example of a regular top lip would be a triplet so a triplet is when we force three notes into the space where we would usually only have two notes another type of tuplet we could have would be a quintuplet where you fit five notes into the space where you might previously only had two or previously only had four or you could have a septuplet where you force seven notes into workspace so that's regular tablets but a nested toplet is a tuplet inside of a tablet and as you can imagine this starts getting quite confusing quite quickly here we have a triplet nested inside of a quintuplet and i've also placed these regular notes and this regular triplet here to give it a bit of context performing these can be very difficult and conceptualizing how the different tuplets are interacting with the pulse can be quite mind-boggling now we can take that mind-bogglingness to another level by having a double nested tuplet a toplet inside of a tablet inside of a tuplet so for example here we have a septuplet inside of a quintuplet inside of a triplet [Music] but really at this point this rhythm is getting quite absurd and precise there's almost always a easier and more intuitive way to transcribe a rhythm like this for example rather than the septuplet quintuplet triplet situation we could have had virtually the same rhythm notated like this with just a regular nested tablet and the last thing we've got on this tier is neutral intervals earlier we were talking about micro tonality and half flats and half sharps and that sort of thing well a neutral interval is a micro tonal interval for example a neutral third is a third where the note is between a major or minor third so for example in the key of c major a major third would be c and e natural a minor third would be c and e flat so a neutral third would be c and e half flat so welcome to the deep the bottom of our music theory ocean and let's start off with a concept that really did blow my mind when i was first introduced to it and that is that pitch is equal to rhythm pitch and rhythm are ultimately the same thing so a note a pitch for example middle c is just a frequency right middle c is 261.63 hertz which means that the sound waves are completing their vibration completing their cycle 261.63 times a second or you could times that by 60 and get 15 697.8 vibrations per minute which effectively means that middle c is just a pulse a regular pulse playing at 15 697.8 bpm pitch is the same thing as tempo and we can actually hear that if we slow down this note slow down our middle c we eventually just get to a pulse it sounds like a kick drum right well we can do the same thing in reverse this is a quarter note kick drum pulse at 160 bpm now see what happens if we gradually increase the tempo of this pulse [Music] at some point as we increase the tempo our ears stop perceiving that pulse as a rhythm and begin perceiving it as a pitch because rhythm and pitch are the same thing amazingly this also applies to chords and intervals do you remember earlier when i mentioned that a justly tuned perfect fifth is the ratio of three to two one sound wave vibrates three times in the same amount of time as the other sound wave vibrates two times so it's a three against two polyrhythm right if we take this rhythm which is a three against two polyrhythm and speed it up [Applause] [Music] and as i said we can turn this into a chord as well we've already got our fifth so if we added in a major third which is the ratio of five to four a five against four polyrhythm what begins as this rhythm turns in to a major chord [Applause] [Music] a equals 432 hertz so we've already mentioned a equals 440 hertz which is our standardized universal concept pitch and we've also mentioned a equals 415 hertz which is our baroque era standardized pitch however a equals 432 hertz isn't some sort of standardized concept pitch it's actually a pseudo scientific idea in music that if you tune your music to 432 hertz it resonates better with i don't know aliens or space or something i don't know if you're not getting the point this is the sort of homeopathy of music adam neely's already got a great video debunking 432 so do check that out if you're interested super ultra hyper mega metal lydian scale so this is effectively a lydian scale but when you reach the fifth degree you then start a new lydian scale from that degree so for example if we're in the key of c major we'd start doing c d e f sharp g that's the beginning of c lydian but now that we've reached the fifth of g we now continue with a g lydian scale g a b c sharp d and now once again now we're on the fifth of that scale we continue with a new lydian scale based on the scale degree of d and the idea is that this is a scale that continues to get brighter and brighter as it ascends deutsche's scale illusion is when we're played one melody in one ear and another melody in the other ear and we actually wind up hearing a third composite melody so this will work best if you have headphones on but here's melody one that will be played in our left ear and here's melody two that will be played in our right ear [Music] and as you'll hear when they're played together we hear a third melody [Music] now this very much is a trick and illusion and it only really works because both melodies are played with the same timbre the same instrument if one of the melodies was played on a violin for example and the other on the piano it wouldn't really work what's happening is although these notes are split across our two ears and written here in two different staves if we condense them down onto one stave we can see that really it's one harmonized melody going up and down each of our ears gets one fragment of the melody but of course we perceive the entire experience as one piece of music one melody a shepherd tone is another auditory illusion where we seem to hear a pitch that's going up indefinitely which of course would be physically impossible because eventually it would go beyond the limitations of our hearing [Music] [Music] how this works is we're actually hearing various sine waves at the same time off the same note at different octaves as the shepherd tone ascends the sine waves at the top the ones with the highest octave start to become inaudible but as that happens they're replaced with new sine waves at the bottom so as the highest sine waves become too high pitched for us to hear our ear just switches to listening to the sine wave an octave below it irrational time signatures 7 12 is an example of an irrational time signature with all time signatures the top number is telling us how many beats there will be in each bar and the bottom number is telling us what type of beat that will be so 3 4 is telling us that there will be three quarter notes in each bar of the music so how do we apply that with 7 12. there's no such thing as a 12th note so how can we have seven of them in a bar well let's go back to three four for a minute we think of it as three quarter notes but what even is a quarter note a quarter note is a quarter of the whole note so what a time signature is effectively telling us is take a whole note divide it into the fraction that we've given you in the time signature so in this case quarters and then give us three of those quarters per bar of the music the same logic applies with our 712 irrational time signature take your whole note divide it now into twelfths eighth note triplets and then each bar of our 712 music is going to have seven of those seven eighth note triplets now you would never have a piece of music that was solely in an irrational time signature because it would be a over-engineered way of transcribing that music there would always be an easier more straightforward way to write that music down where irrational time signatures come in useful is when we mix them in with other rational time signatures so for example our music could be in 3 4 and then jump to a bar of 7 12. micro tonal modulation so a modulation is effectively a key change where the music moves from one key to another a very common practice in all types of music really but a micro tonal modulation is where we move to a key that is a micro tonal interval away from where we started so for example a regular modulation might be moving from g to a whereas a micro tonal modulation could be moving from g to a half sharp for example in jacob collier's arrangement of in the blick midwinter he modulates from e major regular e major to the key of g half sharp major so we've modulated up a neutral third [Music] in this clip jacob shows how before the modulation the piano is in tune with the music but after the modulation because we're now in a micro tonal key the piano is out of tune b four magical chords and then [Music] pythagorean tuning so we've talked a lot about different temperaments different ways that we can tune our piano right at the top we had 12 tone equal temperament which is the temperament that we use in all of our instruments today we then later talked about mean tone temperament which is a historic way of tuning in instruments that allows us to preserve a justly tuned third but before that people would tune their instruments to what's called pythagorean tuning this is a tuning system that instead of preserving the third preserves the fifth of the key meaning that all of the fifths are as well tuned as they can be now just like all other temperament systems pythagorean tuning does result in some intervals that are less pleasing to the ear but to give you an idea of how these different temperament systems sound i'm going to play you a major chord followed by a major scale initially in 12 tone equal temperament our standard modern tuning system then in mean tone temperament which is the one that preserves the sound of the third and finally in pythagorean tuning the one that preserves the sound of the fifth [Music] [Applause] [Music] zen harmonic music is music that divides the octave into something different than just 12 degrees for example you could divide the octave into more degrees like 19 or 21. or you could divide the octave by a smaller number than 12 for example seven or nine now zen harmonic music has a lot of overlap with micro tonal music but the main difference is that micro tonal music sort of assumes that you're starting from 12 to an equal temperament as a starting point and then adding in extra notes between those notes whereas zen harmonic music throws out the entire idea of dividing the octave into 12 notes and then divides it by some other number which could be as small or as large as you like negative harmony negative harmony is the idea that each chord in the key can have a negative version of itself which has the same level of tension and release relative to the tonic chord of the key for example if we were in the key of c major and we had a perfect cadence g7 resolving to c major the negative version of that would be f minor 6 resolving to c major both g 7 to c and f minor 6 to c has the same level of tension the same level of voice leading and thus are effectively the same type of resolution but coming from two different angles two different approaches if we look at how the four notes of g7 resolve onto the notes of our c major chord we can see that they have to move the exact same amount to get to their resolution as the notes of our f minor six chord do to get to c major there's the same level of voice leading the only difference is the direction of travel the b in the g7 chord has to resolve upwards whereas the a flat in the f minor 6 chord has to resolve downwards so how do we figure out the negative version of a chord well what we have to do is flip it across the axis of the key the easiest way to do this is to start with your tonic note of c in this example then draw a line downwards to the fifth degree of the scale g then across this horizontally we draw our axis this is the thing that we're going to be reflecting our chord over now we need to add the remaining 10 notes of the chromatic scale into this diagram it's a bit confusing but if you've done it right you'll wind up at the far right here with the minor third at the top and the major third at the bottom these are the notes that are going to reflect across b flat reflects to a b reflects to a flat c reflects the g d flat reflects the g flat d reflects to f natural and e flat reflects to our e natural and now that you have that diagram you can start reflecting your chords getting their negative versions so like we're saying before we want to get our negative version of f major resolving to c so we take the three notes of f major and we flip them across the axis f becomes d a becomes b flat and c becomes g g minor so in the key of c g minor is the negative version of f major f major resolving to c has the same amount of tension the same voice leading as g minor resolving to c so that is my music theory iceberg now i think what's so great about the iceberg as a way of explaining a concept is showing how you have to start at the top before you can progress downwards concepts like negative harmony and irrational time signatures are certainly interesting and can perk up the ear of a musician but if you haven't already been through the layers above it you're probably going to have a hard time understanding the concept so in a similar way to my music theory tier list that i did a few months ago you could use this iceberg as a way of informing how you should learn music theory in what order you should learn concepts [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: David Bennett Piano

Views: 1,197,199

Keywords: music theory, iceberg meme, explained, negative harmony, nested tuplets, pitch is rhythm, advanced

Id: NmeogiNhdHI

Length: 45min 15sec (2715 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 17 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/letsreticulate]

This was fun.