Tik Tok and dissonance do not mix

so does this harmony sound good to you [Music] that seems like a subjective question but for many people on tick-tock the answer is no and the reason for that is probably because the girl on the left is singing an e-natural on top of a c minor chord e flat is the third of c minor which violently clashes with the e natural and the harmony so you get a very dissonant sour interval which explains people's negative reactions right well the story of why some people like this harmony and why some people don't like this harmony is strange and rather unfortunate because the girl on the left was harassed for posting a fun and harmless tick-tock video of her singing the lesson that we can take from this is that western european polyphonic aesthetics are being relentlessly upheld as what is good or correct on social media let's get into it this video is brought to you by curiosity stream and nebula on may 7th sarah catherine posted a video of her singing the first couple of lines of as the world caves in a very beautiful melody written by matt maltese on may 15th the user fifty shades of swag dueted the original tick tock adding a harmony which a lot of people really negatively reacted to she was inundated with negative comments but many people came to her defense saying that the dissonance was the point of the harmony maybe a little bit too smugly though a lot of the defense basically came down to you just don't have the palette to appreciate dissonance like i do which is not particularly helpful regardless 50 shades of swag is not to blame here and does not deserve the harassment for posting her art it's worth mentioning that as the world caves in as a melody is difficult to harmonize into part harmony matt maltese's original doesn't actually have any vocal harmony attached to it the melody emphasizes the third of the key of g major b as the chords change underneath it we start on a c major chord the iv chord in the key of g major but then we go to a c minor chord which is the four minor borrowed from the parallel g minor this four to four minor c to c minor has like such a bittersweet effect to it but the reason for that is because the e flat of c minor is the flat six in the key of g what i've been calling the nostalgia note because it's a note that's used in harmony very frequently in cadences from popular song of the early 20th century nostalgia it reminds us of a time gone by what's very cool though and interesting about this melody in particular is that the melody keeps hitting the note b natural from g major so on the c minor chord you're getting that dark pull of the e flat while the melody is this bright b the major third there's like a pull in opposite directions that you feel when you hear the singer sing that be natural on lie with good stuff this gives us problems though when we go and try and harmonize the melody when we harmonize melodies what we're doing is we're trying to find some sense of balance between two voices and that sense of balance might be a little bit different from culture to culture like consider bulgarian coral singing for example [Applause] this stuff is this stuff is awesome it's so beautiful it's so resonant and strong the intervals between the voices are so powerful and you get intervals that don't normally occur in western popular music like that flat two there it's like so good so good singers who have ears that have been acclimated to popular music in the west will generally gravitate towards different kinds of intervals though if you have a melody and you're trying to sing along with it in harmony your ear will naturally gravitate towards the note that's either three notes away four notes away five notes away or six notes away from the melody note in whatever key that you're singing these are what we call the consonant intervals this contrasts with the dissonant intervals like the second and the seventh which generally are not used to harmonize melodies at least with a one-to-one rhythmic relationship this relationship by the way is called first species counterpoint more on that later now usually western singers will harmonize thirds and sixths and not fourths and fifths so if 50 shades of swag were to harmonize as the world caves in in thirds it would sound something like this [Music] [Applause] it sounds pretty good but there are some interesting problems in there on the phrase lie with the melody travels from a b to an a so a third down from b and a is a g and an f sharp the combination of the chord tone c e flat and g with the harmony of the singers f sharp and a yields a particularly spicy harmony that might not sit well with everybody's stomach so unless your ears are acclimated to that kind of dense cluster you won't naturally gravitate towards thirds when you're singing along to as the world caves in so fifty shades of swag didn't sing in thirds so what about sixths what would that sound like [Applause] this one actually works pretty well and what i think i personally would gravitate towards if i was going to try and sing harmony with the melody and this one is the one that's cited in a tick tock as being the correct harmony whatever that might be you generally hear singers who are singing by ear gravitate towards thirds and sixth when they're working within popular music those intervals just kind of work within the style this intuitive gravity towards those intervals in western music was codified in a treatise written in 1725 by johann fuchs gratis odd parnassum steps to parnassus this counterpoint textbook that many classical composers studied out of like mozart and beethoven attempted to codify the 16th century polyphonic style of the italian composer palestrina into a series of rules and guidelines for composers who wanted to make good sounding harmony whatever that might mean it was and continues to be an immensely useful guide for that style of music early on in the book you can see that this tendency to always go towards thirds and sixths as intervals for harmony between two voices has existed in western europe for many hundreds of years not in bulgaria by the way they use a different aesthetic over there for that style of singing but in popular music and on tick-tock the harmonic aesthetic of palestrina reign supreme [Music] the young lady in the tik tok in question instead of singing a harmony mostly in six she's saying it predominantly focused on fifths fifths are okay but carry with them some problems this is what she's saying some people were reacting negatively to things besides the notes that she was singing like for example she's singing with very wide vowels she's not really blending with sarah kothran in this the timbres are not really locked together contrary to what some people might have thought she's actually singing the notes fairly in tune if you take a look at the isolated audio track but some bigger problems arise when you take a look at the notes themselves not whether or not they're in tune with our western tuning system for example on the phrase lie with the melody is b to a and a perfect fifth down from b is an e natural chord is a c minor chord and e just it sounds it's well it sounds like this it's a very sour sound when two notes of different accidentals combine like this like e flat and e natural you get something called a cross relationship cross relationships are very very crunchy and in fact composers like igor stravinsky use them quite frequently for that maximum crunch effect but even if you don't have those underlying chords like the backing track that the two singers are singing with that might have that crunchy relationship that cross relationship between e and e flat even if you don't have to worry about that the choice to harmonize a melody with all fifths is a little bit of an odd one [Music] because of how stable and how powerful the perfect fifth interval is when we harmonize two voices in perfect fifths it ends up sounding like the lower voice is the more important one because the upper voice is in a perfect fifth relationship down to the lower one that becomes a problem because of course the melody should be the more important one the upper voice is like the melody of the song perfect fifths are very low on the harmonic series and if you need a primer on the harmonic series anchor wong's got you covered but basically notes physically vibrate and resonate with each other more if they're in simple mathematical relationships with one another and a perfect fifth is a very simple and very powerful mathematical relationship if you have two voices going perfect fifth perfect fifth perfect fifth one after another you don't get the sense that the upper voice is the more important one [Music] ruining that sense of harmony and ruining that sense of balance you may have heard the phrase don't use parallel fifths before right it's like the cardinal sin of music theory it's like the first thing that you learn when you go to music school and take a music theory class never use parallel fists how dare you parallel fits bad of course the first thing that everybody thinks when they encounter this rule for the first time is well for you no i like the sound of parallel fifths i'm going to use parallelophiles all the time and there's nothing that you can do about it and you know there's a good reason for that because parallel fits are very important in power chords in rock harmony power chords are nothing but parallel fifths and you know the amazing harmony of like duke ellington would be absolutely impossible without some degree of parallel intervals like parallel fists are just honestly you'll find them in music from around the world and you also find it in a lot of pop music from today like david bowie's black star he's singing in parallel fifths and it sounds awesome like what an incredibly powerful and haunting vocal performance something that's no doubt aided by the fact that david bowie is using parallel fifths going contrary to the common wisdom of palestrina and fox so why the hate here why was 50 shades of swag harassed for using this kind of harmony harmony which doesn't necessarily conform to that style of european polyphonic singing you know users on tick tock were not citing an 18th century rule and no parallel fifths to justify the harassment no they were just saying that the music sounded bad and without interrogating themselves on why they felt the music sounded bad they were in effect without realizing it enforcing european standards for polyphonic aesthetics that were established many hundreds of years ago by johann fox and palestrina like no parallel fifths and thirds and sixth are good in other words the style from many hundreds of years ago is the one that's correct there's of course the misogyny at play here too this is a young woman who did not conform to what her peer group demanded of her and as such she was ostracized for and relentlessly dog piled if something isn't for you that's okay and if something doesn't conform to the aesthetics of johan folks that's okay too and in the time since listening to this tick tock for the first time i've come to actually really like it you know in addition to the parallel fifths thing she's not like blending that well with the the melody but as the user chicken thighs mentions that actually might be a good thing it feels like they are singing to each other not together and i like that idea way more with [Music] you know young people demand conformity and music is a powerful cultural tool for enforcing it it's easy to say that something sounds bad but harder to come up with a justification why you feel it sounds bad and harder still to figure out why you selected that particular justification to confirm your own biases in this case some people on tick tock think that the music might sound bad because it's going against the grain for western harmony and the rules of western european music established several hundred years ago not bulgarian music mind you western european music this wasn't always the case by the way in western music you know gregorian chant was based on fourth and fifth harmony and of course there are many folk styles of singing that rely on parallel fifth harmonization like you know sea shanties for example while we're on the tick tock trend i talked a little bit more about this and the extended version of my video all about sea shanties by the way which you can find over at nebula and how like parallel fifths were kind of an integral part of that style and how like the natural tendencies of the human voice singing in harmony in work would naturally lead to parallel fifths you can watch a lot of bonus content and extended versions of my videos over on nebula the streaming service that myself and a bunch of other youtube creators started it's a great place to watch and discover quality content ad-free from many of your favorite youtube educational creators like legal eagle wendover productions lindsay ellis real engineering 12 tone charles cornell mary spender and a whole lot more you'll see many familiar faces over there if you're a fan of my channel and what i do here nebula of course and this video is supported by another fantastic streaming service curiosity stream they'll go to place for the very best documentaries on the internet with thousands of titles to choose from they have some great music documentaries over there i've been checking out maestro which is a fantastic documentary all about conductors and the relationship with music and the world it's a beautifully and artfully shot documentary that really feels real and really gets into the musicians experience you're never alone because this music thing sits and lives inside you if you're interested in checking out some of these really awesome documentaries you can go to curiositystream.com adamnelly or click the link in the description when you do so you'll also get a subscription to my streaming 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Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 2,770,339

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: mqsnqIw--RU

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021