What makes a melody catchy?

this video is sponsored by lalau.ai audio splitter if a melody is catchy it means that hours days maybe weeks after hearing it we'll find ourselves involuntarily singing it or humming it as we walk along it's an ear worm a melody that gets stuck in our subconscious mind now it's important not to conflate a catchy melody with a good melody many beautiful melodies are not really the sort of tune that's going to get stuck in your head and likewise many catchy tunes are not particularly beautiful or desirable [Music] it seems to me that there are ultimately two main features that a melody must have to get stuck in our heads it must be physically easy to sing and it must feature repetition so let's start talking about singability first if we're going to start involuntarily singing or humming a tune as we go about our daily business then it makes it easier if that tune is easy to sing if it doesn't require much effort generally speaking the wider the melodic interval the more effort it takes to sing it particularly to sing it in tune which means that catchy amenities will often have smaller musical intervals seconds thirds fourths and fifths [Music] i think once you get past the fifth into sixth seventh octaves and nipes and beyond that it requires that extra physical effort to sing that tune [Applause] the rhythm and tempo of the melody is also important if the notes come in too quick succession then it makes it hard for us to sing it [Music] i think we can also have the opposite problem where the notes are not frequent enough there's too much of a pause between each note in the melody meaning that once we're walking down the road with no accompaniment behind us we're almost going to notice that we're singing a tune because we're having to wait so long between each note it's not very satisfying to wait that gap out when there's no pulse behind you to keep you in time [Music] and i think the last aspect of a melody that makes it easier or harder to sing is whether or not it was originally written to be performed by vocals because if you write a melody to be sung you're naturally going to put gaps in it for the vocalist to take breaths but if a melody was not originally written for vocals for example with the opening piano riff from clocks by coldplay [Music] there's no gap in this melody for the vocalist to take a breath so if you wanted to sing along to this hook at the beginning of the song you'd find yourself struggling to catch your breath so that's the singability half of catchiness but the other element i believe a catchy melody must have is repetition if we hear something just once it doesn't necessarily sound intentional it's only when it's repeated that our brain begins to recognize a pattern and structure in fact if you take any snippet of sound really and repeat it on a regular basis our ears will naturally start hearing a melody in it it's almost like repetition is what defines melody pop songs will often take advantage of this by trying to repeat the main chorus hook as many times as they can without pissing you off for example the chorus of call me maybe by kylie ray jepsen consists of just one repeated four-bar melody hey i just met you and this is crazy so call me baby and over the course of the song we hear this four-bar melody 11 times which means that 57 of this song's entire run time is just the same four bar melody on the macro scale just hearing a melody repeatedly hearing the same song on loop is usually enough for it to get stuck in our heads that's why i think video game music can be so catchy because whilst you're playing the game you're being exposed to the music repeatedly for hours and hours and your attention is also being diverged somewhere else so you're not necessarily going too tired of hearing that music of course i think a lot of people would agree that many songs go far too far with repetition they repeat ad nauseum to the point that it becomes very obnoxious but that doesn't mean it doesn't become catchy you don't necessarily have to enjoy a tune for it to get stuck in your head [Music] but of course there are more subtle ways of getting repetition into a melody without it becoming obnoxious for example the chorus melody of i want to dance with somebody by whitney houston gives us this initial phrase which we'll call a ah we then hear that same phrase again but with a subtle change at the end [Applause] next we hear the initial phrase once more and then we conclude with a new phrase that we've not heard before this final phrase phrase b is very important not only does it give the melody a sense of resolution by ending on the tonic note but most importantly the presence of phrase b here means that the song can now repeat this entire melody again without having six repetitions of phrase a in a row phrase b is like respite from phrase a you may have noticed that throughout this video i've been playing you isolated vocal stems and i actually created these using today's sponsor la lao.ai audio splitter la lao ai is a really powerful audio splitter which can separate out different instruments from a full track its best feature is probably splitting vocals from a full track taking any track you like and giving you an isolated vocal and an instrumental track just a small town girl it also has various other options for how you can split the track for example you can isolate the drums leaving you with a solo drum track and a drumless track if you're interested you can actually try out for free so do follow the link down below another common way to repeat a melody without it becoming annoying is what we call antecedent and consequent or in more layman's terms you could call it question and answer or call and response let's use beethoven's ode to joy as an example the first part of the melody is effectively an unresolved question because it doesn't end on the tonic note instead introducing a bit of tension by stopping on the second degree of the scale then the second half of the melody is answering this question starting in the exact same fashion but then ending the phrase now with what we wanted to hear the first time the tonic note neatly resolving the passage we're almost hearing the exact same phrase twice in a row but the subtle change to the end of the phrase makes it sound satisfying rather than annoying a very common way to build repetition into a melody without it becoming boring is what's called sequence sequence is when a melody starts by giving us a phrase and then after that we hear the exact same phrase again but now higher or lower in pitch this is a really common way to take a phrase and spin it into a melody which sounds cohesive and logical we're effectively hearing the same phrase over and over again embedding it in our heads but by changing where it's pitched in the scale it gives us a sense of progression and development so that's what i think optimizes a melody to be as catchy as possible but why do tunes even get stuck on our head in the first place why do we have this ability for a string of notes to be heard and then record subconsciously at a later time well it seems to be connected to the way that we learn how to speak the way that we learn language the fact that humans can detect changes in pitch really quite small changes in pitch even when they've not had any ear training at all is to do with our ability to detect meaning in the tone of somebody else's voice that's why when people are trying to sound like a robot or a machine they will talk like this on one note constantly because monotone doesn't sound like actual human speaking pitch is an essential part of how we detect meaning in language some languages are in fact what's called a tonal language like mandarin chinese where the actual pitch that the word is spoken at changes its meaning but even non-tonal languages use pitch to add meaning to what's being said for example raising the picture of your voice at the end of a sentence makes it sound like a question humans have spent thousands of years evolving to detect even the smallest changes in the pitch of somebody's voice and this is why melodies get stuck in our head it's the same mechanism that taught us how to speak we hear people talking around us and then without even thinking about it we start replicating those sounds recreating them with our own voice and that's what's happening when you hear the same kylie ray jepsen song a thousand times in the background at tesco's you wind up singing it as you walk down the road because effectively you're learning that as a language you're learning how to speak call me maybe so we've talked a lot about what makes a tune catchy but now let's see if we can apply some of this i'm going to write two different melodies one which aims to be as catchy as possible and the other which aims to be as uncatchy as possible let's start with the catchy one so this melody features some small intervals like seconds thirds and fifths it has sequence and it has antecedent and consequent [Music] so that's our catchy tune but what about an uncatchy tune for this melody i've used wide awkward intervals like this flat 9. the melody is played at a fast relentless rhythm and it also features absolutely no repetition [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: David Bennett Piano

Views: 348,006

Keywords: catchy melody, earworm, why do songs get stuck in our head, how to, melody, sequence, repeat, antecedent and consequent, music theory, explained

Id: nxXh8PU4KkI

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/LeniVidiViciPC]

That Carly Rae Jepsen part gave me PTSD.