What's a Chordioid?

[Music] here's a situation you may have found yourself in before you're trying to figure out the chords to a song and you know for a fact that one of the chords is some kind of G chord only when you play G major it doesn't sound quite right and when you play G minor it also doesn't sound quite right the chord in question may have been a power chord consisting just of the root and the fifth and while it may be technically of either major or minor tonality based on the context of the song including the third of the chord completely ruins the effect that the power chord has as a voicing the jazz chord theory world is built off of tertiary harmony and even the wildest altered extensions or most disgusting poly chords are coming from a foundation of stacking notes up in thirds without that foundation of the third and seventh you don't get the flat 13th or a sharp eleventh or what-have-you but the color of a chord depends just as much on the notes you leave out as it does on the notes you include and leaving traditional chord theory to the side for a second can open up some interesting avenues of musical exploration let's talk about chords a chord e ID according to Wikipedia is definition is a group of notes that doesn't fall into a traditional chord qualification this definition is so broad as to be basically meaningless and I want to use the term a little bit differently here in typical chord theory your bass chord has a root third fifth and seventh with additional extensions sprinkled on top as needed by letting go of some of these necessary notes you can build really colorful three note chords that are annoyingly hard to label jazz chord theory often does this with the fifth of the chord simply leaving it out and allowing the other notes and the voicing to imply the fifths existence this works because the fifth doesn't actually add any meaningful harmonic information to a chord and its inclusion can oftentimes muddy up a voicing animal crossing new leaf Swan p.m. music makes use of these shell voicings to outline the full sound of a major 7th chord in a stripped-down way the bass part in the piano is playing the roots of each chord G and D and the accompanying chord steps are made up of two notes each the third and the vii technically you could consider these chords because they're both missing v but as mentioned before the addition of v wouldn't actually alter the effect of the chord in any meaningful way besides maybe thickening up the voicing in this instance it would just be dead weight the kind of chord that i find much more interesting and the kind that i want to focus on here can be found just a few bars farther in where we get a G and B over a C in the bass [Music] this is a C major 7 chord that's dropping the 3rd just the same way that you could drop the 5th only in this case the effect is much different if you added the 3rd and E underneath this G the core takes on a different and dare I say slightly worse quality let alone the fact that a jazz nerd might see a C major chord symbol and throw in the 9th 13th and maybe even the sharp 11th - and you can see how calling this AC major 7 isn't accurately reflecting the sound of this chord e ID or rather it's not a precise reflection of the sound of the music I realize how pedantic this sounds but it opens up the door to a ton of musical exploration even on this simple level we see chords without sevenths all the time they're just called triads and we see 7th chords without fifths all the time as well as we saw in the previous example but I have rarely seen 7th chords without their thirds and I think these harmonic colors are worthy of more exploration the accompaniment 2 under tails Snowy is chock-full of these kinds of chords in the initial section we see a chord built off of C including the root fifth and major 7th alternating with another C chord e I'd including the root 6 and major 7th this extended chord with a lack of third or fifth provides a simultaneously exposed and colorful sound [Music] to label these bars with court symbols you could think of these as slash courts with the emphasized 2d in the melody this first voicing could be seen as a G over C and this definitely gives off a G over C type of sound the following bars use similar Cordia accompaniment but the addition of the melody implies an F sharp minor 7 over B kind of sound in both instances you have a 5 over 1 slash chord using first the major scale as a base then the minor scale the problem with these labels is that they don't take into account the utility of moving between these 2 3 note voicings cg b 2 c AP creates harmonic motion the say a B voicing is dissonant even though it could be considered our tonic major chord and resolving back to the initial C GB voicing creates a sense of resolution even though we haven't made any traditional harmonic movement these three note chords sound totally different from one another and the implication of this kind of harmonic resolution is really exciting to me but trying to paint these bars with a big C major 13 or G add 2 over C doesn't do justice to what's actually happening I'm not attempting to put forward some new labeling convention that covers these kinds of chords because I don't think it would be possible to have a labeling system nuanced enough that wouldn't be just as complicated as reading sheet music I just know that I tend to approach composition from a chord symbol first perspective and putting forward the idea of chords as a potentially useful compositional tool can help break out of that mindset chord symbols aren't supposed to be the be-all end-all of music analysis anyway they're an oversimplified abstraction of what's going on in the music to be used for analytical purposes using these kinds of chords works well in a non functional context as we see in this example the alternating C major and B minor tonality Zhou fer a fun juxtaposition of sounds and later on in the tune we see different kinds of colorful major chords sliding chromatically around to different key centers a similar non-functional usage of these chords can be seen in noir fairs theme from the original Metroid which opens with a 1 flat 2 for voicing being shifted around between DC and F tonic notes this is a fun example of a courtyard that doesn't use the 3rd 5th or 7th but in a typical harmonic analysis you could say the 5th is being implied for each chord and label them sus 4 flat 2 chords a voicing that's typically considered an expression of the Phrygian scale this is I think where chords kind of shine because while this cluster voicing can be derived from the Phrygian scale it is not in any way equivalent to an alternate Phrygian voicing that could include the 3rd or 5th or a variety of other extensions the sound of these chords creates such a particular mood for this area of the game it can be useful as a composer to have this kind of writing in your tool belt should a project call for it if you're used to thinking in a typical harmonic fashion this kind of non-functional nonsense might not occur to you and for those of us who don't have the ears and instinct of a hero kazoo tanaka knowing that a 1 to 4 voice and can be an option for a piece of music can open the door to creating these kinds of musical atmospheres that just aren't possible otherwise in the wild cordials like this are most commonly found acting as partial voicings of a larger chord that is one instrument maybe playing a chord e ID while other instruments fill in extra notes that recontextualize that chord e ID as part of a full legitimate chord this is another idea that can be very fun to mess around with and we see a perfect example of it in Pikmin twos perplexing pool the acoustic guitar plays repeating three note sequences that often add up to some kind of if we consolidate the notes in the guitar part into chords the a section gives us this progression two of these chords can be justified in the tertiary system as sus two chords sure but for our purposes here that doesn't really matter the first chord consisting of a root the second and the sixth looks like a B flat six nine chord without the third or fifth again this gives it a very specific kind of quality that would be lost if the third was just added in indiscriminately when the melody comes in it very clearly outlines B flat and C major triads before resolving to F and landing ultimately on a G this creates the strange situation where the melody is providing the harmonic progression while the accompaniment just adds some static color in the context of the two parts together the melody feels like it's alternating between one flat major 7 and C 7 colors and the chord e idle accompaniment complements both equally well this idea becomes even clearer when the Pikmin begin working which cues the addition of a bass part this later part of the melody clearly outlines a C C minor C sus 2 C minor progression overtop of a continuous CD G or CSS 2 arpeggio in the guitar but the addition of the bass and the low guitar b-flat pedal recontextualizes this chord e ID into several different courts G minor 13 minor add to f6 9 and a flat major 13 over b-flat moving on to an E flat major 7 sharp 11 sound all of these wild chords are constructed with the same three notes on the guitar and having that consistent texture pitted against the hectic movement in the surrounding voices creates a very cool effect [Music] I'm generally not too interested in advanced music theory concepts I could say the reason is that I think there's plenty of unexplored territory to be found in tonal equal temperament a equals 440 music and this is true but to be honest a lot of music that uses more advanced compositional techniques really just doesn't do anything for me however I think this topic of cordials is something that you could consider advanced that doesn't fall into the trappings of the avant-garde it's a technique that's advanced not in its complexity but in its precision so if you're interested in playing with this idea on your own here's a handful of cordial types that I've been playing with it you might like to try I'll put a Google Drive link in the description with a PDF of all of these examples I know I've been having fun exploring what's possible with these kinds of voicing so I thought I should share if any of you are going to be at Meg West this week I'll be presenting a couple of panels there and I'd love if you came to hang out and for those of you who have yet to buy tickets you can use promo code eight BMT to get fifteen dollars off of your purchase I'll put a link for that in the description below as well if you want to support the channel you can check out my patreon here you can follow me on twitter there thank you so much for watching and I'll see you all next time [Music] you

Channel: 8-bit Music Theory

Views: 348,113

Rating: 4.9765434 out of 5

Keywords: What's a chordioid, harmony, advanced music theory, building chords, undertale, snowy, pikmin 2, perplexing pool, metroid, norfair, video game music, animal crossing, 1 PM, music theory, composition, 8-bit Music Theory

Id: cmsqkgppBtc

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 09 2019