Demystifying Popular music

If you have not seen this video yet, I highly recommend it(If you have seen it…. watch it again). I remembered it after having a conversation with a group of undergraduate music students at the University of Western Sydney.

Our dilemma as music students has been trying to find a chord progression that differed from the magic four chord structure (I think, it is an ” I’ve invented something original, and I need it to sound that way” thing). This Australian comedy team ‘Axis of Awesome ‘ sort of makes you feel ok about writing another song that fits the magic structure.

For those non-musicians out there, there are reasons why certain sounds go together and feel natural to us. This knowledge is teachable. At about a mid year ten level, chords and why they work or don’t work together starts to become part of the music knowledge that is taught.

Too Quaver

What do you see?

In one of my fateful lets sit down with a coffee episodes, I seriously began to wonder about how we teach duration. This little picture is for me a division of sound that has a multitude of lengths depending upon the context it is placed.

For Me that first little picture is exactly half the duration of the next little picture if they are placed within the same metronomic context. If the pulse stays steady, if the piece started at 98 beats per minute, and stays at 98 beats per minute throughout reading both these little pictures, then I know that the qrotchet (the second little picture) can happen 98 times a minute, and the quaver (the first little picture) can happen twice as many times in that minute. I think thats 196 beats per minute. And that for me is all these little pictures are.

Although you change whether they sound high or low by moving them up and down on the lines you normally find them on.

The reason for the initial question is that I’ve read them for so long that I forgot they had a meaning by themselves, and although they tend to be taught initially by statements like

slow and quick (opposites, not a movement direction! :-)) or long and short (durations, not all encompassing! :-)). These meanings even when I was learning them seemed a little too abstract, and not precise at the same time (you can, I hope, understand that as a passionate mathematician my command of the english language had just been completely shattered).

I think I would have understood if it was taught like… Dude what’s taking so long….. (This is a semibreve, and in context only 24 of these per minute.)

and….

Nope, didn’t quite get that one…. (This is a demi-semi-quaver, in context there are 768 of these per minute)

I would have completely understood straight off the bat. It would have also explained duration to me in a way that fit into my world, AND (this is the crucial bit) my english descriptors for mathematics would still be intact today.

You see, if you actually count the pulse to determine the length of a semi-breve then you have ruined the musical feeling of it being a single note, and if you try and mathematically work out something like a demi-semi-quaver and then play it, it’s ‘game over’ already.