KVR Audio

Deep Purple · Post by **Deep Purple** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 12:40 pm

I think you’re still trying to fit a square peg into an often round hole, even if you limit it to ‘Western music’.

Dasheesh · Post by **Dasheesh** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 2:17 pm

you got it backwards. can't blame you, product of modern music, but the music came first, the arp imitated it.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 2:36 pm

You would be best advised to stop leaping to conclusions. And listen to people who know things.

Western music:

I wrote:There was a time before chords in western music.
For example, the figured bass derives from linear conception of the vertical*. Harmony was once considered strictly in terms of lines agreeing in a concordance at points.

You're trying to fit <music> into your sketchy grasp of it.

*: The cadential formula I6/4, V, I. Compare I6/4, Vsus4-3, I.
The resolution to I is voiced: a 5/3 chord. This is linear.
{the latter, example given: G C E (G); G C D (G), G B D (G); C C E G.}

The figured bass shows the vertical relationship of the other voices to the bass; therefore the voices are revealed to have a linear identity. This practice derives from contrapuntal practice; at a certain juncture historically this gels into chordal identities. Harmonic practice did not start that way.

So, I'm not really writing eastern music, from a tradition like that. And I pretty much do_not think in terms of chord names.
I have no particular use for it. Many composers work in ways that don't. It's a mistake to place it foremost in consideration in *music* in a wider sense. It has a strictly use case importance to_you, it's what you grasp.
Harmony considered in linear terms, free of insisting on those boxes is freer, more possibilities arise.

If all you want is very pedestrian music, you may not need more but as far as a truism, you don't have one.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 3:01 pm

Stamped Records wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2019 7:06 pm But then, the way that 4 part harmony shares the notes of a chord among instruments and the way that the instruments even alternate, almost cycling but not quite, is pretty close to arpeggiation, from my perspective. Thoughts?

No, it doesn't follow. Take a real part-writing course. 4 part writing exercises are given objectively as 'voices'. Part-writing is PART_WRITING. Parts. Lines. You're tripping.

vurt · Post by **vurt** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 3:05 pm

maybe do some elaborate arps so we can hear what you mean.

Stamped Records · Post by **Stamped Records** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 3:07 pm

Maybe my own basic meanderings correspond to my own definition or maybe its just a good way for me to interpret it based on the stage I'm at.

telecode · Post by **telecode** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 3:24 pm

The term "western music" is just too broad a term to be using here. Drake is western music. Hildegard von Bingen is "western music".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6qFCYRQKVA

I think what you are talking about is the stuff that is seemingly prevalent in the current music trends that target young(er) generations of listeners. (Not old farts who were weened on Pink Floyd and Stones and are gonna be long gone in 20 years).

aka.. Are the melodies that the collaboration of producers that came up with in Katy Perry's Dark Horse good melodies and if they are not, why are they melodies that young listeners seem to respond well to. Is there such a thing as a "good melody" and is there such a thing as a "bad melody" in "modern" Western music?

I personally don't think so. As my music listening oeuvre has expended, I am finding that in "modern music" being made by the new younger generation of musicians who will one day rule the world, anything goes, because the tools they are using to make the music allows them the flexibility to do almost anything with them. They are not tied to paper and staff's and sitting down at a piano in the corner of an old building trying to come up with something. They are clicking away on their laptop (or desktop) and slicing away at chunks of colors on a DAW and creating collages that sound good to them. Just my 2 cents.

FWIW.. I personally like the melodies that are found in the music of Zedd and Ariana Grande. They are kick ass.

Stamped Records · Post by **Stamped Records** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 4:02 pm

It's funny that you talk about this new style of melody (predominantly RnB) because they actually kind of get on my nerves. It's almost as if they are deliberately doing it wrong. I'm not sure if the younger generation really do like it, that's a question for psycho-acoustic-philosophy. I maintain they are conditioned because to me it sounds like musical pinball, hopping suddenly and randomly from point to point, and the lyrics often have zero correspondance to the music itself.

Anyways, so where I was tending to think of it as breaking up a chord into melodies, it appears that the reverse is a better way to think about it, building a chord with melodies?

I work using a mixture of the ways you mentioned - I want to stay more in tune with classical correctness so I use a keyboard and manuscript. I try to get the idea as complete as possible at the keyboard, although for me, the arrangement is more of a creative edit than a musical progression.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 4:31 pm

Check this out:

https://youtu.be/_4x9iLvhpUE?t=404

you may go with the URL which is cued where I want to direct you

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 4:38 pm

telecode wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 3:24 pm Is there such a thing as a "good melody" and is there such a thing as a "bad melody" in "modern" Western music?

I think very much so. Your argument 'no longer tied to staves' and all that is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned.

If that concept outs, and is some truism, I suppose Igor Stravinsky or Edgard Varese, or Frank Zappa, or Claude Debussy et al were just locked into an inflexible paradigm, now opened up by having choices made for us by software developers, since teh young people may just click away at prefabricated options a brave new world is formed.

Non-sequitur. FTR I don't work from notation for years. I have however ended up in situations where it was probably the better mode of operation for the idea, but I toughed it out.

I hear utter shit with poor excuses for melody every day practically. By people that didn't do their due diligence and learn music.

My conception is that chord names is not primary, they may be simply coincidental to a stream of lines. The distinction 'western music' seems rather a red herring, a music can infiltrate from any direction.

Study more music, keep your mind open to things which aren't at all familiar, don't take pop music as anything to base anything on anyway and you'll be the richer for it.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 5:23 pm

Here's some young person, kind of linear polyphony approach to "chords"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHV04eSGzAA

get outside that box

vurt · Post by **vurt** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 5:33 pm

according to at least a couple of authors, music is an elaborate scam by the illuminati to control the populace.

the weird fact about this post. im not making it up!

Jafo · Post by **Jafo** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 5:45 pm

vurt wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 5:33 pm according to at least a couple of authors, music is an elaborate scam by the illuminati to control the populace.

Maybe for the fnording music industry and establishment, sure. But not for those of us who do it simply because we like/have to. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that music is an impulse/need that has largely been manipulated to control the populace. An awful lot of music is formulaic, celebtating order and conformity, after all.

Stamped Records · Post by **Stamped Records** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 6:05 pm

jancivil wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 4:31 pm Check this out:

https://youtu.be/_4x9iLvhpUE?t=404

you may go with the URL which is cued where I want to direct you

Very beautiful. Can you recommend any good books on melody, or perhaps even just a "little bit of everything" book on world music?

vurt wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 5:33 pm according to at least a couple of authors, music is an elaborate scam by the illuminati to control the populace.

the weird fact about this post. im not making it up!

A tiny bit of a generalisation I think. Media in general, has from it's inception been used as a manipulation device. I don't think music is any different. The subtleties of the human psyche, and the absolute trash that is being fed to teens and pre-teens can only be harmful if looked at objectively for even a second, and yet, it continues, and it only gets worse. This new RnB is a weapon of mass destruction if you ask me.

Stamped Records · Post by **Stamped Records** » Sat Mar 09, 2019 6:08 pm

jancivil wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 5:23 pm Here's some young person, kind of linear polyphony approach to "chords"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHV04eSGzAA

get outside that box

I don't really hear or interpret the inner workings of music that well, and linear polyphony turns up nothing. Can you elaborate?

Is music just an elaborate arpeggio?