vocalman2004 odds & ends

Ever wondered what the best key for your song might be? From a practical point of view, the vocal range of your singer will obviously need bearing in mind. But what’s the best key for your guitarist or bass player? What other considerations are there? In this tutorial we help choose the perfect key.

“Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable”

– Leonard Bernstein

Let’s start with the vocalist. A male singer with a strong tenor range voice might prefer to sing in a key like G or A major, where the natural ‘tessitura’ or range of the melody might often lie above middle C. But your favourite female singer is likely to enjoy working in a lower key, like D—or even C if she is an alto. She won’t want her voice sounding too high and thin!

From an instrumental point of view, both electric and acoustic guitars sound naturally good in keys like E, A and D because their string tunings ‘fit’ well with those keys. On the other hand, in the key of D that low D will be out of range for your 4-string bass player, unless he decides to drop his bottom string tuning, or buy a five string!

More complex still, arranging your piece in certain keys might mean the piano or string inversions you’ve written sound too full, and ‘clog up’ the whole mix. Do you rewrite them, or move the whole piece to a higher key?

Mood Music?

Is there also a mood consideration? Some say that major keys always sound brighter and minor keys more melancholy, but is that always the case? Can major keys sound ‘dark’ sometimes? Are certain minor keys naturally more dramatic than others?

Did you know that ‘All You Need is Love’ was originally written in G major? Would it have been as great a hit if it had been written in Eb? Would Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata sound the same in B minor as in its actual key of C# minor?

Before we can look at whether keys can affect how bright, dramatic or melancholy your song will sound to others, we’ll need to get a few music theory basics sorted. In this article I propose to look at scales, keys and key signatures and how they relate to each other, and in the following two articles we’ll get on to the harmonic structure of a song.

The Diatonic Scale System

First, a little western music history knowledge. We’re talking exclusively about ‘western music’ here. There are lots of types of world music that don’t involve the diatonic scale, like Arabic music which uses non-western scales, or Indian or Thai traditional music, for example.

Back in the 1600s, some keys contained horrible dissonances because the frequency relationships between the notes in each octave had not been set as identical. The ‘equal tempered’ or ‘well-tempered scale’ changed all that. It defined each semitone as being equidistant in frequency from its neighbour, across the octave. That meant that you could play in any key without fear of grating dissonances.

Bach celebrated this by composing his landmark 48 Preludes and Fugues; 2 written in each major and minor key. Most piano students come across this seminal classical work at some point in their studies.

Major and Minor Scales

As you probably know, there are eight notes in any scale if you count the octave. But if we include every note in between, there are actually 12 semitones or half tones.

So, if we take the key of C, there are actually three main ways of getting from low C to high C; one major scale and two different types of minor scale. You can see them written out below.

Notice the melodic minor scale uses different notes going up and coming down; the sixth and seventh note are raised going up and lowered coming back down. The harmonic minor scale is the same in both directions. The 3rd note is again lowered, but its peculiar feature is the wide gap between the lowered 6th note and the raised 7th.

Accidentals

Accidentals is the collective word for the sharp sign, the flat sign, and the natural sign. A sharp raises the note it precedes by a semitone, a flat lowers it, and a natural sign restores the note to its original state again.

All the black notes of a keyboard are referred to as either sharps or flats, depending on which scale you are in. So E major has four black notes in its scale; F#, G#, C#, and D#. And Bb major has two flats; Bb and Eb.

Technically, any note—white or black—can be a sharp or flat in relation to its neighbour. So the key of F# major has six sharps including E# which is played as an F, though it is a white note.

Note that D# and Eb refer to the same black note on the keyboard in any octave. But before the invention of the well-tempered scale, this wouldn’t necessarily have been the case. The equally distanced diatonic scale system is a kind of harmonic compromise, but at least it means that the seven octave piano doesn’t have to be many times longer than our arms could reach!

Key Signatures

What exactly are key signatures then? They are just a means of shorthand that you can use at the beginning of your piece next to the clef sign.

For example, if you are in the key of G, you know that probably every F you encounter will actually be sharpened to an F#; so why not create a shorthand that tells you that at the beginning of a piece? Then you won’t have to write the sharp sign every time there’s an F.

As we’ve seen, some keys have lots of them; Db has five flats and B has five sharps. As any music student will tell you, that’s a lot of notes to remember to change if you’re trying to play a sight reading piece in an exam!

Here’s a list of all the key signatures. Note that each one can refer to either a major or a minor scale, which is actually known as its relative minor.

So How Do They Sound?

It’s often been said that major keys tend to sound happy and positive in mood, but some claim that certain major keys like Db or Ab can sound ‘darker’ than major keys based on white notes on the keyboard. Lots of opinions have been expressed about this through the ages.

Here’s a list of what some have said. See if you agree!

Key descriptions

The association of mood with certain keys is a highly subjective area, so I won’t be too surprised if you disagree with anything in the above table. For me, after the practical considerations of instrument and vocal range have been taken care of, it can sometimes be an additional factor to take into account though.

For example, if your piece is in a major key but has a more thought provoking, restful mood, it might benefit if it were moved to a lower key, especially if your singers tone sounds ‘darker’ as a result.

The song ‘Moon River’ from Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a great example of this:

Minor scales can clearly provide lots of scope for emotional pathos and drama. I can think of no better example than the theme from the film ‘Schindler’s List’, which is played by Itzhak Perlman, acknowledged as one of the finest violin players of his generation.

Note the pathos of the falling intervals of the melody as the harmonies work through several related keys to find their way unerringly to the home key of D minor:

Conclusion

This article is the first of several, in which I aim to take a deeper look at the whole area of music theory and how we can make use of it to write really great songs! Next up, I plan to take a look at the whole area of harmony in two separate articles.

How are the main ‘primary’ chords of I, IV, and V derived from major and minor keys? We’ll see how they relate to each other, and how other secondary chords can be used to support them to produce a harmonic framework that has the potential to support and enhance those great melodies we want to write!

Original Story – Music Tutsplus

By Dave Bankhead

St. Peter ad Vincula Church, Coggeshall, Saturday 14th December 2013.

David Wood has reviewed our Christmas Concert. He writes:

In recent years, Witham Choral Society have performed many gems of the choral repertoire, with first rate renditions of Messiah, Elijah and the St. John Passion.
Their seasonal offering was another gem: J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Wisely, however, they made judicious cuts to this unwieldy opus, and threw in some Hoist, Berlioz and popular carols for good measure.

The opening chorus of the oratorio, Christians Be Joyful! was, indeed, a joy.
There was a resplendent sound from the choir, echoed by the tuneful timpani. The choral sound was responsive and fresh throughout the performance, and the assembled team of soloists were, as usual, on top form. As the Evangelist, Paul Hazelgrove-Spurin (tenor) fluently mastered the demands of Bach’s high writing; Elaine Henson (mezzo soprano) sang with warmth and feeling; and Richard Fallas (bass) delighted the audience with his resonant tones.

Hot off the press, the choir, orchestra and soloists gave a colourful account of Peter Lawson’s arrangement of four carols by Gustav Hoist. The familiar tune of In The Bleak Midwinter was given a lively makeover, making the poignant performance of Lullay My Liking all the more effective.
The orchestra gave an atmospheric rendition of the overture from The Flight Into Egypt by Hector Berlioz, followed by a controlled and moving account of Thou Must Leave Thy Lowly Dwellings.

The conductor, Patrick McCarthy, put a lot of thought into the make up of this programme, and his vision clearly paid off.
This was a perfectly judged combination of Christmas music, and the sparkling encore, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, sent everybody home with a sense that Christmas had really begun.

David Wood

Original Post

Music affects many different areas of the brain, as you can see in the image below. We’re only scratching the surface with this post, but let’s jump in.

Of course, music affects many different areas of the brain, as you can see in the image below. We’re only scratching the surface with this post, but let’s jump in.

Happy/Sad Music Affects How We See Neutral Faces

We can usually pick if a piece of music is particularly happy or sad, but this isn’t just a subjective idea that comes from how it makes us feel. In fact, our brains actually respond differently to happy and sad music.

Even short pieces of happy or sad music can affect us. One study showed that after hearing a short piece of music, participants were more likely to interpret a neutral expression as happy or sad, to match the tone of the music they heard. This also happened with other facial expressions, but was most notable for those that were close to neutral.

Something else that’s really interesting about how our emotions are affected by music is that there are two kind of emotions related to music: perceived emotions and felt emotions. This means that sometimes we can understand the emotions of a piece of music without actually feeling them, which explains why some of us find listening to sad music enjoyable, rather than depressing. Unlike in real life situations, we don’t feel any real threat or danger when listening to music, so we can perceive the related emotions without truly feeling them—almost like vicarious emotions.

Ambient Noise Can Improve Creativity

We all like to pump up the tunes when we’re powering through our to-do lists, right? But when it comes to creative work, loud music may not be the best option.

It turns out that a moderate noise level is the sweet spot for creativity. Even more than low noise levels, ambient noise apparently gets our creative juices flowing, and doesn’t put us off the way high levels of noise do. The way this works is that moderate noise levels increase processing difficulty which promotes abstract processing, leading to higher creativity. In other words, when we struggle (just enough) to process things as we normally would, we resort to more creative approaches.

In high noise levels, however, our creative thinking is impaired because we’re overwhelmed and struggle to process information efficiently.

Our Music Choices Can Predict Our Personality

Take this one with a grain of salt, because it’s only been tested on young adults (that I know of), but it’s still really interesting.

In a study of couples who spent time getting to know each other, looking at each other’s top ten favorite songs actually provided fairly reliable predictions as to the listener’s personality traits. The study used five personality traits for the test: openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability.

Interestingly, some traits were more accurately predicted based on the person’s listening habits than others. For instance, openness to experience, extraversion and emotional stability were the easiest to guess correctly. Conscientiousness, on the other hand, wasn’t obvious based on musical taste.

Music Training Can Significantly Improve Motor and Reasoning Skills

We generally assume that learning a musical instrument can be beneficial for kids, but it’s actually useful in more ways than we might expect. One study showed that children who had three years or more musical instrument training performed better than those who didn’t learn an instrument in auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills.

They also tested better on vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills, which involve understanding and analyzing visual information, such as identifying relationships, similarities and differences between shapes and patterns. These two areas in particular are quite removed from musical training as we imagine it, so it’s fascinating to see how learning to play an instrument can help kids develop such a wide variety of important skills.

Classical Music Can Improve Visual Attention

It’s not just kids that can benefit from musical training or exposure. Stroke patients in one small study showed improved visual attention while listening to classical music.

The study also tried white noise and silence to compare the results, and found that, like the driving study mentioned earlier, silence resulted in the worst scores. Because this study was so small, the conclusions need to be explored further for validation, but I find it really interesting how music and noise can affect our other senses and abilities—in this case, vision.

Music Helps Us Exercise

Research on the effects of music during exercise has been done for years. In 1911, an American researcher, Leonard Ayres, found that cyclists pedaled faster while listening to music than they did in silence.

This happens because listening to music can drown out our brain’s cries of fatigue. As our body realizes we’re tired and wants to stop exercising, it sends signals to the brain to stop for a break. Listening to music competes for our brain’s attention, and can help us to override those signals of fatigue, though this is mostly beneficial for low- and moderate-intensity exercise. During high-intensity exercise, music isn’t as powerful at pulling our brain’s attention away from the pain of the workout.

Not only can we push through the pain to exercise longer and harder when we listen to music, but it can actually help us to use our energy more efficiently. A 2012 study showed that cyclists who listened to music required 7% less oxygen to do the same work as those who cycled in silence.

Some recent research has shown that there’s a ceiling effect on music at around 145 bpm, where anything higher doesn’t seem to add much motivation, so keep that in mind when choosing your workout playlist. Here is how this breaks down for different genres:

Now if we team up these different “tempos” with the actual work-out we’re doing, we can be in much better sync and find the right beat for our exercise. If you match up the above with the graphic below it should be super easy to get into a good groove:

So in the same way that exercising makes us happier, it’s not surprising that music adds significantly to our work-out success.

Original Story – Buffer

A musician plays a viola.

Researchers found that breakthrough moments often

happened when players were humming to themselves,

not when playing their instrument.

Photograph: Alexandru Nika / Alamy/Alamy

For a musician, it’s an elusive question: where to find your muse? How to unlock your creative voice? Well, putting down the instrument and just tapping the furniture or singing badly in the shower might help.

New research suggests that musicians may be at their most creative when they are not playing their instrument or singing. By studying musicians and asking them when inspiration struck them, researchers found that breakthrough moments often happened when players were humming to themselves or tapping out rhythms on the table or imagining dance moves inspired by the music.

“What we are finding is that even fairly mundane activities can feed in to the discovery of new insight, new knowledge and new means of expressing ideas in all sorts of ways,” said John Rink, professor of musical performance studies at Cambridge University. “The potential is infinite.”

Rink led a team of researchers who carried out field work at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal College of Music, using interviews, questionnaires, focus groups and filming one-to-one lessons.

They talked to students about when they felt particularly creative or when something new emerged about their understanding of a piece – described by the team as creative episodes.

One horn player was filmed undertaking private practice. Watching it back he identified 34 creative episodes, 23 of which took place when he was not using his instrument – it was when he was humming, tapping on a table, gesturing, whistling and conducting himself. “All of this helps to embed the music in one’s mind,” said Rink.

He said creativity was important even if you were following a score.

“The standard assumption has been that the composer composes, the performer transmits and the listener receives and that chain of communication is now being very seriously questioned by musicians and musicologists alike – we are regarding the performer as a creative agent, as a co-creator rather than simply a transmitter of what the composer has pre-ordained.”

The team found four key ingredients to achieving creative expression in performance. These are freedom, flexibility, a sense of being in the moment and a commitment to “giving” the music to an audience, even if that audience only exists in the musician’s imagination.

Rink said one possible barrier which might limit a musician’s search for creativity was feeling that they needed to respect the score and the composer who wrote it. “There is a perceived hierarchy in which the composer is deemed to be of much greater importance than the mere executant,” he said.

The researchers concluded that musicians began to make a piece their own when they felt free and flexible enough to be spontaneous and take risks rather than simply rely on external validation from, say, a teacher.

Having said all that, Rink said there was no magic formula for unlocking creativity. It would not just happen.

“Developing a creative voice takes time,” said Rink. “It takes experimentation, patience and there may be no predictable course of development that one can expect to follow. You never really know when creative insight will be achieved or how to get it but prolonged consideration, trial and error and concentration are all very much part of it … it is a lifelong journey. It never really ends.”

The project is one of the research initiatives launched by the AHRC ResearchCentre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, a collaboration between the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, King’s College London and Royal Holloway, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It has made a YouTube film about its research and a book will be published in 2015.

Original Story – The Guardian

New research has shown that individuals who play an instrument are more capable at identifying errors and correcting mistakes, and that these benefits apply to amateur musicians as well as professionals.

The study, led by Dr Ines Jentzsch for the University of St Andrews, tested the cognitive abilities of musicians and non-musicians, with the research concluding that learning an instrument could “slow or even prevent” the mental decline associated with aging.

The research, published in the journal Neuropsychologia, draws particular attention to the skills learnt in musical performance. When playing pieces to an audience or to themselves musicians must demonstrate heightened awareness of their actions: continually monitoring their playing through auditory feedback and rapidly adjusting their movements to anticipate possible mistakes.

The psychological and mental benefits of learning to play an instrument have been shown in previous studies, with research highlighting musicians’ improved reaction times and their increased capacity to “inhibit task irrelevant information” (aka, to stay focused).

“[The results] suggest that higher levels of musical training might result in more efficient information processing in general (indicated by faster overall speed across tasks without accuracy tradeoff), and confirms earlier reports indicating a positive link between mental speed and musical ability,” says Dr Jentzsch.

The research is notable in that unlike previous studies it focuses on amateur rather than professional musicians, showing that even “moderate levels of musical activity” were beneficial to cognitive performance.

The study also drew attention to the diminishing support for children to learn to play in schools, noting that “in times of economic hardship, funds for music education are often amongst the first to be cut.”

“This is particularly worrying given both anecdotal and limited research evidence suggesting that music can have strong positive effects on our physical as well as psychological functioning.”

Original Story – The Independent

In this trip down memory lane, brought to you by cdza, Mark Sidney Johnson charges through the history of the guitar solo using 28 songs from over the past five decades.

Watch to see how differently the instrument has been incorporated into rock music through years, and cover up the left side of the screen to see how many solos you can name (no cheating!).

Original Story – Huffington Post

A short animation, with appropriately rousing musical accompaniment, which manages to condense Wagner’s magnificent 15-hour epic, Ring Cycle – complete with gods, heroes, dragons, a castle in the sky, love triangles, magic swords and Valkyries – into a succinct, coffee-break friendly two and a half minutes. Get it? Got it? Good!

Original Story – Guardian

Moving in time to a steady beat is closely linked to better language skills, a study suggests.

People who performed better on rhythmic tests also showed enhanced neural responses to speech sounds.

The researchers suggest that practising music could improve other skills, particularly speech.

In the Journal of Neuroscience, the authors argue that rhythm is an integral part of language.

“We know that moving to a steady beat is a fundamental skill not only for music performance but one that has been linked to language skills,” said Nina Kraus, of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois.

More than 100 teenagers were asked to tap their fingers along to a beat. Their accuracy was measured by how closely their responses matched the timing of a metronome.

Next, in order to understand the biological basis of rhythmic ability, the team also measured the brainwaves of their participants with electrodes, a technique called electroencephalography. This was to observe the electrical activity in the brain in response to sound.

Using this biological approach, the researchers found that those who had better musical training also had enhanced neural responses to speech sounds. In poorer readers this response was diminished.
‘Neural jitter’

“It turns out that kids who are poor readers have a lot of difficulty doing this motor task and following the beat. In both speech and music, rhythm provides a temporal map with signposts to the most likely locations of meaningful input,” Prof Kraus told BBC News.

The brainwaves recorded matched the soundwaves, she said. “You can even take the recorded brainwave and play it back through your speaker and it will sound like the soundwave.

“It seems that the same ingredients that are important for reading are strengthened with musical experience. Musicians have highly consistent auditory-neural responses.

“It may be that musical training – with its emphasis on rhythmic skills – can exercise the auditory-system, leading to less neural jitter and stronger sound-to-meaning associations that are so essential for learning to read,” added Prof Kraus

John Iversen of the University of California in San Diego studies how the brain processes music. He was not involved with the research but agreed that musical training could have important impacts on the brain.

“This study adds another piece to the puzzle in the emerging story suggesting that musical-rhythmic abilities are correlated with improved performance in non-music areas, particularly language,” he said.

Original Story – BBC

So here’s Beethoven’s 9th played on 167 theremins built inside Russian dolls. Oh, and wait for the boogie. (Really.)

Original Story – NPR Music on Tumblr

What’s the point of being insanely musically gifted if you don’t have a little fun with your talents? Music producers Andrew Huang and Dave Brown collaborated to create a song encompassing 26 genres in alphabetical order.

The song spans from ambient to zouk, stopping along the way to feature grunge, K-pop, and reggae. Despite the rapid changes in instruments and lyrics, a chord progression links each genre’s 10-second clip together. A label in the lower right-hand corner of the screen indicates which genre you’re currently listening to, making the video a cool, compact musical education.

The behind-the-scenes video demonstrates the duo’s incredible wealth of knowledge about music. It also shows they’re up for anything — just because they aren’t familiar with the musical stylings of quan ho, a Vietnamese genre of folk music, doesn’t mean they shy away from it. They perform it with gusto, including Vietnamese-inspired costumes and instruments.

Original Story – Mashable