Katie Wilkie, Simon Holland, and Paul Mulholland. Winter, 2010. What Can The Language Of Musicians Tell Us About Music Interaction Design? Computer Music Journal, Vol. 34, No. 4, Pages 34-48

The authors discuss the ways that user interface design for music production and teaching software is informed by embodied cognition, as articulated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff and Johnson argue that all metaphors trace their roots to states of the human body, which are the only basis for abstract thought that we possess. The closer a metaphor is to a state of the body, the easier it is for us to understand.

In music, the most obvious bodily metaphors are rhythm and repetition, which we experience throughout the sensory world, not just in music. We also use a variety of spatial metaphors for music, referred to by the authors as image schemas. Listeners commonly conceive of music using images of containers, cycles, verticality, balance, the notion of center-periphery, and (in the case of western melodies) a narrative of source-path-goal.

An example of the container schema is the statement “Bb is in the key of F.” We imagine the key of F as a container, with Bb as one of its contents. We think of chords as being stacked vertically, like a pile of bricks. When we conceive melodies, we think of the line going for a metaphorical walk, with altitude standing in for pitch: “The melody starts on F, goes up to Bb, down to A, and then lands back on F.” (However, the “pitch-as-height” metaphor is muddied by the circularity of pitch class, and by the fact that we feel ascending pitch movement differently from ascending.) We may use alternative image schemas; that higher pitches are brighter, and lower pitches are darker. We are on stronger footing with the notion of the tonic as “home base” — we imagine a piece that modulates through different keys as going out on a journey and then returning home.

People approach software equipped with bodily image schemas, learned and innate. The highest praise one can give to an interface is that it is “intuitive.” The authors define an intuitive interface as one that allows the user to apply prior knowledge and existing image schema: innate, sensory-motor, embodied, cultural, or expert.

The authors evaluate two software programs in terms of their intuitiveness, or lack thereof. The first is Harmony Space, a program written by one of the paper’s authors to “systematically and richly designed to exploit spatial metaphors for harmonic concepts.” (Unfortunately, this software is no longer available online, aside from low-resolution screenshots.) Harmony Space organizes the diatonic pitches onto a grid with the topology of a torus, organized by Euler’s tonnetz scheme. This organization helps users understand harmony in terms of spatial proximity. In Harmony Space, adjacent notes form diatonic thirds and triads. Chords and scales form distinctive geometric shapes. The user can transpose chords and other patterns by simply moving the shapes around on the grid. While this is an elegant didactic tool, it is only partially useful. By design, Harmony Space totally neglects rhythm. The authors discuss the difficulty of designing a visualization scheme for rhythm that is as elegant as the tone grid.

The other software program evaluated is Apple’s Garageband. Since Apple includes it for free with Macs, Garageband has become widely used by amateurs. It is a simplified version of Logic, using the same multitrack tape recorder metaphor as most other DAWs. This metaphor is not immediately intuitive, but it is easily learned — users quickly learn to imagine a chorus of voices, with each voice occupying its own horizontal track. The left-to-right timeline is also immediately intuitive once the user sees it in action. Garageband adds an appealing loop library to the basic recording functionality. The loops can be altered by the user in a full-fledged MIDI editor.

The authors praise Garageband for its combination of versatility and accessibility, but they miss some of the program’s shortcomings as a tool for beginner self-teaching. Garageband offers many attractive-sounding loops and instrument sounds, but offers no suggestion as to how to make good musical use of those materials. It does not suggest, for example, that by western pop tradition, loops sound best when repeated two, four, eight or sixteen times. Also, it makes no attempt at showing harmonic relationships; users are left to trial and error to find musical chord/scale combinations. Ideally, Garageband’s MIDI editor would suggest to the user which notes would actually sound good, perhaps by coloring chord tones green, extensions yellow and dissonant notes red.

Garageband and Harmony Space are intriguing, but surely better visual metaphors for music have yet to be implemented. For example, while the “container” for chords is intuitive, it is also misleading, since the chord is comprised of tones, not a box for them. A better image would be tones as atoms and chords as molecules built from those atoms, which gets at their relational nature better. As the molecule becomes a more familiar image, it will become available as an “intuitive” image schema.

I anticipate that the next generation of beginner-oriented production software will draw not on the tape recorder metaphor, but on the sampler. I could imagine simplified version of the Session View in Ableton Live, allowing the user to build songs out of musical “legos,” dragging and dropping in real time.

See also a post collecting my favorite music visualization systems.

If the music resists all attempts at finding temporary key centers and harmonic relationships, then it’s just annoying. Serialism has always gotten on my nerves for that reason; it seems to be specifically designed to resist musical sense-making.

Original question on Quora

Here’s the C major scale. The scale tones are in red, and the non-scale notes are in grey.

There’s a simple formula to use notes from C major to make a set of chords that sound good together. You start on a scale degree, and then go around the circle clockwise, skipping every other scale tone. To make a C chord, start on C, then skip over D to land on E, and then skip over F to land on G. To make a D minor chord, start on D, then skip over E to land on F, and then skip over G to land on A.

Running the formula for all seven notes in the scale gives you these seven chords, known as the diatonic chords to C major:

C:    C  E  G (I)
Dm:   D  F  A (ii)
Em:   E  G  B (iii)
F:    F  A  C (IV)
G:    G  B  D (V)
Am:   A  C  E (vi)
Bdim: B  D  F (vii)

The crucial chord for this discussion is G. If you add one more note to the chord, you get G7. This called the dominant chord in C, and it strongly defines the key.

The interval between the notes B and F is called a tritone, and it’s considered by western tradition to be very dissonant. When you hear the B-F tritone, your ear wants it to resolve — you want the B to go up to C, and the F to go down to E. This is the heart of the chord progression known to western music as a cadence, from Latin meaning “falling.” The G7 chord teeters unstably until it “falls” to land on the solid ground of C.

Using dominants to temporarily change keys

The diatonic chords sound nice, but they’re a little bland. You can spice them up by adding some more dominant seventh chords to create temporary key changes. Think of each chord in C major as the root of its own key. Each new key comes with its own dominant seventh chord, built off its own fifth scale degree. (It’s customary to ignore B diminished because it’s unstable-feeling and doesn’t work well as a root chord.) These new secondary dominants temporarily pull you out of the key of C.

Notice that all the secondary dominants are based on scale tones in C major. When you’re expecting an A minor chord and you hear A7 instead, shifting you temporarily into the key of D, it’s a recipe for deep musical gratification.

Secondary dominants in action

The most common secondary dominant in C is C7, which temporarily puts you in the key of F. I can’t even count the number of pop, rock, country, jazz, blues etc songs that use this progression:

| C | C7 | F | F |

Another very common secondary dominant in C is D7, which temporarily puts you in the key of G. You see this progression a lot, particularly in older country music:

| C | D7 | G7 | C |

The D7 includes the note F#, which is pretty dissonant in the key of C. The conflict gets quickly resolved when you hear the G7 chord, so the overall effect isn’t terribly jarring.

You’ll also hear this progression quite a bit, especially in jazz and country:

| C | A7 | D7 | G7 |

The A7 puts you in the key of D; the D7 puts you in the key of G; and the G7 lands you back home in the key of C. The A7 chord includes the note C#, which is the most dissonant note possible in the key of C. You hear that C#, and you’re like, what the heck is that? Then as the progression unwinds, it makes retrospective sense. Your brain really likes hearing this kind of conflict getting resolved.

Secondary dominants and the relative minor

The relative minor key to C major is A minor. It’s very common to switch back and forth between the two. You can do the switch using the secondary dominant to A minor, which is E7.

| C | E7 | Am | Am |

Here again, the E7 chord contains a very dissonant note, G#, which then makes perfect retrospective sense when you land on A minor.

Secondary dominants don’t have to resolve

For really advanced harmonic wizardry, use a secondary dominant and don’t complete the cadence. An especially cool usage is to fake people out with the relative minor. In the last example above, try replacing A minor with F, like so:

| C | E7 | F | F |

The F chord contains two of the same pitches as A minor, A and C. You’re surprised by the root move up to F instead of down to A, but you’re still hearing two of the notes you were expecting. Hip! Two of my favorite songs from very different eras use this device. One is “Freight Train” by Elizabeth Cotten; the other is “Empire State of Mind” by Alicia Keys and Jay-Z. The fakeout progression happens going into the chorus.

Another popular secondary dominant fakeout is to use D7 without resolving to G. Plenty of folk, rock and country songs will just go straight from D7 back to C. Neil Young is especially fond of this maneuver, for example at the end of each verse of “Harvest.” Bob Dylan uses it too, in “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.”

Around the circle of fifths

Check out what happens when you arrange the secondary dominants around the circle of fifths. You can start on any of them and work your way around the circle counterclockwise to make chains of cadences.

Going around the circle of fifths using dominant chords is a time-honored songwriting technique, and a sound you’ll instantly recognize from jazz, ragtime and Tin Pan Alley songs. The best example is the bridge of “I Got Rhythm” and the uncountable jazz tunes based on it. Usually it’s played in B flat, but for consistency, here it is in C:

| E7 | E7 | A7 | A7 | D7 | D7 | G7 | G7 |

Use a dominant to get to any key

Any time you want to jump to a new key, you can get there via its dominant chord. Want to jump to Ab? Get there via Eb7. Want to jump to F#? Get there via C#7. It isn’t the only way to introduce a new key, but it is the smoothest. Using cadences gives your tunes a feeling of structure and logic, and lets you introduce all kinds of exotic dissonances without alienating your listeners.

To understand tuning, it helps to start with the concept of the octave. Two pitches are an octave apart if their frequencies have the ratio 2:1. Standard concert A has a frequency of 440 Hz. When you play concert A on the guitar, the string vibrates to and fro 440 times every second. If you double the frequency to 880 Hz, you get an A that’s one octave higher. If you halve the frequency to 220 Hz, you get an A that’s an octave lower. The ear hears all these different pitches as being the “same” note. (Technically, they’re the same pitch class.) This ability we have to hear frequencies related by powers of two as being the “same” is known in music theory terms as octave equivalency. This ability isn’t specific to humans. Rhesus monkeys hear octaves as being equivalent too.

Octaves emerge naturally out of the overtone series. The first harmonic of a vibrating string is an octave above the fundamental. The third harmonic is two octaves above. The seventh harmonic is three octaves above, and the fifteenth harmonic is four octaves above.

After the octave, the next musical interval you get from the natural overtone series is the fifth (it’s the third harmonic.) Two pitches are a fifth apart if the ratio between their frequencies is 3:2. The note a fifth above concert A (440 Hz) is E (660 Hz.)

Fifths are a very significant interval in western music theory. If you keep going up by fifths, you visit every note in the chromatic scale (every key on the piano) until you eventually wind up back on the note where you began. So if you start on A, then go up to E, then B, then F#, and so on, eventually you’ll wind up on the A seven octaves higher from where you started. This concept is known as the circle of fifths, though it would be more accurate to call it the spiral of fifths, since you’re getting higher and higher in pitch.

The circle of fifths is foundational to western music theory. It makes it possible to transpose music effortlessly from one key to another. The circle gives rise to all sorts of useful and interesting symmetries, too, like its close relationship to the circle of semitones.

But there’s a big problem with the circle of fifths. If you use the 3/2 ratio you get from the natural overtone series, the circle doesn’t actually close. Recall that to go up by a fifth, you multiply the frequency by 3/2. To keep going up by fifths, you keep multiplying by 3/2. To go all the way around the circle of fifths from A to A, you multiply by 3/2 twelve times:

(3/2)^12 = 129.746337890625

Going around the circle of fifths twelve times is the same as going up seven octaves. To go up an octave, you multiply by two, so to go up seven octaves, you multiply by two seven times:

 2^7 = 128

Going from A to A by fifths means multiplying the frequency by 129.746337890625, but going by octaves means multiplying by 128. The discrepancy between the two multiples is known in music theory terms as the Pythagorean comma, and it has caused musicians a lot of gray hair over the past few hundred years. It would be nice if a tuning system based on fifths agreed with a system based on octaves. It would make it a lot easier to hop from one key to another without having to retune your instruments. But that is sadly not possible.

The history of western tuning systems is the story of musicians trying to resolve the contradiction between the desire to have pure-sounding overtone-based intervals and a closed circle of fifths. European musicians of the 1700s tried all kinds of compromises. You could have some of the keys sound perfectly in tune, and have others be out of tune. You could have eleven decent-sounding keys and one awful one. You could use perfect fifths and smooth out the Pythagorean comma with out-of-tune thirds. You could have pianos with many extra keys for all the subtly different versions of each note.

I don’t advise getting too bogged down in the minutiae of all these different systems. The bottom line is that the western world eventually settled on its present consensus solution, which is to just make all the intervals other than octaves a little bit wrong. This system is called equal temperament. It’s considered a “modern” idea, but it dates back at least as far as Galileo’s father Vincenzo Galilei.

In equal temperament, all intervals are built by adding semitones together, and all semitones are defined as a ratio of one to the twelfth root of two. Twelve half steps gets you the perfect octave, because multiplying by the twelfth root of two twelve times equals two. An equal-tempered fifth is seven semitones –  you multiply the frequency by 2^(7/12). This comes to about 1.4983, which isn’t quite the 3/2 from the overtone system that your ear would like, but it’s close enough to not be offensively awful-sounding. The other equal-tempered intervals are similarly “wrong,” but by similarly bearable small amounts. Every key is identical and the circle of fifths closes, so everybody is more or less happy. If you get an electronic guitar tuner, it’ll be based on equal temperament.

Some musicians lament the loss of pure fifths. One bassist I know claims that all those out-of-tune fifths are gradually making western listeners crazy, which is why we’ve had so many enormous and horrible wars in the past couple of centuries. This idea sounds silly to me, but it’s true that pure fifths are easier on the brain. On instruments where the tuning is flexible, like winds and violin, the most skilled musicians tend to seek out pure intervals by ear, adjusting their intonation slightly depending on the key. Good singers do this too. Electronic instruments are a lot easier to retune than acoustic ones, and it’s sometimes possible to program in whatever tuning system suits you. Auto-tune lets you choose any historical or microtonal tuning system you want right off a menu.

So what if you’re just trying to get your guitar in tune? You need to make peace with not being able to do it perfectly. Use an electronic tuner to get the individual strings to their correct equal-tempered pitches and deal with the fifths sounding a little wrong, or tune with harmonics and have the low register not quite match the high register. In practice, most guitarists just fudge a little bit one way or the other, and guitars rarely stay tuned the way you want them to anyway. As always, let your ear be your guide.

How to form the scale

Imagine an ice cube tray with twelve slots, one for each note in the western tuning system, labeled like so:

C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B

To make the C major scale, you just remove all the ice cubes with # in their names, like so:

C [ ] D [ ] E F [ ] G [ ] A [ ] B

Here’s a graphic representation of the C major scale. Scale tones are in red, the notes you skip are gray.The scale is extremely easy to play on the piano: just play the white keys from C to C.

Here’s the C major scale in standard music notation. The curvy lines show notes with a skip between them, and the angled ones show notes that are adjacent on the piano:

Here’s how you’d program the C major scale into Auto-tune, which clearly visualizes the notes you leave out:

Where did the naming convention come from?

Given that C major is “home base” in the western tonal system, it’s weird that it starts on C and not A. Why this departure from the alphabet? I have no idea. I put this question up on Quora; maybe someone there will have some insight.

Also, what’s up with all the sharps and flats? Why not just use the first twelve letters of the alphabet for the twelve pitches? Maybe it’s just too many things to remember – we don’t do well trying to hold more than eight or nine distinct pieces of information in short-term memory. The sharps and flats system is annoying but it does reflect the fact that you can form other scales by starting with C major and raising or lowering (sharping or flatting) certain pitches.

Some music theory geekery

You can play the C major scale by going around the circle of fifths from F to B:

F  C  G  D  A  E  B

Try playing the scale this way, it’s fun.

The notes you leave out of the C major scale form the G flat major and E flat minor pentatonic scales. Try playing only on the black keys on the piano to hear these scales.

Harmonizing the scale

When you play certain notes from the major scale simultaneously, you get a lot of interesting chords. The pattern that generates the most commonly used chords in C major is very simple. You can form a C major chord by starting on C and playing every other note in the scale:

C  E  G  B etc...

You can form chords from any note in the scale the same way. Just pick one and go up the scale, skipping every other note. When you do this for all seven notes in C major, you get a group of seven chords that sound really good together.

C:    C  E  G (I)
Dm:   D  F  A (ii)
Em:   E  G  B (iii)
F:    F  A  C (IV)
G:    G  B  D (V)
Am:   A  C  E (vi)
Bdim: B  D  F (vii)

These seven chords are called the diatonic chords to C major. (The name comes from Greek.) The diatonic chords are good to know. You can play them in any order and any combination, and the C major scale sounds terrific over all of them.

The roman numerals next to each chord refer to the scale degree the chord is based on. G is the V chord in C major because G is the fifth note in the C major scale. These numbers can be a good shorthand. You’ll see references to chord progressions like I-IV-V, which means, in C, play C, F, G. Another common progression is I-vi-ii-V — that’s C, Am, Dm, G.

The first note in each chord is called the root. The next one is the third (makes sense, you skipped the second.) After that is the fifth. If you add another note to each one, you get seventh chords.

Cmaj7: C E G B
Dm7:   D F A C
Em7:   E G B D
Fmaj7: F A C E
G7:    G B D F
Am7:   A C E G
Bm7b5: B D F A

Adding still another note to each chord makes more complex-sounding ninth chords. Adding yet another note makes eleventh chords, and yet another makes thirteenth chords. After the thirteenth, you’re back on the root again.

A very common rock and pop songwriting technique is to use all of the diatonic chords except for the I chord. By combining Dm, Em, F, G7 and Am, you can get a dark, moody and ambiguous sound that’s still tied together by the familiar major scale. You get enough angst to have an edge, without scaring away mainstream audiences.

Playing C major on the guitar

Major scales are surprisingly annoying to play on guitar. They’re much harder to play than the pentatonic or blues scales. Here are some good fingerings for C major — click through to see them bigger:

The first row shows the open position, so named because it uses open strings. The second row shows a closed-position fingering that fits conveniently between the seventh and tenth frets. Use your index finger on the seventh fret, your middle on the eighth, your ring on the ninth and your pinkie on the tenth. This is a nice fingering because you can slide it up and down the neck to easily form any other major scale.

The bottom row shows arpeggios of all the chords diatonic to C major. This exercise is a challenge, so take it slowly, and try to get it to sound musical and rhythmic. Play it backwards too. Mastering your arpeggios can inspire tons of melodic ideas, and will make your solos much richer and more structured.

See this web site for more major scale guitar fingerings. There are a lot of them, and they can make you crazy. My advice is to really master the ones above first. Then learning the rest of them will be less daunting.

Modes

Not only does the C major scale contain seven awesome chords, but it also includes six other scales. This is a complex topic that gets a post of its own, but the basic idea is simple. By playing the scale starting and ending on notes other than C, you get an assortment of exciting new sounds.

• If you play C major from D to D, you get a scale called D Dorian. This is a minor scale that goes well with the Dm7 chord. It’s great for funk and sixties jazz.
• If you play C major from G to G, you get a scale called G Mixolydian, which fits well over G7. This is a crucial scale for rock and roll.
• If you play C major from A to A, you get A natural minor. This is the basis of the key of A minor, the relative minor key to C major.

Major scale in action

Most of the European-descended nursery rhymes use the major scale: “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” “Mary Had A Little Lamb” and so on. Tons of pop and folk songs, hymns, theme songs and jingles use it too, everything from “Amazing Grace” to “Good King Wenceslas” to “Imagine.”

In classical music, the major scale is traditionally used for bright, happy moods: think of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” or the William Tell Overture. The scale can be tragic or majestic, too, if played slowly enough. My favorite example is Beethoven’s string quartet in A minor, opus 132, 3rd movement. This is one of the most depressing pieces of music I can think of, and it’s all major.

The major scale can be bland and vanilla-sounding, but it’s all in the execution. Björk’s beautiful “Anchor Song” sounds crunchy and dissonant, but it’s entirely in the major scale. She just chooses surprising combinations of notes, arranged in rhythmically surprising ways. (Unfortunately, the sound and image in this video aren’t lined up well.)

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” talks through the diatonic chords in the major scale in its first verse: “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift.” Those major-scale chords might be well-worn cliches, but we’re nowhere near exhausting their possibilities.

When you’re first learning to improvise, it’s daunting to be confronted with all the scales. Fortunately, there’s one scale that sounds good in any situation: the blues scale. It’s a universal harmonic solvent. I haven’t encountered a chord progression yet that didn’t fit with the blues scale. It works in blues, of course, but it also sounds terrific in rock, country, jazz, reggae, funk and much else.

How to play the blues scale

The blues scale is the minor pentatonic with a note added, the sharp fourth/flat fifth. The C blues scale is C, Eb, F, F#, G, Bb. Here it is in standard music notation:

And here’s how you program it into Auto-tune.

The blues scale is easy to play on guitar. Your index finger plays the root on the E string, so to play C blues, put your index on the eighth fret.

The Eb blues scale is exceptionally easy to play on piano — just play the black keys and add the note A.

The blues scale and music theory

In western music theory terms, the blues scale is practically inexplicable. The Eb in the C blues scale makes it sound minor, but the scale is customarily played on top of major chords. And no traditional western scale has three adjacent chromatic notes, the blues scale’s F, F# and G.

The F# is especially odd, since it’s a tritone away from the root C. But western music theory can’t explain everything that people like. From a science perspective, the F# is perfectly reasonable, since it emerges naturally from the overtone series of C. And science aside, there’s something about the blues scale’s asymmetrical sequence of big and small leaps that appeals to the intuition. I can’t articulate any particular reason why. Your thoughts on this are welcome.

As I said above, blues scale works in just about any improvisational situation. This makes it especially useful when you’re learning to play jazz. Until you’ve attained a significant level of mastery, it’s hard enough to follow a tune’s chord changes, much less express yourself while doing so. Even the best jazz soloists sometimes get lost in the changes. The blues scale is a reliable fallback position. Other musicians might judge you for not being able to make the changes, but the audience is always glad to hear blues, so I say, let the haters hate.

The blues scale is a fertile source of harmonic ideas for songwriting and arranging. Use the scale tones as roots for chords and get ready for pleasure. Dominant seventh chords work great: C7, Eb7, F7, F#7, G7, Bb7. The F# also suggests F# diminished, a jazz standby.

Blues scale melodies

As a kid, my most memorable exposure to the blues scale was Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme.” Mancini also uses chromatic approach notes above and below the scale tones, very hip.

Charles Mingus uses the blues scale as the upper extensions for a set of abstract chords in “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” This might be one of the most beautiful blues melodies in history.

“Take Five” by Dave Brubeck uses blues scale for its A section.

Other blues scales

You can combine the blues scale with other scales for a richer assortment of tones. Combining the blues scale with the major scale gives you the entire chromatic scale except for flat two and flat six. You can throw those two notes in as passing tones too, so you can effectively play any note you want over blues. That’s a lot of possibility!

Diminished chords sound great over blues. C diminished seventh is C, Eb, Gb, A. The combination of the major sixth A with the flat third Eb is especially tasty, since there’s a tritone between them. Check out the turnaround at the end of Miles Davis’ trumpet solo in “All Of You” on Round About Midnight for a great diminished chord blues lick. Listen at 1:40.

Blue notes

Blues wouldn’t be blues without blue notes. Blue notes are microtones in between blues scale notes and major scale notes. The pitches in between Eb and E, or between F# and G, are good examples. Here’s a more complete discussion of blue notes.

The devastating beat, produced by Shamello and first-timer Buddha, is based on sped-up samples of “Sweet Green Fields” by Seals and Crofts. Listen at 0:17.

Nothing against Seals and Crofts, but Busta’s song is about fifty times cooler. According to the Complex blog, licensing the sample ate up the entire producers’ share of the publishing rights. That’s a shame. Maybe Shamello and Buddha didn’t write or record “Sweet Green Fields,” but they did have the wit to identify the best part of it, speed it up to a more exciting tempo and set it to a sizzling drum machine pattern. That creative act seems like it should be worth some money in addition to the admiration of sample geeks like me.

Hip-hop has rehabilitated the music of the disco era for listeners of my generation and younger. This is no small accomplishment. When I was growing up, I was taught by everyone remotely cool that slick, lavish  seventies pop was the epitome of cultural evil. My hippest white friends had an aesthetic centered around punk, which was fuelled in large part specifically in reaction against artists like Seals and Crofts. Rock fans of a certain age love to tell me about spending the seventies holed up with the Velvet Underground, waiting for disco to go away.

Hip-hop was a reaction to disco too. Like the song says, “create rap music ’cause I never dug disco.” Maybe hip-hop musicians don’t dig everything about disco, but they do dig some aspects: the beats, the production, the party atmosphere. Punk stripped away a lot of disco-era excess, but it also stripped away danceability, groove, arrangement and texture. The indie rockers have restored some variety to the vocal and instrumental palette, but their grooves remain impoverished.

Rock was dance music first and foremost in its lively youth, but I can’t think of too many rock songs from my lifetime that make me want to dance. Hip-hop, on the other hand, has taken the best disco grooves and given them laser-beam focus through looping, layered drum machines and harder-edged lyrics.

I’m mostly concerned here with production, not rapping. But I want to recognize Busta’s flow for a second. On paper, the lyrics of “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See” might not seem so special. It’s mostly just exhortations to party over a rhythmic pattern that, in the verses, is minimal and repetitive even by hip-hop standards: six beats worth of eighth notes, ending on beat three of every other bar. Delivered straight, this metrical scheme would get annoying fast. Busta makes it work by stretching the time creatively. He delays the last syllable of each line almost into the next beat, and he rushes or drags the other syllables freely. The tension between the predictable meter and Busta’s unpredictable delivery grabs your ear and doesn’t let go.

Speaking of bringing together disparate sensibilities, here’s Busta presenting with Martha Stewart at the 1997 Video Music Awards. There’s no deeper message here, I just find this photo amusing.

Busta’s first big hit “Woo-Hah!!” is based on a quote of the Sugarhill Gang. It’s kind of an analog sample.

Busta’s chorus is a quote from the Sugarhill Gang’s “8th Wonder” — listen at 1:52.

The Revenge Of The Nerds band quotes “8th Wonder” too. The law considers quotation to be a different practice than sampling a recording. Why? Quoting and sampling achieve the same effect, the insertion of a recognizable meme into a new context. In casual language, music fans tend to use the terms “sampling” and “quoting” interchangeably, and I think they’re right to.

In addition to the Sugarhill Gang quote, there’s an actual sample in “Woo-Hah!!” The chromatically off-kilter keyboard part comes from “Space” by Galt MacDermot, who also wrote the music for Hair. “Space” has an unintentional hip-hop flavor to its beat, I can see why Busta and his producers like it. The “Woo-Hah!!” sample comes at 0:46.

Galt McDermot’s catalog is surprisingly popular with hip-hop producers in general. For instance, Run-DMC’s “Down With The King” uses a loop of “Where Do I Go” from Hair.

As befits a song built from samples, “Woo-Hah!!” has been sampled itself quite a few times. Some highlights:

• Loefah – “Disco Rekeh” — a cool dubstep track.
• Girl Talk – “What’s It All About” — featuring Busta’s vocal laid over “Everything She Does Is Magic” by the Police, among other random things.
• Ayman – “Mein Stern” — a German rapper.
• Cut Killer – “La Haine” — a French turntablist. What is it with international hip-hop artists and Busta?
• Def Rhymes – “Weekend” — Dutch rappers, on top of a Gloria Estefan sample! The world is a big and complicated place.
• Hardcore and industrial musicians sample “Woo-Hah!!” a lot but I find their stuff too annoying to listen to.

Here’s the whole story of “Woo-Hah!!” in convenient map form, click to see it bigger:

Not every sample Busta uses comes from something groovy. “Gimme Some More” uses a string part that will be immediately familiar to Hitchcock fans.

The strings come from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho. That’s pretty creative sourcing. Hear the sample thirty seconds in:

Busta has also had the exquisitely good taste to sample Miles Davis. “Everything Remains Raw” gets its moody chord progression from the ending of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” from Miles’ and Gil Evans’ arrangement of Porgy and Bess.

Again, I love sample-based music for the power that it has to form unexpected musical connections. Think of all the hip-hop heads who might be motivated to check out some Miles Davis and Gil Evans because Busta sampled them. For that matter, think of the jazz nerds (like me) who might be motivated to check out Busta.

Here’s the real video, which sadly I can’t embed. In its place, enjoy a fan video.

I’ve loved this song for years while barely being able to make out any of the words. I finally had to look them up on Google. MJ isn’t exactly Cole Porter, but his lyrics have nice body logic, they sound good and are super pleasurable to sing. MJ had the same songwriting strategy as the Beatles: he started with a melody over a rhythmic groove, developed using nonsense syllables. Only later, once the whole song was in place and recorded as a demo, did he find words that fit the metrical scheme.

Verse one:

Lovely is the feeling now
Fever, temperatures rising now
Power (ah power) is the force, the vow
That makes it happen
It asks no questions why
So get closer
To my body now
Just love me
‘Til you don’t know how

The melodic nut meat of this tune is on the words “lovely,” “fever,” “power,” “happen” and so on. The first syllable of these words is sung on D#, the major third in the key of B. The second syllable is on the A below, the flat seventh in B. The interval between these two notes is a tritone. It’s a sound with a richly conflicted emotional resonance. If you’re willing to follow me through a little music theory, it’ll help you understand what makes this song so awesome.

Western music theory is based on the buildup and release of tension. One of the best ways to create tension is with dissonance. The tritone is considered by European tradition to be a very dissonant interval. Every major key has a tritone in it, between the fourth and seventh notes of the scale (fa and ti, for Sound Of Music fans.) If you’re a typical western listener and you hear a tritone, your ear wants it to resolve to a less dissonant interval. You want the fa to resolve down to mi, and the ti to resolve up to do.

African-American music treats the tritone very differently. The blues uses tons of unresolved tritones. In blues, chords with tritones can functionally feel stable and resolved, “dissonant” though they may be. (The music has lots of other intriguing harmonic grittiness, like microtones, and the simultaneous use of minor and major thirds.) The blues passed the unresolved tritone on to its many musical descendants: jazz, rock, funk and so on.

MJ is squarely within his musical tradition to be basing his melody on an unresolved tritone. Still, it’s startling to hear it featured so prominently and starkly in a pop song, on the very first two notes of the vocal melody no less. It gives a jolt of intensity to what might otherwise be a harmless piece of disco fluff.

Music is fundamentally all about math. Most of the musical intervals in the western tuning system are based on simple ratios, the kinds of numbers you can count on your fingers. The interval between A and the next A up is an octave, meaning that the ratio between the two notes’ frequencies is one to two. The interval between A and E is a fifth, a ratio of two to three. The interval between A and C# is a major third, a ratio of four to five. The tritone is different. The interval between A and D# is one to the square root of two. Your ear might not know which specific irrational number it’s hearing, but it knows that something weird and complex is at work, something you can’t count on your fingers.

“Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” asserts further non-European quality in its extremely minimalist chord progression. It has just two chords, A major and B7. The A major has B as its bass note, which really makes it more of a B9sus4 chord. The music term for this kind of unvarying chord pattern is a modal groove. In this case the mode is B mixolydian.

Western music is mostly linear. The chord progression tells a story of dissonance leading to consonance, or vice versa. Modal tunes are more Eastern, trance-like and drone-oriented. They’re about creating a cyclical ambiance, a mood rather than a narrative. “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” shares its modal quality with my other favorite Michael Jackson original, “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” which he wrote around the same time.

MJ’s chorus adds to the trance-inducing vibe by repeating the same line over and over:

Keep on with the force, don’t stop
Don’t stop ’til you get enough

It’s more of a mantra than a semantic idea. It helps keep the mind clear for the business at hand, the business of getting your groove on from the waist down.

The harmony and lyrics might be static, but there’s a lot of music packed into this track. Ben Wright’s string arrangement chases up and down the chromatic scale, adding another dash of unsettling dissonance. There are multiple layers of bells, handclaps and other percussion, and the bass and guitar mostly function as percussion too. Jerry Hey’s tight horn chart makes the brass into yet another percussion element, rather than a melodic one. Check out the stab at 1:37, the end of the first chorus. Hot!

As with all of MJ’s hits, “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” has been sampled many times. Some highlights, more or less in chronological order:

• Jazzy Jay – “Def Jam”
• Public Enemy – “Can’t Do Nuttin’ For Ya Man”
• Double Trouble & Rebel MC – “Just Keep Rockin’ (Remix)”
• Slick Rick – “Impress The Kid”
• Mase ft Jay-Z, 112 and Lil’ Cease – “Cheat On You”
• Beyoncé – “Black Culture”
• People Under the Stairs – “Tuxedo Rap” (the sample is pitch-shifted way down, cool)

Purists might find it jarring, but I’m enjoying this remix with Jay-Z.

Here’s my own contribution:

MJ Makossa

mp3 download, ipod format download

Don’t stop!

A A7 Am

B7

C C7

D D7 Dm

E E7 Em

F

G G7

It’s not much good to just memorize these chords without musical context. It’s better to learn them grouped together into keys, so you can hear how they relate to each other. Family Guy explains how this works using the key of G. I apologize for the filthiness of the opening joke, but then it actually turns into a good music theory lesson.

Here are the standard fifteen grouped into various useful major, blues and minor keys. Pick a row and try the chords within it. They’ll sound good together in any order and in any combination. The first chord in each row is the tonic chord, which feels like home base.

Major keys

          I  ii  iii IV  V  vi    V/V  V/ii V/vi

C major:  C  Dm  Em  F  G7  Am    D7   A7   E7

G major:  G  Am  --  C  D7  Em    A7   E7   B7

D major:  D  Em  --  G  A7  --    E7   B7   --

A major:  A  --  --  D  E7  --    B7   --   --

E major:  E  --  --  A  B7  --    --   --   --

Blues

          I7  IV7 V7 bIII bVII

C blues:  C7  --  G7  --  --

G blues:  G7  C7  D7  --  F

D blues:  D7  G7  A7  F   C

A blues:  A7  D7  E7  C   G

E blues:  E7  A7  B7  G   D

Minor keys

          I bIII iv  IV  v   V  bVI bVII  V/V bVI7

D minor:  Dm  F  --  G7  Am  A7  --  C    E7  --

A minor:  Am  C  Dm  D7  Em  E7  F   G    B7  --

E minor:  Em  G  Am  A7  --  B7  C   D    --  C7

For more adventurous sounds, try mixing chords from different keys together. Trust your ears and have fun!

Update: once you’ve mastered these chords, maybe you’d like to tackle the pentatonic scale.

Ms Heap is accompanying herself with artificial harmonies created by a Digitech Vocalist Workstation. The device reads her pitch in the manner of Auto-tune. She tells it what notes to shift her voice to using the MIDI keyboard. She also uses some digital delay for the echo effect, and towards the end, she samples herself singing the chorus so she can sing the last verse over the playback.

The result is one of the most futuristic sounds I’ve ever heard, and yet it’s also warm and intimate, not icily posthuman like you’d expect from such a high-tech performance. Because the harmony responds on the fly to her singing and keybs playing, she’s free to improvise, phrase and embellish in the moment. Real live choral harmony is cool and everything, but if you want multiple complex parts, you need to write everything out ahead of time, and conduct the singers exactly. It doesn’t leave much room for spontaneity, and spontaneity is key to truth-telling in music. When I say that “fake” technology can result in more real music, this is exactly what I mean. Here’s how Imogen Heap describes the writing of this song in an interview with Electronic Musician:

My favorite computer blew up on me, but I didn’t want to leave the studio without having done anything that day. I saw the [DigiTech Vocalist Workstation] on a shelf and just plugged it into my little 4-track MiniDisc with my mic and my keyboard and pressed Record. The first thing that I sang was those first few lines, “Where are we? What the hell is going on?” I set the vocalist to a four-note polyphony, so even if I play ten notes on the keyboard, it will only choose four of them. It’s quite nicely surprising when it comes back with a strange combination. When it gets really high in the second chorus, that’s a result of it choosing higher rather than low notes, so I ended up going even higher to compensate, above the chord. I recorded it in, like, four-and-a-half minutes, and it ended up on the album in exactly the structure of how it came out of me then. I love it because it doesn’t feel like my song. It just came out of nowhere, and I’m not questioning that one at all.

Brian Eno says that for synths to have the soul of traditional instruments, they need to be a little bit unpredictable. All the glossy perfection the computer makes possible can get to be oppressive. You get the best results when you don’t have total control, when there’s room for the happy accident. By confusing the harmony algorithms, you can get unexpected notes that sound way more hip than anything you could have worked out on paper ahead of time. It’s why I’m so addicted to Auto-tune. If you set it right, it reacts in surprising ways, live as it’s happening, opening up new avenues of expression.

Some people think that artificial harmonizers and Auto-tune are dishonest, that they’re cheating, that they’re part of a larger trend towards fakery that’s destroying western civilization as we know it. We have an abiding anxiety about the authenticity of our music. The Online Etymology Dictionary says that the word “authentic” descends from ancient Greek authentikos, meaning “original, genuine, principal.” This word in turn descends from authentes, “one acting on one’s own authority,” a composite of autos, “self,” and hentes, “doer, being.” The related word “genuine” descends from the Latin genuinus meaning “native, natural,” from the root of gignere, “to beget.” The thinking goes that the word originally referred to paternity.

I think it’s reasonable to be concerned with the parentage of our music, but it’s wrong to be repulsed by the bastardized and the mongrel. All the really exciting music is hybridized. Hip-hop combines the phrasing and improvisation of jazz with European electronic beats. Jazz combines African-American traditions with European harmonies and song structures. Let’s have some mongrel pride! The president of the United States is a self-described mutt. So am I. Purity is lame.

By the way, gorgeously recorded a capellas are irresistable to samplers, so it’s no big surprise that someone would take an interest in using Imogen Heap samples. The best example I could find is Jason Derulo’s song “Whatcha Say.” It won’t change your life or anything, but I give him props for venturing it. I feel less of an urge to sample Imogen Heap and more of an urge to get my hands on a Vocalist Workstation and try out some harmonies of my own.