Musical Space

Auto-tune first appeared in the late 1990s and quickly took hold of pop music with its use in Cher’s 1998 hit, “Believe.” She, and other artists, such as T-Pain were responsible for its popularity, its synthetic voice effect in electronic dance music and hip-hop.

Scary, though, is the more subtle use of auto-tune to correct the performance of a less-than pitch perfect singer. A great vocal performance can be accurate and expressive; electronics can often get in the way.

One way musicians create tension in a melody or chord progression is through use of a suspension.

Here’s a little music theory for you: the suspension. A suspension is a note that clashes with the harmony and needs to move to another note to resolve the tension. For instance, the fourth note above the root of a chord is dissonant, and likes to move to the third note, which is consonant. Here’s a 4-3 suspension on a piano; the tension in this C chord is resolved when the dissonant F moves to the consonant E:

Example 1: 4 3 suspension.piano

Whether Beethoven or beat boxers, musicians have come to rely on one tool to help them keep time.

The metronome was invented by a friend of Beethoven’s, Johann Maelzel, in 1815. It is used in music to set a tempo, measured in Beats Per Minute, and traditionally has a range of 40 - 208 BPM, roughly the extremes of the human heart-rate. BPM correlates to the human body in other ways, too.

Mark Foley explores the relationship between math, meter, and music.

Music is almost always arranged in a repeating pattern of beats; the pattern, or “meter,” usually corresponds with a rhythm that is easy to dance to, so the meter of a song is usually a simple group of 2, 3, or 4 beats. There is, however, a history of composers making things more complicated. “Money,” from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, has a strange, lop-sided groove because it is in an undanceable seven-beat meter.

Example 1: “Money”