Week Summary, What is This Sound? New Passage and Behind the Scenes of the Artworks.

This week you may or may not have seen that I released my newest track “In Music Beats A Heart” and am incredibly happy with how this piece turned out. I did a post all about it if you would like to find out more.

I also started a new series of short pieces in which I multi-track improvised parts which I also talked about in a post earlier this week in conjunction with setting up my Facebook page. If you would like to follow me there, clicking the icon in the top right hand corner of the nav bar will take you there.

The bulk of what I have done this week has been discussed earlier already, however I do also have another cool sound effect that I would like to share and talk about:

This will be featuring in the co-write project I am working on. We are creating an ambient introduction and ending and this will be one of several sound effects amounting to the overall soundscape which aims to depict a cold and windy mountain side. This sound alone however sounded so interesting I just had to share it. Next week I will reveal what created it and how, but for now, I’d be interested to see if anyone can or in fact will take a guess at what it is. I will read comments on Facebook and YouTube.

I also received a few questions in the week regarding the artwork for “In Music Beats A Heart”, or more specifically, how I made it.

I have mentioned before that I am also a photographer, and an important skill in photography is photo editing, and it is in my opinion, a very powerful tool and a very simple and quick one when you know what you are doing. Indeed it was a few simple tricks that I used to create the artwork.

It is worth mentioning that I coined the name thinking about oscilloscopes, a tool on which you can represent waveforms and also heartbeats, and hence the name, so I drew a picture of some waveforms on an oscilloscope:

The lined paper did half the work for me, Then I drew a heart:

No need to worry about the lines as they can either be matched over the ones on the other pictures, or because they are fainter, removed with some exposure tweaking. I then took photos of them and removed any trace of colour, adjusted the brightness, inverted them and added some grain effects to make them look a bit worn to get these:

Then I overlaid them and re applied a few effects to remove the feeling of them being jarred together and added a gated light bloom filter to further enhance the brightness where the white from both images overlaps to get this:

Then I just dimmed the edges and added the text for the final result:

This weeks passage is the part of “In Music Beats A Heart” that comes just before the cadential passage I recently analysed. I have chosen a significantly longer passage this week but am looking specifically at a wider spanning musical parameter and that is tonality. Tonality is the use of key and key change, and in this section of music I have used it to achieve significantly more powerful chord changes and harmony than you could do within one key. I see so much music that feels stagnated by staying in one key and could be vitalised by using a modulation or two. Not to say all static key music is stagnant, but it can often be the case.

Along with the video you will see a diagram I have drawn which shows this progression but I will explain it more here.

The idea being these key changes results in what is described as functional harmony, the key moves by the use of cadences, usually by a fifth. There are several Cadences used to do this. The first is a Interrupted cadence but the actual tonality has moved by a fifth.

The next few key changes are created by moving minor chord 4 of the current key to minor chord 4 of the next key, which is a functional progression as it is moving down my a fifth but doing this on a chord that isn’t chord one also creates a temporary sense of instability in the key until chord one is reached. The big key change in this section comes when there is a shift from Bb minor to C# minor This is also an interrupted cadence if it is considered as an enharmonic modulation where chord 7 of Bb minor (Ab Dominant 7) is treated as chord 5 of the destination key (C# minor). Ab is harmonically the same as G#. The harmonic effect of this shift is a hugely energetic surge where the whole piece of music gets lifted up a semitone. This could also be reffered to as a truck driver's key change as it is like going up a gear in a clunky gear box. The next key change is another like the ones mentioned before. The point of this is that the piece would have no where near the amount of drive it has if it stayed in D minor for this section, the constant change in key pushes the music forwards. Another great example of this by a group I really like is Flight of the Silver Bird by Two Steps From Hell.

I’d encourage people to experiment with key changes. There are no rules in music, and keys are like the law, made to be broken.