The Music Theory Of Jacob Collier
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- Опубліковано 28 чер 2018
- What does Grammy-winning composer Jacob Collier have to do with a 19th-century music theory fight? Are perfect fourths the minor version of perfect fifths? Is a minor triad just an upside-down major one, and if so how do we account for the other differences between them? And how did answering those questions lead us to the birth of functional harmony? Buckle up, this one's a wild ride.
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Circle of Fifths video: • Building Blocks: The C...
Overtones video: • Why Don't All Instrume...
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SOURCES:
www.musictheory21.com/document...
• Interview: Jacob Colli...
• Interview: Jacob Colli...
• Jacob Collier Explains...
Script: docs.google.com/document/d/1a...
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Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold and Jade Tan-Holmes for proofreading the script to make sure this all makes sense hopefully!
If you're interested in checking out some of Jacob's theory videos, here's some interviews he did with June Lee:
ua-cam.com/video/DnBr070vcNE/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/b78NoobJNEo/v-deo.html
And here's a video he did with Wired about harmony:
ua-cam.com/video/eRkgK4jfi6M/v-deo.html
12tone Thanks for the links! Your quick mention of “undertones” reminded me of Adam Neely’s video on Mari Kimura and ALF. (Autocorrecting names is annoying)
Really enjoyed the video!!! Spent an hour or so a while back translating the major scale built going down, which turned into Phrygian if memory serves, and reconverting the relationships of the V and V7 into regular chords of the major scale just to try and implement them. Then, last week, experimented with using a plagal cadence as a secondary dominant, using IV the way I would Vs, and nearly had a heart attack that it was the same movement as the negative V to I. Best moment of this summer.
Watching this video, and I started to wonder, how pety has the theorist been through history?
You mentioned a few times how theorists has argued against each other, and maybe you could show some shade on what the most peti/insignificant detail they have argued about.
I was trying to think of why I knew who this was, I just couldn't think of any people so young who would be so knowledgeable except for the person I'd seen doing interview with five different levels of explanation for harmony. So I searched that and found that it was the same person, but I should have trusted that 12 tone would have provided these links LOL. The harmony interview is VERY interesting to me
hey 12tone, could you dissect "free bird" by lynyrd skynyrd? keep up the good work!
If you construct a chord with 5ths, the first 3rd is major: c, g, d, a, E
If you construct a chord with 4ths, first 3rd is minor: c, f, bb, Eb
I think that has something to do with it.
Well imo, this theory is extremely pythagorean which means that it will create impure intervals of 32/27 for a minor third, and 81/64 for a major third.
I would just use the undertone series and overtone series which seems at least some what more straight forward.
i understood about 5%
Congratulations you're 95% honest :p
Congratulations, youre not alone, mate
No need to brag
@@bjp4869 lol
I'm way too deep on the music theory rabbit hole I got it all.
May be a bad sign.
I think Collier makes an interesting point. A few ways to think about it:
1) Going clockwise around the circle of fifths means raising the V chord of the starting scale's fifth mode from minor to major. C major's fifth mode is G mixolydian, and then you replace v (Dm) with V (D) to get the G major scale.
2) You can also go clockwise by replacing one of the scale's primary triads with the parallel major of its relative minor. For example, going from C major to G major means replacing F major among the primary triads with D major. Going from G to D means replacing C major with A major, and D to A replaces G with E.
3) The perfect fourth is, in a strange way, a misnomer, as it is only a half-step above the major third. This drives much of the dissonance within the major scale. Remember, major is not the sharpest in key signature among modes; that would be Lydian, wherein raising our "perfect" fourth to the usually dreaded tritone actually brightens the scale and reduces dissonance. Maybe we should refer to what we call perfect fourths as minor fourths and to tritones as major fourths, while making fifth intervals neither major nor minor but neutral. And while we're at it, maybe the title of "major" should go to Lydian rather than Ionian with its minor fourth. This would also give more meaning to major intervals: C's major intervals currently correspond to D, E, A, and B. If we add in F# as C's major fourth, then we've got D major pentatonic, D being a major 2nd above C. Meanwhile C's minor intervals (Db, Eb, F, Ab, and Bb) would correspond to Db major pentatonic, Db being a minor 2nd above C. How cool is that?
Great post!
Dang!
Anirudh Silai I agree with a lot of what you’re saying about the major scale; the Lydian mode should be our reference due to being the brightest of all the modes. The fourth is such a clunky note that I largely avoid it in my bass lines unless I’m doing a cadence. It is an ambiguous interval and unique amongst the rest.
2nd point should be D to A not D to B for it to make sense
Hey Anirudh. Where did you learn all this?
First Riemann surfaces, now penguin diagrams. Are you SURE you aren't secretly trying to become a mathematical physicist?
I'm a music theorist, I'm not sure of anything.
acapellascience has always me a Im the morning before the bus 🚌 I get home 🏠 I have like ian day I got like that I’m so sorry 😐 I didn’t have anything happening right I was like I don’t think 💭 it fair it again to do the stuff and then I’m iiiiiiiiionas iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiijiiiiiihuuuuuuuuuuuuuujuuujuuuuuujjuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuujuuuujuuuuuuuuuuujjjuujuujujuuujujjuuuuuuuujjjujuujuuujjjuujuuuujujjuuuuuujuuuuuujjuuujjjjuujjjjjuuuujjjjuuuuuuuuuujjuujjuuuuujjujuuuujjujjuuujjjujuuuujuuuuuujjjujuujujujuuuuuuujujuuuujjjjjjjujjujjjujuuuuujjjjjujuuuujujjuuujjjuujjjjjjjjujjjjjjjuujujjuujjjjjjjjjjjjujjujjjujujujuuhuujjuuujjuuujjjjjujjuhuuujuujujuuuuuujuujujjjjjuujujujuuuuuujjuuuuuujjjjuuujujjuuujujujjuuuuujjjuujjuujjjuuujuhuhjjjjjujjjhjjjuujjjjjjjujjjjjjuujjujuujjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjujujjjjjujjujuuujjjjjjjuujjjjjjjjjuuuuuuuuuujjujuujuuuuujuuuujujuujjuuujuuujjjujjjjjuujjujjujuujjjjjjjuujjuujjjujjuujjjjuujjjjjjujjuuuuuujjjjujjjjujjjjjjjjjjuuujjjjjuuujjjjjjjjuuujujjjjuujjjuujjjjuuujjhujuuuuujuujuuujjjuuujujuujuujjujjujjjuuuuuuuuuujjuuuuuuuuuuujuuuuuuuujjuuuuuuuuuuuuuujjjjuujuuuujhuuuuuuuuuuuuujujjjuujuuuuujuuuuuuujjuuuuujjjjujjuuujujujuuuuujuujjujjuujuujuuuujjujuuuuuujuujujjjjujujuuujjuuuujujuuuuujuujujuujjuuujuujuuujuuujuuuuuujujjuujjuuujujuuuuuuujuuuuhuuuujuuuuujuuujjujujjjjuujjjujjuuuujuuujuujuujuuujjuujjuujuujuujjujuuuuuuuujjjuuuuujjjuuuujuuuuuujjjujuuuuujujuuujjjuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuujuuuuuujjjljhjjh
Imagine what I was iiiiuuuilliiiiiiiiiiiooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
12tone iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiooiiiiuy
He also wrote the right definition of the E = mc^2 equation.
Jacob Collier + 12 tone = Y E S
+ microtone = EEEEEE
I kind of want to see a flame war between monists and dualists break out in the comments.
This is a new subject to me. My mind is undecided and open. Monists and dualists: Hit me with your best arguments.
The citations in the footnotes are going to be 🔥🔥🔥.
Mister Apple
I’ve always been a dualist.
I had the same idea about 5ths being major and 4ths being minor before I even heard about Jacob Collier. I showed one of my theory friends and he sent me to one of Jacob Colliers videos.
Well as I understand it I am a dualist but I am happier with monism if we change it to minor being king rather than major but that's personal taste
The monist scum must be vanquished
Many of the associated content to this concept; Adam Neeley, Rick Beato, and Jacob Collier inherit their ideas about harmony from a 1950s book by George Russell called "The Lydian Chromatic Concept" and Ernst Levy's "A Theory of Harmony". Between the tonnetz, the opening table in LCC and some of the axes Ernst suggests in ATOH, you can create some really cool harmonies for your tunes.
An f1 driver and a music theorist nice
Adam Neely has a great video on the undertone series.
This reminds me of a concept taught by one of my theory professors that I’d never heard before: extroverted and introverted intervals. The idea is, within a scale or tonal melody, any interval from the tonic or root of the current chord has a “extroverted” or bright and bold quality with upward tendency if it is easier to make it from ascending 5ths (D is 2 5ths above C) while any note that is faster to make with ascending fourths is “introverted,” or darker and muted with downward tendency (a minor third is an example). By this theory, it does put most minor notes (minor third, minor sixth, minor seventh) in the same family as the fourth, and the major equivalents in the same family as 5ths.
Love your quick videos and how they’re short enough to avoid ads but what you’re talking about is interesting enough for me to want 45-60 min videos with ads.
3:25 couldn't help but notice how nice that dove was...
I've been watching all my yt videos at 2x speed for weeks. This was the first channel that forced me to switch back to regular speed.
Awesome stuff! I'm friends with Jacob from college so I just sent this to him :) Hope he watches it! Thanks for making this video!
I first watched your vids without knowing a damn about music theory, knowing now a little more, makes me make connections I hadn't before. And makes me wanna keep watching as you explained everything in a very consise and clear manner.
I had almost zero knowledge of music theory, but naturally played a lot of music by ear. I recently become more interested in music theory so I started learning about it, but it didn't really make a lot of sense to me and it seemed to be built around the piano. I decided to think of it in terms of a 12 note system with just the 12 semitones rather than the 7 white notes and 5 black notes. I drew a circle with 12 tics (like a clock) and plotted some chords onto it, and noticed that major chords and minor chords are the same, with one going clockwise and one going counterclockwise around the circle. I also practice tai chi so it made sense for me to think of it as a yin spiral and a yang spiral. Or minor chords being yin and major chords being yang. I then learned about how Jacob Collier views music and I realized it was the same as what I was conceptualizing. To me, music reflects duality just like everything in the universe reflects duality. After having this perspective, I can't think of music as something other than this.
Jacob's theories are very similar to the ones around the 16. century. Durum (hard) and Molle (soft) are the concepts of major and minor at that time and represents a very similar way of thinking. The funny thing is: I discovered Jacob and a penetratingly good UA-cam channel, Early Music Sources, which spreads incredible knowledge supported by amazing research, about around same time in my life, I means not even days apart. I strongly recommend the channel for the curious and interested creatures of UA-cam. Cheers!
Thanks for sharing!
Jacob is totally right. Every Major interval travels clockwise around The Circle of Fifths and every minor interval travels anti-clockwise. Music is essentially energy movement: Major right, (clockwise in rotation), minor left, (anti-clockwise in rotation).
thank you for having your channel 😍😍😍
Really appreciate that special relativity reference at 1:34.Very nice
PLEASE analyze some of Jacob Collier's songs, You and I in particular
Basil Muthalaly the great thing about Jacob Collier is that June Lee exists to bridge the gap between him and us mere mortals. Just go through the sheet music yourself and you can watch Jacob's thoughts on paper.
You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this video.
I went on a binge of your (The 12Tone crew's) videos and noticed the drawing was almost as if it were pulling from the same tiny pallete of characters and diagrams. Now watching this video I keep getting distracted by all the various drawings thrown out at breakneck speed. Especially the fish. It's almost like music itself, trying to find the perfect blend of what people are familiar with (dat elephant tho), and something new to keep us all intrigued (fishy).
So good job, person who has a famous hand on youtube (:
What an incredibly interesting breakdown of information. Now I have many new my music theory tools to research but which i already have a reference point to understand :)
Pretty good pronunciation of the German words. Especially "Wechsel"
The video was getting too complicated when he introduced the german words. Even as a german
AND HELLO, CORY! Thanks for your entertaining, informative uploads every week.
This explains an effect I've been thinking about at the end of the Broadway version of Green Day's "Whatsername." The cello plays a soft outro to a sad song (in D major). It ends on a D, then couple's it with an A below. It always sounded weird and very sad, likely because of this 4th=minor thing.
Super Job, Dude!! Talk about entertaining, concise, and to the point. Really enjoyed it. Subscribed, liked, etc. Doesn't happen that often. Some gems: "While ideas are great, they're not the same as real notes" and "sometimes music theory is wonderfully petty", or something like that. ;-)
Oh my word😱!!! Just discovered this!! Amazing, just subscribed😁
"In music theory right and wrong are kind of meaningless" 😂😂😂
Expertly put even by your high standards ❤️
+death0intj why's that sad to you? Music is inherently subjective. Language is arbitrary and "pulled out of (someone's) ass," but linguistics and grammar still are important. Not everything is or needs to be a hard science to have meaning.
Just thought it was a funny fact of the times... Fully believe an objective and scientific approach to music is both possible and will be achieved and yield massive innovations. Just have to work together and not tear each other down 😋
@@death0intj Music theory is a collection of models. Those models earn their keep by providing structure for musical creativity, and their worth is determined by how well they do that job.
Scientific theories are more like that than you think - they are models, and they earn their keep by providing explanations and predictions of the real world. Their worth is determined by how well they do those jobs. That does /not/ mean that scientific theories tell us the true nature of reality.
Take quantum and relativity. They offer fundamentally incompatible descriptions of reality, and yet each is spectacularly successful in its own domain. Both are extremely useful, but neither of them actually describes the true nature of reality. And don't forget, Newtonian mechanics is still good enough that NASA uses it for calculating rocket trajectories.
@@death0intj That isn't the job of a model in music theory; as I said in my previous comment, models in music theory exist in order to provide structure for musical creativity. Jacob Collier's music provides the most immediate example of this.
To be clear, music theory isn't making fact claims about the nature of reality. Instead it's building a structure which fits as neatly as possible with reality.
@@death0intj Look, ultimately music itself is an artificial construct.
For instance, I have a complete keyboard tuning in pure Just Intonation - perfect harmonic tuning for the major and minor scales of any one root note, plus (my own addition) the augmented tonic and diminished dominant that are neither major nor minor. The whole tuning is beautiful - mathematically interlocking and complete. But it's still just one tuning among many, one model among many. No matter how mathematically or aurally beautiful my tuning is, that doesn't invalidate eg. 12EDO or Werckmeister III. They're all valid in their different ways and they all solve different problems, just like Newtonian mechanics and quantum and relativity.
I love that attempt at drawing a TARDIS around 2:30!!! Great video!
the visual learner inside of me is having a learningasm right now!!! THANK YOU that was so pedagogical
Always good videos here! Barry Harris explains somethibg like this very simply. Play the 6th on the 5th or his explanation on the chromatic scale and how it produces familys through the whole tone scales, diminished, etc etc. It is a simple way to directly create music without worrying about additional overtone or undertone concepts. Play a classic turn around iii vi ii v I in Cmaj BUT instead play it as Gmaj6, Cmaj6, F6, D-6, Cmaj6 and listen to that sound. I think that's related to this video lol if not still cool to try!
Hey 12tone, I'm a huge fan. I know this isn't too likely, but I would love, love, love to see a video on Sultans of Swing. Regardless, keep making great content!
Awesome video!
The neo-Riemannian grid reminded me of Ron Jarzombek's (Blotted Science, Spastic Ink) methods (and I thank your video audience for introducing me to them!) :)
Theory geek here!! He is really changing the way one thinks about music theory. I feel like classical theory is so FIXED. Honestly though, thinking about Jazz theory, which I didn’t really get to study as a classical music theory geek, he has made a MAJOR DISCOVERY!!! This discovery is really changing the landscape of harmony...and I’m SOOOO OBSESSED!! Crazy how if one stacks the fifth, over any bass line it really makes so many other chord options available!!!
One of the things I take slight issue with when it comes to Collier's approaches is that they're entrenched in the "flavor" of 12 tone equal temperament. Different temperaments have entirely different circles of fifths (or other generative intervals). Perfect example in my opinion is 22tet, which is a "superpythagorean" tuning, ie it has a sharp perfect fifth and a flat fourth, as opposed to 12tet's slightly sharp fourth and flat fifth. Moving up 5 22tet fifth lands you squarely on a septimal or supermajor third, 9/7, and moving down 5 fifths lands you a septimal or subminor third, 7/6. To find traditional 5-limit harmonies, you have to stretch much farther along the circle of fifths or work outside it altogether. Regardless, I think of Collier like a 12tet cartographer and his music is like an incredibly detailed map. The way he splashes tonal color all over feels chaotic but it illustrates the underlying structure of the temperament beautifully.
I would not be surprised if in the future Jacob plays around in different temperaments. I think right now though he's more focused on telling an idea in terms everybody can understand and like. Not everybody is used to 22TET (although I'll be real, Sevish has done a fantastic job with making different temperaments sound less alien) but we're probably not far off from hearing something in a different temperament from Jacob.
However, it should be noted that he doesn't always use 12-tone equal temperament. Most of his songs are in just temperament.
yeah, jacob defenitely doesn't always use 12tet! I don't know exactly when he does and doesn't, but I've seen in a livestream harmonisation of his that he prefers to tune in just temperament. Whenever there's piano in his music that's obviously not going to work, but I think in a lot of his a capella stuff he indeed uses just intonation.
I'm 63% sure he's also used quarter tones sporadically for extra spice but I couldn't tell you where since it's been a while since watching June Lee's amazing transcription videos.
More importantly though, what does it matter? I love microtonal music as much as the next weirdo but there's absolutely nothing wrong with anybody choosing to devote themselves to 12TET, especially since for most people all of their favorite music is in that tuning system. I've never heard anything about Collier claiming his approach is the one true writing style to rule all others so there's absolutely no reason to find "problems" with it, they're just ideas he uses to write the same as any other ideas. It's like trying to find "the issue" with a jam session, aleatoric composition or write-a-song-in-an-hour video. It's all just people trying out various approaches to making music and there are no right or wrong answers.
yes, he switches between equal and just intonation all the time. And im not aware of actual quartertones, but a lot of microtones used by him also.
I can't say for sure when/how he uses JI but I think my point mostly still stands. When he dances up and down the circle of fifths in his chord progressions, he's using the 12tet circle of fifths which - regardless of how each individual chord is tempered - largely defines the feel of 12tet's harmonic MOVEMENT. This isn't meant as a criticism of his music (it's great), I just think that his explanation of how moving up/down the circle of fifths makes things brighter and darker is a bit 12tet-centric.
if you stack fifths from C, C G D A E you get C6/9 which stems from Cmaj, and if you stack fourths, C F Bb Eb Ab Db you get a Bbmin11 ish sound. That could be wrong but that’s how i’ve thought of it
Me too.
This is what's called 3 limit harmony, because the fifth is the third harmonic. It's kinda one dimensional because all you can do is add more fifths one way or the other.
Major and minor triads are technically the more complicated 5 limit harmony because they contain invervals based on the 5 th harmonic, which is the major third.
Eugène Beringer yeah you can voice maj13#11’s by stacking fifths, (i.e. Lydian) and you get the locrian scale when you stack seven fourths. Try it.
if you leave off the Db that is some kind of an Ab major voicing to me.
idk man, Db on an Ab maj chord? kinda makes it sound like not Ab to me...
Really good video. Subscribed.
This was super cool! I have watched your other videos on Neo-Riemannian theory, and I'm aware of the major/minor duality, and I've read about Heimholtz and Reimann... but I was missing some of the history there, so this was great to fill in some of those gaps. I especially didn't know about the phonicity/tonicity concept -- that's really interesting to think about, and I think it helps to explain some of the theory behind consonance in general (although there's plenty more to think about there). As for Jacob Collier, well, who knows what's really going on in his head. :D
Also, I just rewatched the Wired video (for like the third time) and there was something Jacob said about polarity that addressed the question you had about his way of thinking: are fifths really major and fourths really minor? And I don't think it has to do with how many sharps or flats a key signature has. He does say in this video (and in others) that fifths result in a "brighter" sound and fourths result in a "darker" sound, but I think it has to do with the closeness of the interval and the sonority it creates when you stack them. Also in the Wired video, he equates fourths with the plagal cadence and fifths with the perfect cadence. So maybe that's what he's getting at -- a sonority created with fourths creates different expectations compared to fifths? That's all I got :)
At 5:31, things would be easier to understand with some numbers. If I understood correctly, by comparing charts, the frequency of A0, the tonic fundamental of the chord, is 27.5 Hz. The frequency of C-sharp1, the major third in your A major chord, is 34,65 Hz. The phonic overtone, the earliest overtone shared, would be 415 Hz, G-sharp 4th octave, 15th overtone/partial of the fundamental, 12th partial of C-sharp first octave's spectrum. The G-sharp 4 is in the A-major scale, and would be like a 7th of the chord, raised 3 octaves. Putting this out there as a reminder to myself when reviewing the info later. Thanx for teaching a n00b something new. :-)
I always have to adjust the speed of your videos to understand it fully.
Hell yes! New video!
7:38 What is this?!.... A video for ANTS?!
Mike O'Brien *eleph* ants
haha is that actually the reason for the ant? that would be amazing!
"this kinda falls appart"
* draws steven's ocean temple *
oo i see what you did there
AWESOME video! Im a huge fan of Jacobs. Similar to his talk with June :)
You have blown my mind, sir. You are amazing.
If you want an interesting emotional experiment try playing, as a chord - the root/b6/b7th, (from 4th octave CAbBb) - just those three notes and tell me how minor it feels (without having a minor 3rd in it) relative to how major feels, then add the 4th too (CAbBbF), then the natural 5th (CAbBbFG). Then voice it like CFAbBbCG. Helps if you have MIDI in a DAW to work with or sheet music app too I guess.
On the contrary for a major sound without the 3rd, play the root/6th/Maj7th (CAB) then add 9th, (CABD) then add 5th, (CABDG), then voice it CGABDG.
In voicing these two as CFAbBbCG & CGABDG, I noticed that they're symmetrically identical, the order of the minor sounding chord from top to bottom has the same interval spacing as the major sounding chord moving from bottom to top, and they sound quite different indeed. You could also add the 3rds respectively and it'll remain symmetrical. I'll be honest and say I'm not sure what the significance of the symmetry is.
The idea of thinking about harmony kind of radially around a root note is a theory that I've been pondering about recently until I stumbled upon Jeff Brent's website mentioning it there where he debunks the LCC.
i have already held dualist ideas (in how i looked at the harmonic series and how the perfect fourth fits into it), but i never thought of it as the fifth being the actual root of the chord. i like that idea a lot
I think I'm going to have to watch this 10 times more to get it. Great vid!
it's not that important.
long story short, some theorist belives the most important note on a minor chord is the fifht ; now you know that you could write awesome melody over minor chords ;)
phonic overtone = least common multiple; tonic fundamental = greatest common divisor. There's math going on here.
very interesting video and i love the conclusion👏🏻 the thing im hung up on is this idea of sharp keys being brighter and flat darker in some absolute sense.
does he just mean relative to what came before within a particular piece ? because the frequency we decided to call d# is not actually brighter than the one we decided to call Bb are they ? both are just a certain amount of vibrations in the air that we assign a name so we can communicate etc.
Something I found interesting is that if you stack a bunch of 5ths and spell those notes out differently you get a Lydian scale which is the sharpest/brightest, and if you stack a bunch of 4ths you get a Locrean scale, which is the flattest/darkest.
So like going up 5ths would make C,G,D,A,E,B,F#,C, which are all notes in Lydian
And going up 4ths would make C,F,Bb,Eb,Ab,Db,Gb,C, which are all the notes in C Locrean.
The F# to C in the 5ths stack is changed to a tritone and the Gb to C is also to make it spell the respective scales. So I guess I don’t think of 4ths and 5ths as major and minor as much as just darker and brighter. Let me know if you see a flaw in this observation but I found that interesting.
great observation!
now that i think of it, I think Jacob made a similar observation, but called it something like super-mega-hyper-meta-lydian... I'll have to look intto that aswell, but I believe that idea was also made by stacking fifths
I had a similar idea. I notice how in major key the first five notes is Root-T-T-S-T and the next five notes starting in the fifth is Fifth-T-T-S-T. Example: C-D-E-F-G = G-A-B-C-D. And in minor key this "symmetry" exist with the perfect fourth. C-D-Eb-F-G = F-G-Ab-Bb-C
Augusto That’s really interesting as well!
Kalkaanuslag Kalkaanuslag yeah I remember him talking about that but I didn’t fully understand it. I think rick Beato also has a video on it
helmholz was a physisist too in fact his work is a lot more"important to modern physics" than ottingen
Awsome video
MrTheSmoon Incredibly important to Engineers too. Helmholtz theories of Vorticity are integral to the analysis of all kinds of flow.
Thermodynamics and transport processes (and other equivalent things) in general.
Please make a video explaining negative harmony.
My gosh. I am so far of understanding a single word of this video... But subscribed! Hopefully one day I'll get it... hahaha
Pleeeeeease do more about dualism, especially Von O's unity etc!
Superb video, i wish the pace was a tiny bit slower!
That grid reminds me of the bass structure on an accordion. Interesting. Kind of makes sense, too, since I guess they were invented around the same time as each other.
I feel like this video, while really interesting, didn't really explain what Jacob Collier means by things he says. How should I use them in composition? Is the only thing (from him, not from the dualists before him) I should pay attention to are just to use fourth in minor chords and fifths in major ones?
The video felt like there's not much to get from his ideas. Like he can't properly express what he means so it is better to look for simmilar ideas in history (which is also I belive his inspiration). Maybe it's because of the format (1 minute of Collier, just stating what do fourth and fifths do, then 5 minutes about everyone else, and 1 minute of Collier on the end). I'm not saying it really is like that, but the video made the impression.
Don't get me wrong, I really love Jacob, his music is so fresh and interesting. And even music theory iterviews with him are really great. I just feel like he isn't really great music theory educator by himself. He seems to have this framework that works for him, and it seems little shrouded in mystery, because it's so obvious to him, he doesn't really explain it properly in relationship to modern music theory.
Finally! Jacob Collier. I've been waiting for this for so long
Hi, thnx for your work! I dont understand why in 6:49 with the Quintscritt transformation you move a fourth from Ami to Dmi instead of the perfect fifth (duality)?
I think of this theory a bit differently. I don't know how to explain it so I'll leave bunch of notes:
3:2 (5th) major
4:3 (4th) minor
5:4 (maj3rd) major
6:5 (min3rd) minor
7:6 (7al
Why minor triad works:
Not in the harmonic series, but it doesn't sound bad because a to c, cto e , a to e independentely is not dissonant
When hearing a chord/mode what we do is quite similar to how we hear rhythm, we devide it into 2 parts, if there's 5th, it's majorish, if there's 4th then it's minorish. And you divied thefirst one into 2 parts again, when there's maj third, it's major, if not, minor
Minor 3rd is in the harmonic series though > 19th harmonic (19/16) is minor and near indistinguishable from an ET minor third - perhaps I am not getting something?
i return to this video every couple months to see what I understand this time 😂
woahh i had to watch it 3 times on half speed to even understand like 50% of it
Bruh same
+1 for the full version of the mass_energy equivalence.
And he's also helplessly cute. Gosh. Has nature anything left to give to the rest of us?
Ánd very creative ánd humble ánd enthousiastic. It's not fair! :P
Thanks for another entertaining and informative clip 12tone. I appreciate learning new concepts explained clearly and concisely.
I find it interesting to think about why reflections of sound waves create overtones but not actually undertones (overtones aren’t created downwards). Negative harmonies fit and can be implied. If I hear the 3 and the 7 of a chord I feel the tonic.
Is it really impossible to create a lower overtone (please excuse my rudimentary musical terminology, I’m just a beginner) using higher fundamentals?
The brain can fill them in: There's something called the Missing Fundamental Effect, where if you play an overtone series without the fundamental, you can wind up "hearing" it anyway because your brain knows it's supposed to be there. (We actually made a video on a related phenomenon a while back: ua-cam.com/video/KWJS_Fzs1j4/v-deo.html ) But overtones are real, physical things: If you measure the waveform, you'll see them. That doesn't happen with undertones.
Fascinating.
Does that mean the higher note you play the less harmonic tones it has?
If you pluck a high e string on a guitar, for example, are there no resonances created in lower frequencies?
When looking at recorded tracks there seems to be a plethora of sounds in the sound wave shapes even of one note.
Can an instrument create lower sounds than the fundamental through tone or is that my mind creating the tone sound too?
Curious Amanda k
6:39 thought that was Bernhard Riemann and my mind was about to explode.
I've actually been thinking of a plugin that completely mirrors the spectrum from low to high audible frequencies, I just really wonder how it would sound, does such a thing exist? (Or similar stuff, maybe just a synth that generates undertones rather than overtones etc.)
Fantastic!
Thanks 12 tone! Question: what is the Tonic Fundamental of a minor triad according to Oettigen’s Tonicity? You show how the Phonic Overtone is E in an A minor triad but I’m missing how that would imply that an A minor tirad’s root would be E. Wouldn’t the Tonic Fundamental be the thing to push our ear to that? Or am I missing something? Could you help me out?
I understand all of the words, but mostly have no idea what's going on. It's like listening to something produced by a Markov Chain.
But fascinating and entertaining as always!
Hey, have you listened to Allan Holdsworth? I think there's a lot of complex theory in his music.
By the way, great video. Thanks.
Good stuff! We should team up.
Yeah, I have to say I generally can't get behind the dualist line of thinking. Things like the undertone series and negative harmony are certainly interesting to think about and they *can* inspire you to create different types of music (as you say at the end of the video), but to say, for instance, that A minor is not really an A-root chord is just contrary to how people really hear things. People don't *hear* in negative harmony. Negative harmony can create interesting new chord structures but I don't really believe anyone is hearing it in a *positive* context. Pretty much what you say around 4:40 sums up what I'm saying here. This idea that 5ths are major and 4ths are minor is not really accurate, because I don't buy that major is "positive" and minor is "negative" (here I'm talking about in the harmonic sense, where positive = ascending and negative = descending or inverted, not in the qualitative sense). Hindemith, who I think probably understood harmony as well if not better than Jacob Collier, wrestled a bit with how best to deal with major and minor thirds, for example, in his book on the craft of music composition. In that book, he talks about the different intervals, how to determine an interval's root, and the combination tones that are created by each interval. The difficulty he had was in reconciling that, like you mention in this video, there is a fundamental difference in the acoustic effect of a major third and a minor third, namely that the major third re-inforces its root whereas the minor third does not. But Hindemith realized that you still have to reconcile this with our conditioning, which is to say that we do really hear the lower tone of the minor third as the root in spite of the fact that the acoustics of this don't make total sense. He essentially concludes that there isn't truly a minor and major third, so to speak.. that thirds occupy a spectrum (and if one wants to look to the harmonic series, this is definitely true, as a just-intonated scale will have several varieties of third, not two as there are in 12tet), and that what we call a major third is sort of at one end of that spectrum and the minor third is sort of a diminished version of that. To support this he observes that you can create other thirds that are somewhere in between the two and it will be difficult to really say at one point one becomes either major or minor in this cross-over region. Where I'm going with this is that I don't really think it's even particularly useful to classify intervals into minor and major. Ultimately every interval has its own identity and saying one is inherently positive / negative or ascending / descending doesn't really describe the sound of those intervals, which more often than not is highly context-dependent.
Hey mate you clearly know a lot about this shit, I'd like to recommend you break it up into paragraphs though
7:15 it seems as though the notion that 4ths are minor and 5ths are major may be true, but there isn't much practical application to this knowledge that wasn't already covered by our understanding of the perfect 5th as the dominant and the perfect 4th as the subdominant interval. you can think of minor intervals in general as subdominant to the dominant major intervals if you're basing their relation to the fundamental tonic on the overtone series.
This is surprisingly helpful for my philosophy exam
4:35 i know technically this doesn't happen, but i do think it's interesting how when i hit the strings on my bass guitar and compare what's supposed to be the same note to my regular guitars, the bass sounds like it's producing at least one single subharmonic at 0.5x the frequency. i don't think it's producing a 0.25x frequency subharmonic two octaves below, but the string is somehow producing at least a tiny amount of subharmonic tone, and i'm not sure how the physics of that work based on how the strings vibrate.
It's not about theory . Jacob said it's just his philosophy . Not the actual happening . For him, intention and feelings are the most important part, and talking too much about theory would maybe help by practicing certain things, but wouldn't replace the actual feeling. And we all know that he can create feelings
How do sub tones work on a stringed instrument? Does it have to do with the undertone series?
If you speak a little bit faster you might can become „flash“. Great video and content anyway and nice drawings. Thank you for that
I thought this vid would bring me closer to his level….it only increased the distance😭
Actually the undertone series can happen if you hold a tuning fork against the edge of a piece of paper and very the pressure. The idea is if you can get every other pulse of the wave to make a sound, that's the first undertone. Every third pulse creates the second undertone, and so on. Of course, you need special circumstances to make this happen and this series isn't present everywhere like the overtone series, but it can be done.
I’m confused at 6:49. Isn’t the duality of a minor chord the root of the minor chord? It was explained earlier that the unity would be the 5th of the minor chord so how is the duality chord of a minor d minor?
I honestly had to check if the playback speed was not at x1.5 on this one. ;-) Will have to rewatch at 0.75 or half speed or stop between ideas to let things sink in.
Oettingen’s interpretation is fascinating!
At a tuning of 423hz if you stack 4ths over sixth with each other subsequential sixth being flattened, then (bare with me) alternate from say, 3/4 to 2/7 starting with either time signature from between 100-140 BPM harmonise an elephant, donkey and a hippotamus in heat to the resonance of a scalding hot iron frying pan....
I think Jacobs perspective about the 4ths and fiths may came from the way the major triads and minor triads are percieved. Major triads are considered more consonant and pleasant for the ear. With that being said the fith since is a very strong and stable interval it kinda sounds consonant and "major". The fourth on the other hand feels almost dissonant since in western academic music and well... in almost every tonal piece the fourth usually resolves to the third (usually the major third in the classic resolution with the tonic in second inversion and the the dominant) and that led to the consideration of the fourth as almost a dissonance
subscribed.
I like music.
Music is something you hear, not necessarily something you analyse, but something to feel or connect with emotionally.
Writing music necessitates notation and music theory, but composing is about how it sounds.
Major/minor/modal or overtones/undertones; just detail. The Beatles started out with almost no musical knowledge, but frequently used modal motifs and produced an enormous range of musical "moods".
they're not just random details. you don't have to know the names of any of this stuff or how it works to employ the patterns, but your brain is recognizing the same patterns as other people and using them in essentially the same ways. until just a few centuries ago, the vast majority of people could use language with their voices but they couldn't read or write. the beatles may not have been able to read or write musically, but they were still speaking the same language.
The "progressive" clockwise circle is C - F - Bb - etc. The other way is simply backwards and confusing when trying to understand "progressions". Whether one moves up or down is irrelevant - as long as the progression is from C to F to Bb - etc. K?
Watching this on normal speed hurts my brain a bit, so I wonder if it's because I'm from non-English speaking country or a little slow...or both
I already had this idea that perfect fifth is major and perfect fourth is minor. I notice how in major key the first five notes is Root-T-T-S-T and the next five notes starting in the fifht is Fifth-T-T-S-T. Example: C-D-E-F-G = G-A-B-C-D. And in minor key this "symmetry" exist with the perfect fourth. C-D-Eb-F-G = F-G-Ab-Bb-C
Augusto Tetrachords my friend
Fun fact: Hungarian people do not have a word/term for harmonic dualism as far as I know. In primary school teachers teach the concept of harmonic monoism, but as a fact, not as a part of an arguament. I still remember my teacher's voice as she made the whole class repeating the sentence: major is king, minor is shadow. Sometimes major is the father, and minor is the mother, so kids can understand it better. Btw most of the musicians I know think in harmonic dualism, but they don't have a term for it either. ( If you are from Hungary and I am not right, please tell me, because I nearly went crazy while trying to find anything about this theory in hungarian. )
NICE
aha moment, thank you finally got a klimps of how dualismen, Rieman and Jakob are connected
Curious why you (and Collier) start the circle with C, instead of F which would create a Lydian mode diatonic scale, which by my reckoning is “more major” than the ionian mode. Disclaimer: I’m an amateur, it’s an honest question. Thanks for your informative videos!
Guys.. guys. Do you think the likes of John Williams and other fantastic musicians thought about nonsense like this? Do you think Thelonious Monk sat down and drew circles? Even in the study of 12 tone music, it never got this bizarre. Jacob Collier need not crawl up his own [expletive] with theories about perfect fourths and perfect fifths. Music theory has its place... in the back seat! So if people really want to be a better composers they should start taking all this crazy stuff with a grain of salt because it's confusing as hell and the cost benefit of taking the time to go over this is not worth it. I mean, there's a reason everyone recognizes Jacob Collier's talent but no one can really stand his music- and his has to do with his rigid systematic approach to an otherwise creative process.
Regardless I liked your explanation and I enjoyed listening to this :)