By: The Ballad - 7/17/2022
With the advancement in mobile technology over the last 20 years, the consumption of music during that time was also heavily changed. The introduction of iTunes and the switch from physical to digital made taking your music on the go much more mainstream; turning the listening experience private instead of communal. It allowed people to curate personalized playlists to include only their favorite music; starting the trend of listening to select songs instead of entire albums, and creating a musical landscape that has never been seen before. These lists have now become the norm; being created for all sorts of activities and occasions like holidays, seasons, times of the day, exercising, studying, and much more. Unique musical atmospheres now get associated with these different life situations, but why is that?
One of the most effective ways that music is used to set atmosphere is how it is used in movies. Most often in movie production, the score is written somewhat in tandem with filming; so when the composer is brought in, one of their main objectives is to try and get a vision for how the director wants to blend the music into each scene. Making sure the audio and the visuals are harmonious, like they are a single experience, is extremely important because if they clash, then the film can’t easily flow.
Take for example, two OSTs, one from the movie Sicario, and the other from Arrival. Both were written by the composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, but they’re vastly different genres. Sicario tells the story of an FBI agent and her exposure to the dark world of the drug trade in Mexico, while Arrival is about contact between humans and peaceful aliens, and the process of trying to communicate with them by deciphering their language. Because of the unique needs of the films, the OSTs have to be tailored to each one. Arrival’s is much slower, ethereal, and mysterious, featuring the use of very weird, otherworldly synth sounds to give the audience that impression of communicating with aliens. On the other hand, Sicario, while also being very intense and somewhat atmospheric, uses more traditional orchestral instruments like drums, strings, and horns. They create uncomfortable dissonances and a sense of building tension that is felt in many of the violent scenes throughout the movie.
But, say you take away all the visuals that get attached to these soundtracks. Your eyes may not see anything anymore, but the ability for music to continue to create images in your mind is definitely still there. For example, neither “Wherever I May Roam” by Metallica or “Seven Swans” by Al Petteway have music videos, but they both still gives off different and distinct feelings and mental images when you listen to them. But why is that? What specific musical aspects gives different songs and genres their unique atmospheres? To answer this question, we have to take a look back at history and a little bit of music theory.
Back during the time of Ancient Greece, the musicians and philosophers of this era realized that the use of different musical modes could influence people’s emotions. In case you don’t know what musical modes are, they are basically all the different scales that live inside musical keys. In a Western musical key there are seven notes, creating seven modes. If you take the key of C Major for example, the notes of this key, in ascending order, are: C, D, E, F, G, A, B. Each note in a key has an inherent “scale degree,” which is just a number, one through seven, that gets assigned based on what the order of the notes in the key are. Every mode has a directly related scale degree, so if you’re starting on the first scale degree and going up, the order of modes would be: Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian. If you stay within a specific key, all you have to do is change your starting note to change modes. The ancient Greek modes were slightly different, but the only thing you really have to remember is that all the modes use the same notes in a key, the only difference between them is which note they start on.
The famous Greek philosopher, Plato, wrote about these modes in his collection of writings, the Republic. His basic assertion was that certain modes could be used to affect people’s moods, and so only a few were suitable to be listened to. This was not, in fact, too far off. A study published in 2011 looking at the manipulation of Greek musical modes and how they affected perceived musical emotion found that, “small changes in the pitch structures of modes modulate the emotions associated with the pieces, confirming the cognitive foundation of emotional responses to music.” If you go play or listen to the modes by themselves, out of context of any song, it is actually very easy to hear the differences between many of them. For example, Phrygian, the mode that starts on the third scale degree, is a very dark sounding minor scale. It’s often used in metal music, but can also sound very exotic in context, which is why one of its nicknames is the “Gypsy mode.” However, if you go up just one note, to the fourth degree, you have the Lydian mode, which is a floaty and dreamlike major scale. The sharp-four in this mode takes away much of its “tonal gravity,” making the resolution of chord progressions much harder, giving it this perpetually unresolved feel.
So, modes can indeed be used to compose music that influences people’s feelings, but why exactly is that? If you are using the exact same notes for every mode, then why does just changing the starting point have such a big effect? Well, if you remove all the different factors of a song like tone, instrumentation, performer, etc., then it has to come down to the order of the intervals. The very first mode, Ionian, has an interval pattern of: W, W, H, W, W, W, H (W = whole step, H = half step). When you shift the starting point, you change this pattern, which can change the quality of the mode, and give it a totally new characteristic. The quality of the mode, i.e. whether or not it’s major or minor, is determined by the third scale degree; while the placement of all the other half and whole steps is more important in giving each mode their individual characteristics, such as Locrian’s extreme dissonance, or Mixolydian’s somewhat bittersweet, not totally major or minor feel. The more flat notes there are, the darker the mode typically sounds, so being particular in your choice for a song actually ends up being very important in determining the feel. But what else besides the modes evokes the certain atmospheres that we associate with different genres?
In this respect, the most important aspects seem to be: instrumentation, tone, tempo, and song structure. The giant variations between genres in these four categories seem to be what gives each one their defining qualities. There are of course smaller and more nuanced subtleties, but these four, plus the different use of modes, seem to be the most important. If you change one of them too much, you basically change the genre, which is how new subgenres get born. For instance, the instrumentation of a symphony performance is going to be vastly different from that of a metal band, but if you combine the two, you get symphonic metal. The tone of the metal band is going to be much heavier than that of a blues group, but metal is basically just the natural progression of blues. The song structure of the blues isn’t going to be anything like improvisational jazz, but jazz frequently makes use of the blues scale. Tempo is a little different because it is more similar to modes in that it is used to set the feeling of the individual song, and is not restricted by genre, but all of the other aspects are critical in giving individual genres their identity. All the genres are connected in some way; they just change over time as people push boundaries.
If we were to break all this down into a quick summary to answer our initial question: what is it about music that can evoke specific feelings and atmospheres? The answer would have to be: musical modes, instrumentation, tone, tempo, and song structure. The mode and tempo are the backbone of what gives a song a certain feel; with the instrumentation, tone, and song structure being more genre based characteristics. If you change one of them enough, you start to get new subgenres, which is why these three are so fundamental in creating unique atmospheres in music.
For musicians, being able to recognize these traits and use them to make their music stand out is extremely valuable. Being able to write music that perfectly fits a mood is so important to the final product, because whether it’s an album or an entire film, it makes it that much more memorable. Turning your art into an experience is one of the best tips to follow, because humans remember experiences more so than anything else in life. Things that give us extremely memorable experiences, whether good or bad, get seared into our memories because we weren’t able to anticipate them. And this is really the crux of why musical atmosphere is important. It’s because the atmosphere of the music is what gives people feelings. If you can give your audience a totally unique feeling, then you’ll be unforgettable.
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