How do harmony and melody combine to make music?

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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tripandball
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How do harmony and melody combine to make music?

Post by tripandball » Wed Jul 07, 2010 2:59 am

Found a great article on how melody and harmony combine to make music!

http://djfrobot.blogspot.com/2010/07/ho ... ne-to.html

Peace!

FroBot

thefinger
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Re: How do harmony and melody combine to make music?

Post by thefinger » Wed Jul 07, 2010 6:58 am

so, yeah, basically through counterpoint :|

pepezabala
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Re: How do harmony and melody combine to make music?

Post by pepezabala » Wed Jul 07, 2010 7:32 am

thefinger wrote:so, yeah, basically through counterpoint :|
yes and no. I always thought counterpoint would be to combine two or more melodies in a way that creates harmonic sense.

most popular music harmoizes only one melody.

or are my ideas on this totally wrong?

thefinger
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Re: How do harmony and melody combine to make music?

Post by thefinger » Wed Jul 07, 2010 8:14 am

pepezabala wrote:
thefinger wrote:so, yeah, basically through counterpoint :|
yes and no. I always thought counterpoint would be to combine two or more melodies in a way that creates harmonic sense.

most popular music harmoizes only one melody.

or are my ideas on this totally wrong?
no no you are (in most cases) completely right. though, of course there are times when writing simple harmonization to a lead that counterpoint ideas/solutions/chords will help you get more interesting variations. and certainly most interesting music in modern times does this, even pop. for example, recontextualizing a lead with a different chord progression... basically the same lead with a dfferent harmonization can take on a new meaning.

counterpoint, essentially though, is just a method for structuring harmony at its most basic elements. Harmonizing a lead is another way. This guy seems to be explaining counterpoint through mathemtaical language with some of his own stuff thrown in. which is cool. because the really cool part is that all these methods can be mixed and matched, juxtaposed, whatever you want :mrgreen:

my previous comment should be regarded as tongue in cheek. please take it with a grain of salt. it was an interesting article. though i found it needlessly complex at times.

pepezabala
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Location: In Berlin, finally

Re: How do harmony and melody combine to make music?

Post by pepezabala » Wed Jul 07, 2010 9:22 am

what I really liked from the article was the idea to visualize chords on a clock scheme.

Can someone please build me a m4l device that does eaxactly this? Output midi on a note-clock-visualization?

Moody
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Re: How do harmony and melody combine to make music?

Post by Moody » Wed Jul 07, 2010 2:54 pm

Interesting article but, there seems to be some inaccuracies and/or assumptions.

“Music is a collection of simultaneously occurring melodies, parallel horizontal threads that are held together tightly by short-distance motion.”

I am curious how the author came to this definition for music?
Ableton’s engineers are hard
at work developing code that will allow our software to predict the future, but we don’t
anticipate having this available until at least the next major release.

evon
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Re: How do harmony and melody combine to make music?

Post by evon » Wed Jul 07, 2010 5:58 pm

Good post. I wish I could understand all of it, especially the last four or five paragraphs.
fe real!

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