Ableton Forum

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

so, yeah, basically through counterpoint

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?

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

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.

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?

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?

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