How I learned to speak with notes: Harmony
A personal recounting of relative pitch: Part 2
Imagine a strong, powerful voice speaking. The voice is rich in overtones, it carries over a great distance and it makes an impact. What’s the easiest way to diminish the power of the voice? — Have someone else talk simultaneously. You can’t pay attention to the first voice and its sonorous beauty fades from your perception. The main problem is that you can’t understand what the first voice is saying anymore. The crucial aspect isn’t the sound or the words — it’s the meaning you derive from them.
What if the second voice now began to say the same words as the first voice at the same time? Both voices would add up to create a bigger, chorus-like effect, with the added benefit of clarity of meaning. What if both voices began to sing the words set to one tune? And then what if each voice’s melody started to diverge from the other in ways that kept changing the resonance in beautiful ways? Maybe you could even change the words each voice was saying in such a way that the vowels at any point of time sounded pleasing together.
You could keep adding more and more voices to this collective sound. They could even be instruments. All you would need to guide you is your ears. You’d constantly be judging the overall sound and modifying it to suit your tastes. This is one way to look at harmony — a way to make multiple voices talk at the same time while being recognisable simultaneously. I think it was J.S. Bach who famously thought of music as a conversation. The voices can speak one after the other or even at the same time, while always being understood.
This is not how I thought of harmony. In fact, I can’t fully express how I used to think of harmony. All I can say is that I was dead wrong in my approach.
If you think of harmony as different melodies aligned over each other and interacting to create a resonant mix, you’d be talking about counterpoint, but if you think of harmony as blocks of time that are filled with simultaneously playing notes that together create a specific mood, it’d be easier to label it chord-based music. These are all just ways of thinking. The end result can be perceived in whichever way the listener chooses. It is helpful though, to be able to think in both these ways, and many of the other ways in which harmony can be perceived, to make listening a richer experience.
I’ve already talked about how I learned to recognise individual notes by developing relative pitch, which allowed me to understand pitches as well as the relationship between pitches (How I learned to speak with notes: Melody).
After my strange and successful experience associating pitches and animal calls, I spent the next few weeks focusing exclusively on melody. I tried to recognise the notes used in a melody in real-time as I listened to it. I started off testing myself with slow alaap sections in Hindustani classical to help me gain a foothold. Once I could comfortably name notes in alaaps with hardly any conscious thought, I moved on to faster pieces. I tried pop, rock, western classical, Hindustani banishes, Karnatik kritis, Bollywood — whatever I could listen to. Slowly and gradually my skill improved.
After about two months, I was able to apply this skill on the guitar as well. Naming notes is great but it needs to be an active skill to be of any use musically. I listened to small sections of songs and tried to play it on the guitar immediately. Two things improved as a result — my knowledge of the guitar fretboard and the speed of note identification. Both of these fed into each other and made my progress a lot faster.
For many years, I had wanted to play entire songs on the guitar just by listening to them. And I wanted to be able to play every part. Whether it was the voice, the keyboards, the backing guitars, the bass or the lead guitar, I wanted to be able to understand them the moment I heard the song and play them on the guitar without the usual hit-and-miss. I had now reached a level of skill where I was able to do this for the melodic parts. What stumped me was the chords. I could play the right chord in 3 or 4 tries but that just meant that I didn’t know it the moment I listened to it. I was still dependent on the guitar to let me try a few options.
This was absurd. The guitar is there for me to be able to create and give out music. Instead, I was using it to help me listen. I had my ears for that. Why did I need more?
I also realised that while I could play the bass parts as a melody easily enough I didn’t really understand why the parts were the way they were. In essence, I couldn’t relate the harmony to the melody. Many people might not be aware that both melody and harmony are present in a lot of the western-influenced music we hear. We tend to focus so much on the melody that we don’t realise that it would sound nothing like it does without the accompanying harmony. A lot of the time, when we listen to an unaccompanied melody, we unknowingly fill in harmonic contexts at each point all by ourselves!
A simple example to demonstrate this: If we play {Sa, Ga, Pa} simultaneously and then play {Pa, Ni, Re} simultaneously, we feel that there needs to be something to finish this small piece. Playing Sa or {Sa, Ga, Pa} gives us that conclusion. If nobody played the final Sa, we’d do it in our heads and think of that as a likely ending. This is because we intuitively understand harmony. When we listen to a friend singing a song, we can imagine the music around it as we’ve heard it because it’s easy to recollect the harmony. While we might not be able to recall specific notes, the feeling is clear enough in our minds.
When I was playing in a couple of bands in college, the way I used to compose harmonic parts was to play notes simultaneously and make sure they weren’t sounding bad. This is not entirely a bad approach. At least I was still using some parameter to judge what I was composing. At the same time, it would take hours and hours to decide chords and bass parts because I didn’t know which combination of notes created the emotion I wanted specifically. I had grown weary of this kind of trial-and-error approach and wanted something that gave me the ability to decide what kind of harmonic context I wanted to be in at any given time. I didn’t know how to do this at the time and benched the idea.
Back to the future, when I had figured out how to speak through melody, I felt I had a rough idea of how to finally understand harmony. I needed to apply my experiments with pitch learning to harmony. It seemed straightforward enough. To get an idea of pitch, I had started with interval training, and then followed it up with interval training in the context of Sa. I thought to do something similar to get a grip on harmony.
There were two aspects to harmony I wanted to learn: counterpoint and chords. I started with counterpoint. I had already done some of the legwork for this with interval training.
Counterpoint involves melodies playing in parallel. The rhythms and notes of each melody can vary dramatically. What I needed was a way to listen to the sound of 2 notes at the same time. Then I could increase the number as my skill improved. This would allow me to understand how melodies interact with each other.
I began in the most obvious way, playing every combination of 2 notes and trying to recognise the result. I had already done this in my interval training. Back then, I just needed to name the interval between the two notes. Now, I had the added task of naming the interval in the context of Sa. That meant that I needed to do 3 things: name the 1st note, name the 2nd note and name the interval between them. It combined the difficulty of everything I had learned so far. Recognising the 2 notes needed awareness of Sa and recognising the interval needed, well, awareness of the interval.
Around this time, I had gone to visit college with a couple of friends: a trip for nostalgia and reconnection. As luck would have it, the incredibly gifted jazz guitarist and instructor Sid Jacobs was conducting a guitar workshop in college at the time and I invariably wound up sitting right in the front row. My current struggles with harmony were the main thing on my mind, so when he opened the floor to questions, I was the first one to raise my hand.
I asked him, “There are 12 notes in an octave. If I want to learn harmony, do I have to know how each note sounds when played with another note? That’s a lot of combinations to learn. Is that the best way to go about it?” To this he gave me the best possible answer I can imagine, “There are only 12 notes. Just 12. All note combinations added up would amount to 78 combinations. If you go over all 78, you know all the contexts. Isn’t that great, that this is all you need to do?”
From looking at it as an infinite mess, Mr. Jacobs made me instantly see how little effort I needed to put in to get this right. If I can point to all countries on a world map (in my defence, I love reading), then I can definitely remember 78 sounds to understand harmony, and so can anyone else.
I went back to understanding 2-note combinations in the context of Sa. As I progressed through the combinations, I realised that I wouldn’t even need to go through all 78. I think Sid Jacobs foresaw this when he told me to follow this path. With some listening, I was able to understand that each note in the scale had a unique sound that determined the context. Once I understood this nested context, adding another note was just like a repetition of what I had done when understanding individual pitches. All in all, I just needed to start off with learning 12 contexts for harmony.
I should have known this already from my understanding of pitches but I never saw them as anything but individual, separate entities that could join to each other through time. What I now perceived was a totally different conception of notes. They could join to each other without needing the glue of time, and in this conglomerate, one note could determine the context of the whole. Or if you were to look at harmony as a building, each note determined the context for one floor in the building.
What I was now able to experience was a vortex that was spinning into itself like a fractal.
First there is the context of Sa, using which we identify other notes. Even when Sa isn’t actually played or heard, its presence is still heard via the music. That’s how we understand the other notes.
Then there is a note that determines the harmonic context of all other notes being played.
Then there is another note that specifies more exactly, the harmony being heard. You could consider this the final differentiator when 2 notes are being played.
We can continue this process to include more levels and more notes (to an extent).
An analogy might explain this better. Think of Sa as the concept of time. We’re constantly experiencing it. Whether or not we use calendars or clocks, time passes in our experience and we get older. We’ve invented the concept of time to relate to the experience of it. Now the 1st note, which determines the harmonic context is the hour hand of a clock. It is specific and is a base unit of how we’ve chosen to divide time. The next note can be likened to the minute hand. You could get even more detailed by saying how many minutes have passed in the hour. You can add a second hand and so on to get more detailed.
One aspect of this view of harmony that bothered me was that who decides which of the 2 notes is the one that determines the harmonic context? There lies the beauty of music and of perception. All this is just a way of thinking about sound. Music itself is our conception of sound. We determine what music is. 2 notes playing simultaneously produce the same waveform in an oscilloscope every time. It is my mind that determines the harmonic context; my ears hear the same 2 notes the same way each time they’re played — as a sound with a specific wave pattern.
I think this variability in perception is a factor in creating biases to certain styles of music. You might judge music in a certain way based on your perception but I might judge it by another set of subconscious parameters that exist in my mind. This has led to the establishment of music traditions and, arguably, music critics. This has led to expectation, fulfilment and disappointment. When Beethoven premiered his Great Fugue, he created something so contrary to expectation that almost nobody liked it. Over time, it has come to be seen as one of the grandest fugues ever composed. It is a classic today.
Harmonic context can work in the same way. If we’re used to a certain set of norms that musicians use when it comes to harmony, someone trying something new in the harmonic sphere can completely upset our expectations. It is only when we begin to see music in the way that this particular musician does can we appreciate it for what it is — a work of art.
I had started off with the aim of learning counterpoint but had invariably steered towards the chordal approach. So I sailed onward and found myself getting quite comfortable with the sound of any 2 notes in the context of Sa. It only took 3 or 4 weeks to get here so I was rather pleased with myself. I’m usually the one who ends up taking the most time with these things.
Meanwhile, I was still playing the guitar and continuing my melodic training. I think it was the song Demons by Imagine Dragons that gave me my first taste of how it feels to recognise chords instantly. I was listening to the song, without the guitar in my hands, and suddenly the I-V-VI-IV chord progression came to me like a waking dream. Don’t be worried by the terminology. Those roman numerals are ways to name chords in the context of a root note. I is the chord that uses Sa as the harmonic context, V uses Pa, VI uses Dha and IV uses Ma. I rushed to my guitar, figured out that Sa equated to E-flat in the song and played the four chords with the song. The rush I felt when I heard it fit perfectly with what was playing through my headphones is indescribable! I had done truly very little work to improve my harmonic skill but the results were already showing.
This added fire to to my efforts and I went on to add more notes to my harmonic practice. From 2, I went to 3 notes in the context of Sa. This connected the sounds with the four types of chords that people had been forcing on me for countless years: major, minor, augmented and diminished. These chords each sound a specific way. I think of them as happy, serious, scary and depressed. Maybe they’ll sound different to you. I finally understood the point of these chord sounds and how they fit into the bigger picture. Relief understates the emotion I felt, after years of playing these chords “just because.”
These chord qualities of major, minor, augmented and diminished are the equivalents of intervals, in that they sound a specific way independent of a root note. When I do add Sa though, I need to know the sound of each chord in relation to Sa, just like I did with intervals. Soon enough, I began to see patterns in the way chords were created. They weren’t just a meaningless bunch of positions and sounds to remember, but entities with specific voices that spoke with unique emotions.
If I used the notes of the scale to form a chord the traditional way, I would use a note, skip the next note, use the next note, skip the next and use the one after that. This would give me the minimum of 3 notes I needed to make a chord. Depending on which note of the scale I chose to be the one that determined the harmonic context, the quality of my chord would change. For example, {Ma, Dha, Sa} is a major chord but {Ga, Pa, Ni} is minor. And all this is true only because I’ve chosen my subset of scale notes to be Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni, Sa. If I replaced Ga with Komal-Ga then {Komal-Ga, Pa, Ni} would be an augmented chord.
I hope you’re not dizzy from that. The overarching point is that, depending on the choice of notes I use in my scale and the way I construct my chord, the sound changes, and that leaves us with many, many possibilities for chords. There is still so much variety that can be explored in the chord world. We don’t need to go learning every chord there is. What we need to do is get comfortable with being able to construct chords to convey a mood, a thought, an image or anything else that we want to share. I think of chord construction as architecture. You learn the basic principles so the building doesn’t collapse because of poor design, but each time you go out to make a new building, you do it in a way that is aesthetic and conforms to the emotion you have in mind, that you’d like to communicate through your creation.
Over time, you begin to be able to predict the sound of a chord because of your familiarity with multiple note-combinations. Thank you, Mr. Sid Jacobs.
All this addresses chords, but what about counterpoint? For that, we use the same skills I’ve talked about so far. You learn to recognise the sounds of note-combinations, familiarise yourself with the moods they create and when you compose melodies in parallel, you decide the harmonic context shifts you’d like to bring into the music, apart from the rhythmic possibilities of multiple melodies. Counterpoint is a lot more work because you need to keep the melodies intact and recognisable individually, in addition to manipulating the harmony. It’d take another series to get deep into the magic of counterpoint. For now, let’s leave it at this:
A chord is a world of possibilities,
And there are many worlds.
_/\_
Around Sound turns my personal experiences with music, both as a musician and as a listener, into stories.
Follow my 4-part series on rhythm (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) to read about my journey through the world of rhythm. As an added benefit, you can improve your sense of rhythm too :)
You might even find these interesting:
How I use music to remember phone numbers or A Recipe for Music
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