Melodic Loudness Primer
Navigating Parts 19-22 of the Melody series
Homecoming
We’ve managed to explore 3 key elements of melody — pitch, time and loudness — over 22 parts of the Decoding Melody series.
So, if you’re still here, I applaud your persistence and love of music.
Before moving on to the next leg of our journey — decoding melodies by ear — let’s stretch our legs and see what we’ve accomplished so far. Also, at the end of this post, you can quickly review the preceding 4 parts of the series, with the provided table-of-contents.
Underdog
Given the track record of this ballooning series, I’d say that we managed to cover loudness in a surprisingly concise way. I mean, just 4 parts! That’s got to be some kind of record.
Ironically, loudness usually doesn’t get the press it deserves. A lot of us (including me) focus on pitch and rhythm to the point where we forget about one of the most expressive, and yet neglected, elements of music.
Even when we do pay attention to loudness, it tends to be an afterthought, a perfunctory step after we’re done with all the popular bits.
One way to remedy this might be to introduce a relation-based vocabulary to name loudness levels, just like we do with pitch and time.
Naming: Useful or Bothersome?
When I started out learning music, I didn’t see the point of naming sounds. Faced with the difficulty of developing this skill, I took the easy way out by justifying naming as an interesting curiosity, and stopped trying altogether.
I thought: If I don’t have to communicate with anyone else, do I really need to name anything? I can just communicate directly by playing/singing the music itself.
This is somewhat valid.
What I didn’t see at the time was that there are other benefits to naming, which I was pushing under the rug only because I perceived the learning curve as being too steep.
A Common Language
By connecting names to our musical understanding, we’re compelled to recognise musical element values as if they’re people we’ve met before.
This act of recognition can happen even without names, but because you and I need to have a way of communicating our recognition to each other, we rely on a shared naming system.
When you and I use the same names, it allows us to learn and communicate subjective musical knowledge.
What’s in it for Me?
Fast forward about 20 years and I realised that there’s also a selfish benefit to naming:
Naming stuff tends to make said stuff noticeable.
Coincidentally, this is exactly what we’ve been leveraging this entire series, so that we can notice and remember aspects of sound that may otherwise pass us by.
Put another way:
Names represent recognition.
Naming isn’t really the difficult part. Recognising aspects of sound clearly and consistently is the real challenge.
If I can recognise something accurately, the hard part is already done.
Once I understood this, a whole world of music opened up within. Recognising sounds accurately helped me learn patterns deeply, reliably and quickly.
In the act of recognition, I didn’t even need to try to remember names. This helped me learn musical patterns in two ways:
as a tune, rhythm etc. directly, and
as a sequence of names.
This helpful redundancy reinforced learning, thereby making musical patterns much easier to remember.
And equally significantly, naming helped me comprehend music more accurately. It became easier to accurately perceive musical patterns in real-time.
Use it and Lose it
While I can appreciate that an over-reliance on names can occlude true musical understanding, this is a risk only at a much later stage in musical development.
Once you have crossed all rivers,
You and the raft can be two.
While crossing the river,
Please be one with the raft.
— Trianglehead Chronicles
You need not continue to burden yourself with the raft that helped you cross the river, but it would be unwise to have cast it away prematurely while it kept you afloat.
The same thing goes for a name. Use it, and when it has served its purpose — lose it.
A History of Regime Change
Since we’re almost ready to decode melodies by ear, let’s take some time to review all the major twists and turns that we’ve taken to arrive at the named representations for pitch, time and loudness that we currently possess.
In the palace of pitch, we took a relatively simple path:
we picked a reference Sa,
chose 6 other pitches based on this reference,
This gave us a Sa-octave referenced pitch system with many pitches.
In the realm of rhythm, there was some back and forth:
we picked a reference Sam,
chose 3 other beats based on this reference,
understood the relationship between Sam and tempo-beats,
renamed tempo-beats with numbers, and inner beats with names.
and finally, incorporated durations into the mix.
In this way, we arrived at a tempo-beat referenced rhythmic system with many beats.
In the legion of loudness, the path was full of turmoil:
we picked a reference Si,
chose 2 higher loudness levels,
created 3 arbitrary spans with these 3 levels within each of them,
picked one level in each of these spans as a reference, which we called Si-spans,
changed the symmetry of both spans and levels to be centrally referenced,
reduced all loudness possibilities into 3 ranges (Ve, Ya and Ha) and one silence level (Si).
This left us with a Ya-span referenced loudness system with just 3 loudness ranges.
What’s Next?
In the next part, we’ll combine pitch, time and loudness into one representation!
Melody: Parts 19-22 in Points
The following is a broad overview of the last 4 parts in this series concerning loudness.
You can use this as a kind-of table of contents or just as a way to remind yourself of what we’ve explored in the loudness domain.
Bookmark this post if you want a handy reference for later.
The Experience of Loudness
Ranking Loudness
Relative Loudness
Referential Relative Loudness
Silence
Range Dictionary
A Loudness Decoding Challenge
Symmetry
Another Spiral?
Something from Nothing
Is Silence a Good Reference?
Part 21: The Centre of Loudness
Generally Speaking
Central Melodic Loudness
A Change in Symmetry
The Process of Approximation
Approximating Loudness
Refining the Loudness Dictionary
Loudness Decoding Exercise
The Melody and its Loudness
What to Expect
Level I Exercises
Level II Exercises
Level III Exercises
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