The Music Theory Iceberg Explained

This video is sponsored by Hook Theory. If you're not familiar with the

iceberg

meme, it's basically a fun way to categorize a topic by starting from the most well-known and conventional ideas at the top and then progressively delving into unusual and obscure ideas. The funniest thing about these Iceberg memes is seeing how weird it gets as you go down, so I thought I'd create a Music Theory Iceberg and today we're going to start at the surface, at the tip of the

iceberg

, and work our way down. below. murky rarity below, so starting from the top we have 440 Hertz.

This is what is called conceptual pitch, a standard universalized pitch that we tune to a mid-upper C2 to allow all instruments to be in tune with each other without having to coordinate which one. note to tune almost every piece of

music

you have ever heard, particularly popular

music

, will tune to 440 Hertz. We also have a few time signatures here, mainly four four, as I'm sure you know the vast majority of popular music is in the 4-4 time signature, but sometimes we have other time signatures and the two most common More there four four would be three four and six eight here we have equal temperament of 12 tones practically all The piece of music that you have ever heard will have an equal temperament of 12 tones without going too deep.

It's the way we define how each note should be in tune with each other. All we have to do to tune something to 12 equal pitches. The temperament is to tune all the octaves first and then divide those octaves into 12 equally spaced images. Here we have our three standard accidentals, sharp and natural flat. We have the pentatonic scale, perhaps the most fundamental and simplest scale, and all of them. In music we have our two most common clefs, the treble clef and the key of F major and minor, which are, of course, the two general types of tonality in Western music and power chords have also been introduced here, which They're chords that don't have a major or a minor because they don't have a third, they're just a root and a fifth at level two, so we haven't gotten beneath the surface yet, but this is the tip of the iceberg with music

theory

. in the background.

Up here we have the harmonic minor, so the harmonic minor is a variation of the typical minor scale in the natural minor scale where we make a modification, we raise the seventh note and this makes the scale more appropriate for writing harmony in the key smaller than we have. We have a few more chord types. Here chord types Beyond major and minor, we have inversions of augmented diminished seventh chords and suspended chords and, although these chord types are certainly less common than major and minor, they will still appear in a wide range of music. In all styles here we have the blues scale, which is exactly the same as the minor pentatonic scale, but with an additional note that we could call the Blue Note, the flatted fifth.

Now a pretty important concept at this level is the circle of fifths. The circle of fifths is a kind of universal tool that unites various concepts in Western music at the most basic level. It's a way to determine what sharps and flats are in each key or, in more advanced use, you can use the circle of fifths to conceptualize how different key changes may feel. The brighter or darker sequence is a very fundamental element of melody writing. It's basically when you take a phrase and then repeat it immediately, but now, in a higher or lower tone, did I try to swim against it and the The last thing we have in this tear are the cadences.

A cadence is basically a short chord progression. A short chord movement that resolves a passage. The two main types of cadence that you will hear used over and over again are the perfect cadence, also known as the perfect cadence. like the authentic Cadence which is five to one or the Plague Cadence which is sometimes referred to as the Cadence of men which is four to one foreign and now we enter the water and at the beginning we have this selection of measures odd like the The name would suggest that these time signatures are strange, they are unusual, but because of that they have a really intriguing quality.

A really unusual sound for the Western listener. Diatonic modes are what you'll consider just Lydian Doric mixolydian modes, all those common modes. What you hear about a mode is when you take the notes of a scale but then treat a different note as the root point as a starting point, for example G mixolydian is C major, but if you treat G as the root note, they are called diatonic modes. here, because they refer to the modes of the major scale, modal switching is obviously related to the modes, it is when in a piece of music you can switch between using different parallel modes, so that a part of the music could be in e mixolydian and another could be in e mixolydian. an e Dorian here we have some different accidental marks, we have double accidentals, this is a double flat and this is a double sharp, for example, a double flat would be the note G natural because we have flattened to twice and the note a double sharp would be grade B because we have sharpened twice.

There are several cases where you may need to use a double sharp or a double flat when writing something in sheet music. Below we have the entire tone scale. This is very easy. scale to remember because they are literally just whole tones, tones going up now we mention these odd time signature types or what we might call odd time signatures, but here we have mixed meter the mixed meter is when a piece of music switches between different time signatures by regularly mixing different time signatures together by For example, Good Morning, Good Morning by The Beatles, keeps changing time signatures, resulting in what you would call a mixed time signature.

Now before we had the harmonic minor here we have the melodic minor the melodic minor is another variation on the minor scale, this is the natural minor scale the harmonic minor scale raises the seventh degree and the melodic minor then raises the sixth degree as well effectively for Closing the gap that was created when we raised the upper 7th degree chord extensions is basically anytime you have an internal 9th, 11th, or 13th. chord and it could be a flat 9 or a sharp nine or it could even be a nine or an added 11 that kind of thing whenever you have a chord like that it's known as a higher chord extension and this fun symbol here is another type of key We already had the treble clef and the bass clef, this is what would generally be called an automatic clef and today it is only used for the viola, although normally when you see this symbol it will be an automatic clef, this symbol in its most La basic form is what we actually call the C clef, the symbol is a stylized C and it works on any line you put the C on, it's the C line, so in a standard auto clef we place it so that the middle line goes through the middle of the C, then the middle line is C, this is actually the case with all clefs, a treble clef is what is called a treble clef, so although we almost always place it on the second line like this, making this line the G line, we could put it on a different line that changes where the G note is and the same for the bass clef, this is the bass clef, the idea is any line that pass through these two points ES F foreign in basic terms, a Neapolitan chord is a major chord built on the flatted second degree of the scale, however, it comes with some context and a true neopunting chord will be expressed as well in the first inversion and is will resolve to the fifth chord of the key and in Roman numeral analysis we can even label the Neapolitan chord with its own unique symbol to capital N, the augmented sixth is a similar type of chord where you have to use it in a particular context in basic terms , is a dominant seventh chord built on the sixth degree of the minor scale, so for example in the key of A minor it would be an F7 chord, but the way we use an augmented sixth chord is that our F7 here you now need to move to the fifth chord of the key in this case E major and the leading voice needs to be done in a particular way, the F at the bottom. of the chord should resolve down to e and the E flat at the top of the F7 chord should resolve down to e and that's why it's called an augmented sixth chord because here we have E flat resolving to e actually label this as a D sharp because this doesn't Not only does it show the player that this note is a leading note that resolves to E, but it also avoids a slightly awkward freak accident and because we've labeled this E-flat note as D-sharp it's changed the chord interval to a dominant 7th. to a minor seventh to an augmented sixth from F to D sharp and the last thing to remember with the six augmented chords is that there are actually three different types of voicing for them, each named after a different nationality, another type .

The Hendrix chord this time from rock music instead of classical music is the Hendrix chord. The Hendrix chord is just another name for a sharp nine chord, a seven chord with a sharp nine added on top, so for example we could have E7 sharp 9. This is our Hendrix Chord, like As the name suggests, Hendrix was a big fan of this chord, for example, we can see it here in Purple Haze and what makes it so distinctive is that we simultaneously have the major third here, the G sharp, and we also have the minor third here. the G natural, although the most accurate way to note it would be with an F double sharp.

Now, of course, this chord got its name because Jimi Hendrix used it significantly, but we can also see it in other songs like here on Michelle Someday, a Piketty Third. is when a passage of music in a minor key resolves to the major chord, for example this passage of music is in the key of B minor but resolves to a B major chord giving it a grand and complete foreign ending, an altered cut is a Jazz idea where the dominant chord of the key, the fifth chord of the key, has its fifth flattened or sharpened and/or could have its ninth flattened or sharpened, I say and or because if a chord chart says G alt, for example , it doesn't specify a particular type of altered chord it just tells the player that they need to play a G dominant seven chord, but with any alteration made on the fifth or ninth, the alterations made on the dominant chord will add extra attention to the chord, which which means it will have a sweeter resolution. when it goes back to tonic chord polyrhythm is when we have more than one consistent pulse playing at the same time, so for example a very common polyrhythm is three against two, two consistent pulses at the same time as three consistent pulses, a substitution Tritone is an idea from jazz music where we replace a dominant chord with the dominant chord one tritone away, this is most commonly done with the fifth chord of the key, so for example in the key of C major we would be replacing our G7 chord with a D flat. seven chords and what it allows us to work with is that both the G7 and D flat 7 chords contain the same tritone, so they both have the same effective resolution up to the tonic chord.

Al Harmony is a harmony built from stacks of fourths, so that most of the harmony we deal with is what we would call tertiary harmony built from thirds, all of our common core types major minor seventh diminished ninth something like that is built by stacking thirds, but alternatively we could make chords by stacking different intervals as fourths , for example in Emerson Lake and Palmer tarkus, these arpeggiated chords played on the organ are constructed by stacking foreign fourths and, as you can see from the chord labels, because our chord labeling system is based on tertiary harmony, when we deal with quartal harmony, the names can get a little strange, you'll see a lot of sas4 for example, and the last thing we have at this level are minor scale modes, so before we mentioned diatonic modes, these are major scale modes where We have taken the major scale, but we have started at a different degree, which resulted in a new scale like the Dorian Mixolydian minor scale modes etc.

When we create modes from a minor scale, for example, we could take the melodic minor scale and al Starting on a different scale degree we generate a new alternative scale, for example, the fourth mode of the melodic minor scale is what we would call dominant lydian and this is the scale used in The Simpsons theme song. All musicians can benefit from being able to know how to play a song just by ear while listening to it. training Sometimes it can feel like learning a new language, it doesn't have to be so difficult hook Theory just released a really fun and effective ear training game called chord Crush chord Crush will play you a progression of records where only some of the chords you and you have to use your ears to identify the missing chords, even if you have never detected the chords by ear before Chord Crush starts you on the basicsabsolute and then the difficulty will increase as you progress for a limited time you can get 20 off. an annual premium subscription subscribe today at hook

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.com forward slash David Bennett right, we really are diving into the depths of this ocean Now metric modulation metric modulation is when we change from one measure to another, but the two are connected by consistent mathematics relationship, for example we could change from 6 8 to 4 4, we can make the two connect by making the eighth note worth the same amount in six eight as it is in four four, so that the two different meters marry in this way . consistent note value a polymeter is when we effectively have two different time signatures playing at the same time, what this means is that one part will effectively go out of time with the other until a full rotation has occurred when they resynchronize together, for example with the song 5 4 by gorillas it has a guitar riff in five four but a drum pattern in 4-4, so after the first measure the two fall out of sync until they have rotated enough to come back together oh , an octatonic scale.

Technically it is any scale with eight notes, but most commonly it refers to one of two symmetrical scales, one that goes in semitone tone semitone semitone tone semitone tone and the top part does the opposite tone semitone tone semitone tone semitone tone semitone this second dotted scale here going semitone is also known as a diminished scale and is what we hear at the beginning of the song only by Radiohead Overseas, double harmonic scales are two scales that are often referred to with a variety of different names. The double major harmonic scale, sometimes called simply the double harmonic scale, is like the major scale, but with a flattened second degree and a flattened sixth degree.

The double harmonic minor scale, sometimes called the Hungarian minor scale, is exactly the same as our usual harmonic minor scale, but with the fourth degree raised, the double harmonic minor scale is actually also the fourth mode of the double harmonic minor scale. A mu chord is just a particular name for what you might think of as a complement to the A major chord with the second degree added as well. The name moocord was popularized by the band Steely Dan, who were especially fond of this type of chord. Foreign polytonality is when we have more than one key playing at the same time, a composer well known for his use of polytonality is Charles Ives, for example, in this piece the top two voices of the choir are in the key of C major and the two lower voices are in the key of B-flat major uh Bebop Scouts are variations of typical scales in which an extra note has been added, for example, the Bebop dominant scale is like the Mixolydian scale, but also features the seventh degree unaltered, so we have the flat seventh and the natural seventh in the scale or you could have Bebop Dorian, which is like the normal Dorian but also includes the major third.

These are the type of scales that Bebop musicians like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane used. However, it is important to remember that the idea of ​​the Bebop scales was not theorized until years after the Bebop era; They were more of a retrospective way of analyzing how these musicians acted. Simply put, the Tristan chord is a half-diminished chord and gets its name from being the opening chord of Wagner's Opera Tristan. is major, so this is a chord that we could label as F minor seven flat 5, but that's missing the point of the Tristan chord. The importance of the Tristan chord is the fact that it opens an opera with tonal ambiguity, usually an opera would open with a very clear key statement, a clear statement of where we are tonally, but when Wagner opened his opera with this chord, that changed and many have argued that the use of this Tristan chord was the beginning of a tonality in Western music that guides me very well. to the last thing at this level which is a tonality a tonality is quite simple when a piece of music avoids having any sense of tonal center any sense of key a tonal piece of music effectively has no key this piece by Arnold Schoenberg largely avoids having any sense of key or resolution foreign to the bottom of this Iceberg, the penultimate one here and we start with swing proportions.

Swing as a rhythm is effectively when two eighth notes have unequal rhythms with each other, where one eighth note is longer than the other eighth note. note and a swing ratio is a way of describing how much that difference is, for example a one to one ratio would not be swing, it would be straight because both eighth notes are the same length, however a two to one Springfield would be a filler triplet. Because the first note is twice as long as the second three-to-one ratio, it would be a dotted eighth note swing like this, the first note is three times as long as the last three-to-two ratio, it would be a type of quintuplet swing like this or We could have a four to one ratio like this, which is also a type of quintuplet swing.

Of course, it is very important to remember that swing players do not think in terms of swing ratios when they play, they simply let it swing naturally and the ratio at which they swing may even change throughout the performance, but the Swing ratios can be very useful when you're trying to program swing into Daw harmonics, so pretty much every time you play a note, for example on a piano, you're not just listening to that note, if I play an A on the piano, we're hearing what's called the fundamental tone of A, but we're also hearing a series of harmonics above those quieter sympathetic notes that effectively color the pitch of the note and always follow exactly the same note.

The same pattern of intervals in what is called the harmonic series or harmonic series, the intervals start out as very fundamental intervals recognizable as octave perfect fifth perfect fourth major third minor third then as we move into the quieter harmonics and much more difficult to hear, they venture into intervals that we wouldn't find in our standard tuning system, such as a sub minor third, a super major second, etc., and the amazing thing is that, although technically these are all separate frequencies, separate images, our ear perceives them all as a cohesive note 24 tet, at first we talked about 12 tone equal temperament where our instruments are tuned by tuning the octave and then dividing the space between those octaves into 12 equally spaced tones. 24 tet is a 24 tone equal temperament tet is short for equal tone temperament, so 24 tet is a way of creating what we might call microtonal music by giving us an extra microtonal note between each standard tone on our piano, for example here there is a piece of music by Ivan Whitson Gretzky that is written in 24 foreign equal temperament tones and To the right of our 24 Tech, here we have some microtonal accidentals that we could use to notate our 24 tap music.

We have a half sharp, so we could have, for example, a half sharp, which is a note tuned between the notes A and B. flat we could have a half flat, so a half flat would be a note between a flat and a flat and we could even have something like this which is a sharp and a half a equals 415 Hertz, so right at the beginning we were looking at a equals 440 Hertz, which is what we call constant pitch. The standard pitch we tune above middle C to the standard of a 440 was introduced about 100 years ago and before that, a wide range of different tunings were historically used in different geographic areas. 415 is what we call baroque tuning and is almost exactly a semitone lower than modern concert pitch, but rock tuning is used when a performer wants to try to recreate the original sound of the composition closer to the original tuning in which it was played. would have been written, however, it is important.

Remember that 415 was not a historical standard, it was just one of many different tunings a baroque instrument may have been tuned to just intervals, if an interval is just it means it has been tuned to a perfect simple ratio, for example a perfect just tuned. the fifth would be the ratio of three to two if you tune an instrument only at intervals, it is what we call pure intonation or pure intonation and although theoretically it is the purest way of tuning intervals, it presents a big problem on any instrument with fixed tuning such as a keyboard. instrument, for example, you cannot have pure intervals between each key without compromising other intervals, for example, if we tune our keyboard here in pure intonation in the key A, then, for example, we have a and e as a pure perfect fifth from three to two, unfortunately that means that by doing that, some of the other perfect fifths in the key don't have relationships of three to two and are actually very dissonant, although three to two is the perfect and purest way to tune a fifth interval perfect for keyboard instruments and similar tunings On instruments, we have to have some way to adjust or tune this tuning system, as we discussed above, almost all modern music solves this problem by using a 12-tone equal temperament where, Instead of worrying about the particular proportions between each interval, we simply tune the octaves to perfect intervals. and then divide the space between them logarithmically into 12 equally spaced images and although of course this means that none of these intervals are now pure, apart from the octave, they are close enough that our ear doesn't care, but 12 tone equal temperament is.

It is not the only way to solve this problem, historically other temperament systems were used, for example, mid-tone temperament, mid-tone temperament, for example, is a system that was used historically to try to keep thirds fairly in tune and keep them did by slightly compromising the tuning of a fifth now, exactly how this was handled is a topic for another video, but the interesting thing is that in older temperament systems, like mid-tone temperament, because each instance of each interval was actually tuned subtly differently, it meant that different key centers actually had different characters in some key. The centers were more tuned than others, so unlike our modern 12-tone equal temperament system, where each key sounds exactly the same, different keys could have different qualities in D minor, which I always find is actually the most sad of all the keys.

I don't know why, but it makes people cry instantly. The player nested toplets, so a normal toplet, an example of a normal upper lip, would be a triplet, so a triplet is when we force three notes into the space where we would normally only have two notes, another type. The type of tablet we could have would be a quintuplet where you fit five notes in the space where before you only had two or only four, or you could have a septuplet where you fit seven notes in the workspace, so they are tablets normal, but nested. toplet is a tuplet inside a tablet and as you can imagine this starts to get pretty confusing quickly here we have a triplet nested inside a quintuplet and I've also placed these regular notes and this regular triplet here to give it a bit of context, Doing this can be very difficult and conceptualizing how the different toplets interact with the pulse can be quite mind-boggling.

Now we can take that hallucination to another level by having a doubly nested tablet, a tuplet within a tablet within a tablet, so, for example, here we have a septuplet within a quintuplet within a triplet. At this point, this beat is getting pretty absurd and precise. There is almost always an easier and more intuitive way to transcribe a rhythm like this, for example, instead of the septuplet. In a quintuplet triplet situation, we could have had virtually the same rhythm scored this way with just a normal nested foreign tablet and the last thing we have at this level are neutral intervals.

Before we were talking about microtonality and half flat and half sharp and that kind. Well a neutral interval is a microtonal interval, for example a neutral third is a third where the note is between a major third or a minor third, so for example in the key of C major a major third would be c and e natural, a minor third would be c and e flat, so a neutral third would be c and e half flat, so welcome to the deep end of our ocean of music theory and let's start with a concept that really blew me away when I first encountered it time and that is that the pitch is equal to the pitch of the rhythm and the rhythm are ultimately the same thing, so a note, a tone, for example, middle C, is just a frequency, right middle C is 261.63 hertz, which means that the sound waves are completing their vibration and completing their cycle 261.63 times a day. second or you could set the time to 60 and getfifteen thousand six hundred ninety-seven point eight vibrations per minute, which effectively means that middle C is just a pulse, a normal pulse played at a pitch of 15,697.8 BPM is the same as Tempo and we can In fact, I hear that if we slow down this note, slow down our middle C, eventually we get to a beat, it sounds like a kick drum, well we can do the same thing in reverse, this is a quarter note kick drum pulse at 160 BPM.

Now look. What happens if we gradually increase the tempo of this pulse? At some point, as we increase the tempo, our ears stop perceiving that beat as a rhythm and start perceiving it as a pitch because rhythm and pitch are the same thing. Surprisingly, this also applies to chords and Remember earlier when I mentioned that a tuned perfect fifth is the ratio of three to two? One sound wave vibrates three times in the same amount of time that the other sound wave vibrates twice, so it is a three-versus-two polyrhythm. If we take this rhythm, which is a three versus two polyrhythm, and we speed it up and, like I said, we can also turn it into a chord, we already have our fifth, so if we add a major third, which is the ratio of five to four a five against four polyrhythm what starts out as this rhythm becomes a major chord is equivalent to 432 Hertz, so we've already mentioned that it's equivalent to 440 Hertz, which is our standardized universal concert pitch and we've also mentioned that it's equivalent to 415 Hertz which is our standardized pitch from the Baroque Era, however, an equal to 432 Hertz is not some kind of standardized conceptual pitch, it's actually a pseudoscientific idea in music that if you tune your music to 432 Hertz it resonates better with no I know aliens or space or something.

I don't know if you're missing the point. This is the type of homeopathy of music. Adam Neely already has a great video debunking 432, so check it out if you're interested in the super ultra hyper Mega meta lydian scale. So this is effectively a Lydian scale, but when you reach the fifth degree, you start a new Lydian scale from that degree, so, for example, if we are in the key of C major, we would start doing C D E F sharp G, which is the beginning of C. lydian, but now that we have reached the fifth of G, we now continue with a scale of G lydian g-a-b C sharp D and now, once again, now that we are in the fifth of that scale, we continue with a new fighting scale based on the degree of the scale. of D and the idea is that this is a scale that continues to get brighter and brighter as it goes up.

The German scale illusion is when we play one melody in one ear and another melody in the other ear and we actually end up hearing a third composed melody, so it will work better if you have headphones on, but here is melody one that will play on our left ear and here is melody 2 which will be played in our right ear and as you are here when they are played together we hear a third melody now, this is very much a trick, an illusion and only really works because both melodies are played with the same timbre and the same instrument if one of the melodies was played on a violin, for example, and the other on a piano. wouldn't really work, what's happening is that even though these notes are split in our two ears and written here on two different staves, if we condense them into one staff, we can see that it's actually a harmonized melody that goes up and down and gets a fragment of the melody but, of course, we perceive the entire experience as a single piece of music.

The pitch of One Melody a Shepherd is another auditory illusion in which we seem to hear a pitch that increases indefinitely, which of course would be physically impossible because it would eventually go beyond the limitations. What we don't know how this works is that we are actually hearing several sine waves at the same time from the same note in different octaves as the shepherd tone ascends, the sine waves at the top, the ones with the highest octave They start to become inaudible, but as this happens they are replaced with new sine waves at the bottom, so that the higher sine waves become too loud for us to hear, our ear simply switches to hearing the sine wave and the octave below it.

Irrational 712 time signatures are an example of an irrational time signature with all time signatures, the top number tells us how many beats there will be in each measure and the bottom number tells us what time signature it will be, so 3- 4 tells us that there will be three quarter notes in each measure of the music, so how do we apply that with 712 there is no 12th note? So how can we have seven of them in one measure? Well, let's go back to three four for a minute, we consider it three quarters. notes, but what even a quarter note is, a quarter note is a quarter of a whole note, so what a time signature effectively tells us is to take a whole note, divide it into the fraction that we've given it in the time signature. , so in this snare quarters and then give us three of those quarters per measure of the music, the same logic applies with our irrational measure 712 take your whole note, divide it now into twelfths, eighth note triplets and then each measure of our music 712 will have seven of those seven eighth note triplets now you would never have a piece of music that was solely in irrational time because that would be an overly designed way of transcribing that music, there would always be an easier and more direct way to write that music where irrational attention has become useful when we mix them with other rational time signatures, so, for example, our music could be in three fours and then jump to a time signature of 712.

Foreign modulation, so a modulation is effectively a change of key where the music moves. moving from one key to another is a very common practice in all types of music, but a microtonal modulation is where we move to a key that is a microtonal interval from where we started, so, for example, a regular modulation could pass from G to a. While a micro tonal modulation might move from G to half-sharp, for example, in Jacob Collier's arrangement of In The Bleak Midwinter, he modulates from regular E major to the key of G half-sharp major, so we have modulated to a neutral third.

In this clip, I give Jacob shows how before modulation, the piano is in tune with the music, but after modulation, because we are now in a microtonal key, the piano is out of tune, yes, four magic chords and then the Pythagorean tuning, so we have We talked a lot about different temperaments, different ways we can tune our piano at the top. We had a 12-tone equal temperament, which is the temperament we use on all of our instruments today. Then we talked about the mid-tone temperament, which is a historical form. of tuning an instrument that allows us to preserve a properly tuned third, but before that people tuned their instruments with what is called Pythagorean tuning.

This is a tuning system that instead of preserving the third preserves the fifth of the key, meaning that all fifths are as well tuned as they can be now, just like all other temperament systems, Pythagorean tuning gives This results in some intervals that are less pleasing to the ear, but to give you an idea of ​​what these different temperament systems sound like, I'm going to play a major. chord followed by a major scale initially in equal temperament of 12 tones are the standard modern tuning system then in medium tone temperament which is what preserves the sound of the third and finally in Pythagorean tuning which preserves the sound of the fifth Foreign music is music that divides the octave into something other than just 12 degrees, for example you could divide the octave into more degrees, such as 19 or 21. or you could divide the octave by a number less than 12, for example 7 or 9 Now Zen harmonic music has a lot of overlap with microtonal music, but the main difference is that microtonal music assumes that you start with a 12-tone equal temperament as a starting point and then add additional notes between those notes, while the Zen harmonic music rules out the whole idea. of dividing the octave into 12 notes and then dividing it by some other number which could be as small or as large as you want Negative Harmony Negative harmony is the idea that each chord in the key can have a negative version of itself that has the same Level of tension and release in relation to the tonic chord of the key, for example, if we are in the key of C major and we had a perfect Cadence G7 resolving to C major, the negative version would be F minor six resolving to C major.

Both G7 to C and F minor 6 to C have the same tension level, the same leading voice level and therefore are effectively the same type of resolution, but they come from two different angles, two different approaches if we look at how All four G7 notes work. When resolving the notes of the RC major chord, we can see that they have to move exactly the same amount to reach their resolution as the notes of our F minor six chord do to reach C major, there is the same level of voice leading the only difference . is the direction of travel, the B in the G7 chord has to resolve upward, while the A flat in the F minor six chord has to resolve downward, so that's my Iceberg music theory.

Now I think what's great about the iceberg as a way to Explain a concept is to show how you have to start from the top before you can progress downwards. Concepts like negative harmony and irrational time signatures are certainly interesting and can liven up a musician's era, but if you haven't gone through the previous layers yet. You'll probably find it difficult to understand the concept, so similar to my music theory level list I made a few months ago, you could use this Iceberg as a way to inform yourself how you should learn music theory in what For you to learn Foreign Foreign Concepts