Negative Harmony Explained 

idk i kinda like it

@@masterboa6321 no

Have confidence in your voice and your content - it works well.

@@BellEndBrass 👍🏼

Maybe I was a bit harsh - I guess background music is a bit of a bug bear of mine.

Yep. Why do a music theory video and put extraneous noise in the background to detract from what you're showing?

It sounds like the phub intro

Like a hammer 😵‍💫🔨

LOL

😂

Yeah! Sounds like he left his phone in his jeans, when he put them in the wash!

I freaking choked lol

Fr tho

Underrated drum beat at the background

welcome to the internet :D

To me it’s a more of a fun discovery than an actual composition tool

I think it’s mostly used bot in complete compositions but rather in some descriptive music pieces. Like for example a person running and then starts to stumble and you accompany it with positive (running) and then negative (stumbling) progression. Somethin like that

@@MisterIncog how would the listener know

@@smiley122688 well, like, you know… music describes emotions… like, minors, majors, you know?

@@madanmohan2683 perhaps

@@madanmohan2683 it depends on what key the overall musical piece is in. if the piece of music is in the key of C, then C notes will be converted to G notes because the tonic chord is C Major and and the dominant chord is G Major, and the axis lies between the tonic and the dominant. if we're working with the key of D, the tonic is D and the dominant is A, and the axis is between D and A, so in this case, C notes will be converted to B, not G. Explanation of what key, tonic chord, and dominant chord are provided below, just in case. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If a piece of music is written in the key of C, that means it's based on the C major scale (an easy one for us to use, since it has no sharps or flats). The C major scale includes the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, and B (and then it starts over again with C). However, each of those notes also represents a chord that we can build with. So, rather than understanding the key of C as just a series of notes, it's better for us to understand it as the chords C major, D minor, E minor, F major, G major, A minor, and B diminished. Every key is like this, composed of chords within that scale. Just as C major holds the first position in the key of C, D major holds the first position in the key of D, and F major holds the first position in the key of F. So when we're talking about chord families (in this sense), we're talking about all the chords that hold the same position in their respective keys. This is important because in each key, the role of each position is basically the same. Three of them, however, define more of the composition than any others. The first (literally) chord we need to get to know is the tonic. The tonic is the root chord of the key. So, in a C major key, the tonic chord is C major. In every key, the tonic chord plays the crucial role of establishing the tonal center of the composition. Musical composition is all about creating tension and then resolving it, and resolution is achieved by coming back to the tonic chord. Therefore, tonic chords are used to start and end major motifs, movements, and even the entire composition. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ^copied from Study.com, "Chord Families: Tonic, Subdominant & Dominant" Whereas the tonic is the first chord in the series, the dominant is the fifth chord. In the key of C, the fifth chord is G Major. This chord is said to have dominant function, which means that it creates an instability that requires the tonic for resolution [Wikipedia - Dominant (Music)].

@@madanmohan2683 yes, technically - however inversion typically refers to chords rather than individual notes, so the C in a C Major chord would become G, but the the G in the original chord would become a C so their relationship remains the same. The E becomes an E flat, changing the C Major chord to a C minor chord.

@@jamaluddinkhalifa8371 I don't understand. the opposite of C should be B according to the circle in the key of D... Why is it E? they aren't opposites?

@@johnwest6690 You are right. I got it wrong. Thanks for pointing it out. I'll edit the correction into my post.

Bloody annoying, in fact.

I seriously agree

Take a listen to Contortionist by Their Dogs Were Astronauts if you think that was bad.

That's because he's telling it wrong. The dark side he mentions (and you like) is the normal way, moving in descendant fifths.

that’s all of music theory right there buddy :)

Lmfao

Maybe you just have ocd or whatever

Lmfao

Lmfao

Lmfao

Good for you, I couldn't even hear what he said.

I like it

There's a reason for that.

As someone who went through years and YEARS of music theory, I second the last person. There's a very VERY good reason for this. The person making this video doesn't even have a functional understanding of the circle of 4ths/5ths

The method you described of using the major and minor third is derivative of this same concept; the middle point between C and G in pitch is E half-flat, so E becomes Eb, F becomes D, etcetera - just like what was described in the video.

@@JXter_ yeah yeah makes sense

Yep. Agreed, I could not easily reason how anyone would ever think this is a great idea, to have such an annoying sound in the background - it’s interesting to see someone so fluent in music theory, while simultaneously rather poorly connected to how things might be felt in the ear of the listener. That’s a topic for another lesson!

Me too. It has an adverse effect on the video. I think he should drop it, really.

Ok, but look at what chord that would be: if your original chord was a Cdim7, the negative chord would have the notes Db E Bb G, which is a chord with many different names, depending on which one you consider the "root" - C#dim7, Edim7, Gdim7, or A#dim7... The video is correct: the negative version of a dim7 chord is another dim7 chord. It's just that the root is ambiguous.

The more I think about negative harmony the more I see it as a paint color than a new medium. I think the rationale behind the tonic/dominant split is that's the strongest resolution in western music. You could divide the circle any way you want, it would be identical to doing it this way but considering another tone as the tonic. It might be useful if analyzing a chord progression with no defined tonic. I suppose it's trivial to write code to transform a given melody or progression 11 times and compare the results. But as I said I don't see this as more than a new color in your pallette and not anything groundbreaking.

This is inversion of melody in the classical sense used by composers for centuries mentioned in the video. Instead of inverting the melody across the music center, which is how it is traditionally done, the example given would be to invert the melody along the mathematical center. While the inversion would have different pitches the relative distance between the notes in the classical inversion would be the same as the relative distance between the notes when inverting along any other axis point.

yes, thst's right. I was asking the same to myself 😄

Because I didn't know how to do background music properly when I made the video lol. I cringe every time I hear it.

@@PolychoronProductions Just don't do it. Educational videos should NOT have background music. It's hyper distracting and takes away from your very clear explanations.

"transposed by a tritone"

yeah, the chords going anti clockwise is describes as plagal halfs, they're perfects!