This was me when I started watching this channel, I have now advanced beyond the horizon and transcend all knowledge, having watched this channel since the beginning.
The Animal Crossing daily BGM is such a great example of stripping away elements from a piece until you're only left with the stuff that is truly effective! Never heard of a chordioid before... but I dig it. Sounds like a name for an Animal Crossing gyroid!
That's an interesting way of looking at music. "Stripping elements to only keep the most powerful"... kinda reminds of it's game-design counterpart "Design by subtraction", that was used in games like Ico or Shadow of the Colossus... That's inspiring !
_"Chord symbols are meant to be an abstract tool for analyzing music..."_ ...Yeah, I'm glad you said that. In my own composition, I've developed a _very_ bad habit - I keep trying to compose from chord symbols/progressions, and it honestly doesn't make for good music, by which I mean it doesn't really work for me and/or I'm misapplying it. My older - and better - works, started from a bass line, embellished with a melody, and then filled out pragmatically with harmony. Done properly, it just sort of 'fits' and works. I've gotten too formal for my own good. Music theory 101: They [Music theory rules] are more like _guidelines..._
Yes, it's better to have a base and to not get too specific because it limits your creativity. You have to find the right balance between structure and freedom
Schoenberg said to write your sketches with all voices at once without regard for meter or bar lines. Of course you can’t imagine 4-5 voices at once, Schoenberg claimed only a few might imagine more than 2 at the same time. But what he means is don’t write out 32 bars of melody and then write something around it. Write 4 notes of melody and then hear what the accompaniment does and write that down and move on. Another way is to not think in terms of chords but in terms of motifs and phrases. So lets say you have a bassline that jumps from A to E F and C. You can think of that as a motif that can be treated as a building block instead of it just being the roots of a chord progression. You can make a sequence out of it, A E F C ➡️ B F# G D ➡️ C# G# A E. You can invert the intervals, A D C# F# reverse them D F E A Augment the intervals A F Ab Eb reduce in a progression A E F C E F C F C C And when you have other motifs you can combine them and their variations giving you virtually unlimited creativity while keeping some internal consistency.
Yes! A few friends and I have been exploring the partimento tradition/pedagogy lately. Now realizing there's a fundamental paradigmatic difference between modern pedagogy/theory/analysis and how the composers the western canon admires actually made music. a side effect of the modern curriculum/pedagogy (with "functional harmony" near its foundation!) is that we tend to think notes come from chords (thinking too vertically) when in fact it seems the early player/improvisor/composers were thinking/playing/learning horizontal (voices, melodies) first... the vertical (chords) were a result of the horizontal (melody, good voice-leading), not vice versa!
Me: "I've taken several years of music lessons, play 3 instruments, and regularly make my own music." Me, after watching this video: "I am but a child in a world of musical gods and deities"
Me: "I've taken no music theory, I play 2 and a half instruments, I haven't even memorized notes and chords, and I've only changed music so I can play it on a guitar." Me after watching this video: "I've taken no music theory, I play 2 and a half instruments, I haven't even memorized notes and chords, and I've only changed music so I can play it on a guitar."
I am floored... I knew that I was severely limited in my understanding, but not appreciation of music, that this concept sounds so familiar but is completely beyond what I understand at all. Im a total novice, but the fact that this technical information is told with such passion and demonstration, speaks volumes to the crafting of this video. This is an instant subscription from me... this is all so fascinating...
@@syweb2 Yeah, Miles Davis. Although Herbie Hancock says that he probably misheard him and he more likely said "bottom notes" i.e. stay out of the bass player's way
this is because the theory of jazz-harmonics is actually fairly limited. it´s more a system to label groups of pitch-classes than an interpretation of their function in a given context. as an example: Why are major 7th chords "stable" tonics despite including a clearly dissonant intervall, the 7th? why is c-e-g-b-d usually a C79 and not a g-minor +11+14?
this does not go beyond jazz, this goes beyond standard chord symbol theory, which is how most people process straight ahead jazz harmony. listen to some modern jazz and i’m sure u will find chordiods
I felt Bill Wurtz vibes on "Let's talk about chordioid" but overall, that was a really neat and interesting concept and I hope you enjoy MAGfest West, 8-bit
Please make more videos about the music from Undertale. There's so much going on in that soundtrack that I don't understand, but I want to understand it, and you understand how music works so well, and you're very good at explaining things and making them both educational and fun.
I find using experimental methods within a conventional framework works the best when exploring these ideas. Like how Mahler played with tonality a lot but used to spice things up not necessarily designing a composition around atonality like Schoenberg would later do. It’s a huge reason why video game music is appealing because you can use experimental ideas within a conventional form. Great video as always though!
I’ve been writing a piece of music FILLED with chordioids, without knowing what they’re called or why I like them so much, then this video comes out. So serendipitous.
This was really fun to watch! I've been finally starting to learn music theory after all these years and it's crazy how endless the possibilities are. You really break things down into very understandable bite sized pieces - looking forward to more!
It would be fun if you take piano lessons, "so, this is C?" "Yes, you see, the whites are the notes of the C scale, and if you want to do a C major you can play the E, which is the third, and the G, as the fifth, but it's a bit complicated for now so..." "And what if I drop the third, diminish the second, add the sixth but only in the second time in the arpeggio, while playing a melody implying the E and the E flat, using the fifth as a gap, do you think it's a modulation by using chordioid ?" "Ah, euhm, no, but, euhm, Hey see, if I play those two notes it's the begining of Für Elise ! Ah ah, euhm..."
Never noticed it before, but that second chord in Snowy (starts around 4:15) really invokes Chrono Trigger in my mind (probably intentionally). It's a very similar progression to Secret of the Forest, but it also reminds me of the crunchy chords in the Epoch theme. And that ties in really nicely to your video on Non-Functional Harmony (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-5zGqN1ZOEJQ.html). In many cases, chordioids seem like another way to apply non-functional harmony, but with a different "color" to the sound. The Norfair example is really interesting, but I actually hear a different chord, rooted on the E-flat and D-flat, instead of the D and C. It definitely fits your definition of a chordioid, but to my ears, it sounds like E-flat sus4 maj7 (omit5), and then the corresponding whole step down. The harmonic function (or lack thereof) doesn't really change, but I thought it was interesting how my ears hear it differently. Basing those chords on the half-step at the bottom makes it especially tough for my ears to decipher, which adds to the unsettling mood (which is perfect for the atmosphere of the game). Cool video. I've always loved how VG composers use non-traditional chords exactly like these. Thanks!
The way I was taught about these type of chords is based on an interval found inside them. For example, the chord you mentioned in Metroid was a perfect fourth with a half step above the root. My professor organizes these chords first by the interval (perfect fourth) and then by placing a whole step or half step below or above each note. So Bb, C, F is a #1 chord as it has a whole step below the C. B, C, F is a #2 chord because it has a half step below the C. The numbers just keep going up until you have all 8 chords. The Metroid chord would be a #3 (half step above bottom note). There are a lot of interesting colors to get out of these chords, and they can also be based on other intervals, such as perfect 5ths, and major and minor thirds.
@@pabloansonmusic that was from pianist Armen Donelian. He has several books out on ear training, but as I just took class with him, I'm unsure what exactly each book covers.
@@benhuff1 Hey, thanks a lot. I didn't know about this pianist and he seems to be quite popular in the ear training circles. He even gave a seminar at my uni (MDW) :) Cool, thanks again!
The chordioid in 2:43 is a chord found in Ryukyu (Okinawa) traditional music. D should suit better than E. I will publish the harmony theory book about traditional Japanese music soon, so read it if you are interested....
Dude you're right. It's so fascinating to have discovered those scales this month, it changed my view on music entirely since it explains how I actually hear music. I've never identified myself with the western system. I too plan to launch something explaining japanese music theory in the future since I've come to understand a lot of it and I'll continue to explore it. Good luck on your book!
Thanks for this video! When I was first starting out, I did a lot of this kind of thing because it sounded good to me, but as I learned more theory I came to think of it as "bad" because they weren't tertian chords, and I've been trying to rediscover it because now a lot of my stuff sounds kinda bland and boring. I always called it "scalar composition" (using intervals from the scale as a whole) as opposed to "chordal composition" based around a tertian progression where the current chord informs most of the notes I choose. Now a smart youtube person has legitimized the thing I like to do!
Thank you for including the example sheet! It's been so much fun to play around with. I always come to your channel in search of compositional ideas and inspiration for new projects, and your upbeat attitude and clean clear way of explaining things (with rock solid analysis) makes it so easy to digest and I always leave full of new ideas. Thank you so much 8-bit MT!
This is the exact information I needed to make sense of chords and harmony. I've had this rigid way of thinking about it, where chords have their instrument, say, a piano for example, and chords go there, the bass and melody are separate and mostly do their own thing, while refering back to the chords occasionally. It never even occured to me that chords could be spilt across instruments. Realizing that chords don't need to be defined so rigidly in a piece and they can be 'embedded' into the composition cleared up a TON of my confusion regarding harmony. N I C E.
5:25 There actually _is_ a notation system that would work well here, though it wasn't designed with this function in mind. 12-Tone notation can be used to indicate either the notes in the scale above the tonic or (more usefully IMO) the lattice of intervals above the root. If we go by more conventional Serialist notiation and assume the tonal center is C: 0, 7, E/0,9,E/E,6,9/E,4,9 (E = 11; it's a hold-over from when they had to hand-write this stuff. If we use the method I prefer, and count the number of half-steps above the previous note: C-7-4/C-9-2/B-6-3/B-5-5 While their notation methods are extremely helpful, I'm pretty sure it was held back by the fact that the music it was used to write is deeply unpleasant to the average person's tastes. EDIT: Cleared out a buch of extra spacing.
I, too, prefer using *integer notation* and *set theory* for such chordioid sets, although I prefer it somewhat different from your system; I count all the half-steps from the root: e.g. C-7-11, C-9-11, B-6-9, B-4-9 and so on and so forth, also avoiding E for 11, since it could be easily confused with the letter name of the note Mi. Question: How do you write italics in RU-vid?
Not only am I so glad you talked about chordioids because I love quartal Harmony and sometimes I NEED to write music without the third, but I’m so glad you talked about Undertale and a brief hint at The Who. Townshend’s playing style is full of this stuff!
I’m a simple girl: I see the word “chordioid” and my brain immediately tells me it’s a portmanteau of chord and cardioid, both of which I happen to find intriguing
I've often found some of these videos interesting but, a little ... not hard to follow, but hard to understand how you get from the explanation to the utility, and there was one sentence in this one which suddenly explained to me why I was having trouble. The part where you say you tend to compose from a chord number-first sort of perspective is super interesting to me. It's obviously totally valid (everything is) but it's SO different to how I work. I can now understand why you would find it useful to think about things in terms of, say, chordioids to break out of roman numeral thinking. But the way I work is largely rooted in melodicism - most of what I do, even when building harmonies is to think of them as layering separate (but often interdependent) lines on top of one another, and from there the harmonies I want emerge - and later I can go back and analyse and think 'Okay, this is 2nd inversion I, this is a secondary dominant V/iii or whatever it happens to be. I haven't checked specifically but I'm *sure* that lots of chordioids slip into my work because I'm not really thinking about filling out harmonies as much as I'm thinking about 'where does this line need to go that would help the piece' Must stress my intention is not to be critical of your approach, at all, but I find it super fascinating how we land at the same technique via such different thought processes :)
This man trying to redefine how we write music 5:45 and that's why I love this channel. Super forward thinking yet straight forward for someone with little to no background in theory
I love your videos to bits and pieces, dude. I'm taking an AP music theory class currently and I like all these examples and how I can apply some of the things I'm familiar with and still learn something new with these videos. If there's one suggestion I could make is that you provide examples of what the chords sound like when talking about them in theory, like the way you added the third into 1pm for Animal crossing. It really helps people understand your music jargon and the wonderful points you make about the properties we love. Thank you for doing what you do!
As someone who makes music yet can't read a music sheet for the life of me, your videos are SUPER cool since you give more practical explanations of these, AND also open me up to learn stuff I otherwise wouldn't be able to really understand at all. Thanks for your cool videos. :D
When I make music it's literally just "hey i like how these notes sound lets do that". Especially when it comes to jazzy type stuff if you asked me what my chords were from a song I probably couldn't tell you. like if I looked over a recording of what I was playing i could be like "oh yeah it was that" but it'd take me thought to figure out what chord it was.
there's a chord voicing in jazz called a shell and it's a cluster of notes that doesn't really have a specific root, so what we do is we play modally which is basically knowing that there are only 2 half steps in a scale and it's always easy to fill in any gaps if it isn't obvious already. playing with ambiguous chordioid voicings and allowing the bass to decide the chord root is actually the art of modal jazz. if the pianist omits a 3rd or any other note in their voicings, we know the implication through modalism which classifies each chord as one of 3 chord types, subdominant, dominant, or tonic, allowing there to be multiple options for the bass motion rather than them being forced to read sheet music. it's a way to include the harmonic and rhythmic improvisation from everyone playing.
In school we called these "skeleton chords". We would derive them by normal chord construction means, but then apply the rule that it's finished not when there is nothing more that can be added, but when there is nothing more than can be taken away, and that harmonic ambiguity is perfectly acceptable as a means of sustaining tension without dissonance.
To address the confusion about the term "chordioid" (as in the video description): from a strictly etymologic point of view, the -oid suffix derives from ancient greek (-oeidēs), which combined with the root of the word would end up meaning "that which resembles a chord". Is it used correctly though? Eh, I guess it depends on whether you actually consider a chordioid a type of chord or not, so it's kind of subjective.
Being a Greek, I was at first intrigued by the name "Chordioid". I said to myself: "what can resemble a chord, but isn't a chord?" In the end, such chordioids are considered chords in my theory textbooks. In Greek, Chordioid could be translated as "συγχορδιοειδές".
My god this explains so much. I’ve heard so many chords in songs and when I try to replicate them sometimes it just sounds wrong. Thanks to this video I’m gonna be looking out for chordioids next time I try to copy a chord. Thank you my friend :)
One of my favorite things in music is to hear one sequence of notes repeated numerous times, as another series of notes revolves around it, molding it into different chords through context. (Very basic example: One Note Samba.) One of the techniques you described here sounds like an advanced version of that technique, using context to mold the harmony. I'm happy you called my attention to it. I may not be an advanced enough musician to analyze songs the way you do, but you can bet I'll be listening carefully for these things as I play through Undertale. :)
Huh. So chordioid is the word for the new agey chords I use in my piano compositions. Thanks for the video once again! You are such a wealth of knowledge :)
Question: How are you able to find all of these different video game music examples for all these different topics? I would be very interested to learn how you discover these unique music techniques “in the wild”
This clip demonstrates one of the most compelling arguments AGAINST common-practice harmonic analysis. One of the things that you discover in upper-division theory is that this underlying problem that the usual techniques don't work after a certain level of complexity. This is why, for example, the "Tristan chord" isn't considered to be possible to properly analyze under that set of methods...but in Schenkerian methods (too involved to explain in comments) actually IS capable of analysis. You just have to "retune" your understanding of what and why the "T" is where it is and how it tends toward AN harmonic resolution...but not THE harmonic resolution that traditional harmonic analysis would cough up. As for the nomenclature, we were taught to call chords missing a degree "open chords" due to the necessity of removing chordal degrees for harmonic clarity's sake. For a really good example of music where you're constantly dealing with various broken/unbroken variances over the course of a piece, I suggest NEU!'s "Für Immer", which is based around what all can be done over 11 minutes with an F9 chord. Sorta like Steve Reich meets the Surfaris!
This is such and awesome video thank you. Really shows the ingenuity of those old 8 bit songs on retro games and how you can envoke tones and atmosphere with limited resources
G.B. POOKY But it is? It’s barely ever mentioned and like you said most people would agree with me. I’m not saying it’s a horrible song, that’s a degrading opinion, I’m saying it’s one of the least popular, which is a statistical fact.
It's genuinely great to see such a specific concept such as Chordioids being brought up when it often isn't, it's true that there's the tendencies in harmony to add more and more on top of chords creating heavy handed chord progression, that could be much richer in sound if they dropped the pretense.
It's kinda funny; I was just making up some stuff involving chorioids before watching this. I was messing around with "flat 7 power chords" because they give a dark, gritty sound without being as "in your face" as a minor triad.
I'm really glad to see someone do a video on this. This has always interested me, especially the chords in Snowy, which have always intrigued me. I really like your channel, and I hope you keep making videos for a long time!
So, to make things terribly simplistic, a chordioid is a chord that omits the 3rd, 5th and/or 7th of chord? Seems fun, being someone with no music background at all, this all sounds more like my sometimes hobby of messing around with the piano app on my phone to make weird yet interesting sounds
Sounds like something that probably comes from the influence/past experience (depending on composer's age) of music for older systems where that was required (or just that for Metroid), due to a limited number of voices and a desire for interesting colors. I think these kind of voicings come up in jazz as well, specifically I'm thinking of Mark Turner's "The Lathe of Heaven" where he wanted extremely specific harmony under the limitations of bass, sax, and trumpet. The way he put it is that even though it's not traditional functional harmony, he wants the next note each voice plays to feel inevitable, and I think that's where these kind of "chordoids" can come from sometimes. Killer video! This will stay in my brain for sure!
And here I am watching a video at 11pm in a school week about something that I don't understand, I don't even know how to read notes. I guess this means your videos are so good that even people like me can enjoy it, keep it up!
Neat stuff. In my own experience working with these structures, I always considered them sort of half baked chords implying the "true" quality without stating it outright but now I'll have to explore that harmonic ambiguity. Thanks!
I love watching your videos because we seem to come from similar educational backgrounds and have had similar realizations about music with more analysis of music outside the jazz idiom. I remember learning a tune of my teacher’s called “Theme for Malcolm” which has a lot of triads shifting around at the end, like Eb/F, etc. But one was G# C# D# over A, which is kinda Lydian, but it’s really more like the chordiods you talke about in your video. I remember adding some notes to some of his compositions at the time and he would tell me that those extra notes weren’t part of the sound he had in mind, sometimes he just wanted a simple triad, like G/C, with no E in the chord. I didn’t quite get it at the time, but learning a lot of rock/pop and composing since I’ve graduated has given me a new appreciation for thinner textures like the ones you talk about here. Incidentally, my teacher loves using the 1 b2 4 voicing that you mentioned in the Metroid example a lot. He even does a similar thing of sliding it around in whole or half steps. I think it may be a Herbie thing? Anyway, thanks so much for your videos, it’s fun for me to watch ‘cause I feel we’re on similar wavelengths. Have a great day, and keep doing what you’re doing!
