In music, sometimes things just have to happen. There is an instant in a song where our brains fill with dopamine at the anticipation of a moment to come. Bulging with expectation, our minds communicate signals to the body which leave us itching to reach our musical climax: the beat dropping, the voice peaking, the guitar thrashing. We know this is going to happen and it makes our experience that much sweeter when it does.
Our predictive response to music is not a superpower - we are not a clairvoyant species - it is based on musical patterns which react with systems in our own brains creating a satisfying relationship between tension and release: the tension is the anticipation and the release is the fulfilment of this. These patterns in music stimulate reactions from us based on their harmony, tempo and memory-triggering effects. The understanding of our response to music in this way is used by the music industry to sell records; music producers and big-time labels continue to churn out songs that tap into the psychological system that almost invariably produces emotive responses, even if the songs themselves seem a little tired and done.
A video recently began circulating the web which speaks of the phenomenon of ‘The Millennial Whoop’: a contemporary musical phrase that relies upon the repetitive, swift shifting of a sequence of notes from the fifth note in a scale to the third and back again (see: http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/what-is-the-millennial-whoop-songs). If you end up “oo-oh-oo-oh”ing after one second of hearing a Katie Perry song, don't blame yourself, it’s all calculated! The choice of this particular shift is far from random: this is a paradoxical musical epigram.
Epigrams are witty, intelligent systems usually associated with language. They are defined as “brief, interesting and memorable”. Their existence in music is based on the same basic concept and they work as a hook for the human mind to latch onto. ‘The Millennial Whoop’ acts in exactly this way in its short, repetitive and harmonically pleasing rise and fall. The rise and fall (the fall from the fifth to the third which rises to the fifth again) plays into the realm of the aforementioned dynamic of tension and release in that it is a paradoxical phrase. Musician and musicologist Jason Martineau describes the importance of the existence of parody within epigrams in their ability to trigger human reactions: “…the listener is temporarily separated from the stream of everyday life into the realm of unification.” ("The Elements of Music", Martineau 2008) This unification is highly satisfying.
Satisfaction grows exponentially with the prolonging of this system from an epigram to an epic. The cases in which the most intense experience of a pleasurable response to a song often occurs is during power ballads or climatic operatic pieces where a storyline unfolds and systematically grows to an emotionally and musically charged climax where instruments, vocals and lyrics all follow the same progressive pattern: bigger, wider, louder, more layered. They then follow this by returning to the familiar main melody, acting in the same way as ‘The Millennial Whoop’ but over a longer, deeper period of time. Where ‘The Millennial Whoop’ would be a short, spiky line, the musical epic would be a wave, bringing with it a tide of emotion. In this bigger, more intense context the musical works rely on what is called an appoggiatura (Italian for ‘object on which to lean’) which takes over the role of epigram and becomes landscape.
A recently published article (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203646004577213010291701378) about Adele’s hugely popular “Someone Like You” speaks about the use of appoggiatura as a means by which to introduce hyper-parody with invariably emotionally powerful results. The definition of an appoggiatura is: “a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound”. It is used rarely enough that the main pattern of the song is not completely dislodged but is temporarily interrupted, causing the audience to prick up their ears and beginning the process of anticipation of a return to the main melody: id est, tension and release. The release in this case is all the more satisfying considering the scale of the tension. “Chills often descend on listeners at these moments of resolution. When several appoggiaturas occur next to each other in a melody, it generates a cycle…This provokes an even stronger reaction, and that is when the tears start to flow.” (“Anatomy of a Tear Jerker”, Doucleff, 2012)
So it turns out that everything we thought about the music industry and its system of calculatedly selling music that the general public will have no choice but become hooked on is true! It is based on something which is inherently within music and within us: the response to pattern and the breaking of this pattern. We hold dear to us the inevitability of music and its return to itself as it gives us a temporary feeling of resolution, completion and sense in the same way that the wonderful symmetry of a crystalline structure, paired with its random sprouting of new branches bring us visual satisfaction. Perhaps jewellers are in on it too…