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hey, welcome to 12tone! a couple weeks ago, I had a dream.
I know, dream stories are boring, but trust me, I'm going somewhere with this.
anyway, in that dream, I was back in college, in theory class, taking a quiz, and that quiz
involved a kind of analysis that I had never seen before.
or, rather, real-world Cory had never seen it before, but dream Cory knew exactly how
it worked, and once I woke up I started to wonder if maybe it could actually, like, be
something.
I'm not gonna lie, my initial instinct was no, but just to be sure I ran it by my friend
Ethan from the youtube channel Sideways, and after talking things through with him, it
started to look like maybe there was something to it after all.
I should note, before I get started, that I am making no claim to have invented this
system.
I don't remember seeing anything quite like it before, and I couldn't find anyone else
who'd done it, but dreams don't cite sources so that could just be because I couldn't find
the right search terms.
if this sounds familiar and you know where I can find some information on similar ideas,
please, let me know in the comments and maybe I'll make a follow-up video.
anyway, the first thing I want to do is just explain the system from my dream, exactly
as I remember it.
basically, it was a way of notating harmonic cadences, which, loosely speaking, are the
chords you play at the end of a phrase, and it was based on a diagram that looked like
this.
the empty box on the left was for some sort of symbols, uh, but I don't know what those
symbols were or what they meant.
my best guess is that they were supposed to show chord qualities, but I don't remember
how.
more important, though, is this box on the right.
each of these dots represents a chord: the one all the way on the left is the I chord,
then each dot to the right is the chord a fifth above the last one, so this is the V
chord, this is II minor, then VI minor, III minor, and… ok, I don't really know what
this last dot was for.
following the pattern, it's VII diminished, but it's really weird to view that as setting
up the III chord.
it could also be IV major, a pretty important chord that we seem to have forgotten, but
that breaks the symmetry, and again, it's weird to see it this far out.
I specifically remember there being six dots, but this one's a mystery, so I'm just gonna
put a question mark here.
as we'll see in a bit, it's not that important anyway.
so the technique for this was to look through the chord progression, identify the point
where we started following this descending-5ths pattern, then fill in all the dots for the
chords that we played along the way back to I. so if we got a full III-VI-II-V-I, we'd
fill in all 5 of our non-mystery dots, whereas II-V-I would just be the first three.
but, importantly, chords could also get skipped, so we could have VI-V-I, which would be this,
or even III-II-I, which is this.
now, the experienced theorists among you may have noticed a problem with this system for
notating cadences: there's a lot of cadences that it can't really notate. in fact, of the
four most common cadences, it can only accurately represent one: the authentic cadence, which
ends with the V going to I. all the others either put chords in the wrong order or use
chords we don't even have on our chart, because as it stands, this system is incredibly limited.
but we'll get back to that in a bit.
first I want to talk about the thing that initially excited me about the system: if
we take our filled-in dot pattern, it's basically binary.
binary is the number system computers use, where everything is either a 0 or a 1. more
specifically, each digit represents a number twice as big as the last one, just like how
in our normal, decimal system, each digit is ten times bigger.
this means that, if our cadence basically follows this pattern, we can plug it into
our system and get a numerical value for it, so II-V-I would be 111000, or 56 in decimal,
whereas going straight from III to I is 100010, or 34.
I had hoped that this could mean we could do, like, cadence arithmetic, adding two binary
representations together to get a resolution that was the sum of two other resolutions,
but sadly the results of that are basically gibberish.
still, though, this system allows us to quickly assign an effective strength score to the
resolution and because we're using powers of 2, that strength score is biased toward
the later chords in the progression, creating a sort of harmonic hierarchy where chords
closer to the final resolution are viewed as more important.
like, the full III-VI-II-V-I has a value of 62.
dropping the III off it and just playing VI-II-V-I reduces that score to 60, which is basically
the same, whereas dropping the V instead gives us III-VI-II-I, which feels a lot weaker and
has a correspondingly lower score of 46. and if we drop the I chord, going III-VI-II-V
and stopping, that puts us all the way down to 30, because losing the I chord means there
is no resolution.
with that in mind, let's take a step back and look at what this system is actually doing:
in effect, it's saying that everything we've played so far can be viewed as having an underlying
structure of III-VI-II-V-I, just with some of the chords implied instead of actually
included.
we're creating harmonic subsets, progressions that are like the larger version, but with
a couple parts hidden.
and this isn't unheard of: I recently did a video about the Andalusian Cadence, (bang)
and a really common variation of that is to just drop the bVII entirely.
(bang) it's still the Andalusian Cadence, at least kind of, it's just that we've hidden
one of the chords.
note, though, that it's the furthest chord in the progression from our return to the
I, which according to the hierarchy means it's the least important, helping to explain
why the result still feels pretty similar.
if we drop the bVI instead (bang) it'd sound less Andalusian, and dropping the V (bang)
works even less.
at least, according to this model.
so what if we just took the hidden-chord part of the system and abandoned the specific progression
it was using?
what if we used it to map progressions onto larger harmonic archetypes, chord progressions
that are so common to a culture that even playing only part of them still evokes that
same sound?
well, then we could solve our cadence problem from earlier.
for example, one thing our model couldn't handle before is the plagal cadence, where
instead of going from V to I, we go IV to I. this is generally considered a slightly
weaker resolution, and that's usually explained with references to chord functions and voice
leading, but what if they're not actually different progressions at all?
what if V-I and IV-I are just two harmonic subsets of the same archetype, IV-V-I, and
the reason the plagal cadence sounds weaker is that the chord it's hiding is closer to
the end?
actually, I don't think IV-V-I is enough.
I think, in order to really show what this system can do, we need to turn to one of the
most ubiquitous progressions in western music: the doo-wop changes.
(bang) if we ignore this I at the beginning, we see we can still make our authentic and
plagal cadences, and the newly-added VI chord is far enough away that hiding it doesn't
make much difference.
but if we repeat the progression twice, suddenly, we open a whole bunch of new doors.
let's start with the cadences: the main ones we're still missing are the half-cadence,
which is I to V, and the deceptive cadence, which is V to VImi, and we can see both of
those as part of this larger progression.
it also does a lot to show why you almost never end on the deceptive cadence: doing
that means hiding this IV, this V, and this I, which, according to our hierarchy model,
are the three most important chords in our progression.
the deceptive cadence wants to continue, because it's absurdly weak as a stopping point.
and let's go back to that double doo-wop thing one last time.
these first two chords are so far away that we can pretty freely hide them, this I chord
in the middle doesn't really cost us much either, and then we can weaken things a little
bit by hiding this second V chord to get a plagal cadence, and… check it out.
(bang) it's the infamous four-chord progression, used in basically every pop song ever.
it's often described as rearranging the chords of the doo-wop changes, but what if it's just
hiding some of them instead?
what if one statement of the four-chord progression is just two statements of the doo-wop changes
but with some of the chords implied? does that explain why it feels less resolved, allowing
it to create a more continuous sense of motion than the original progression?
I mean, maybe.
who knows?
I'm just making this up.
but this doesn't just have to use the doo-wop changes: that's just as limiting as our circle-of-fifths
version from before.
we can take any common, archetypal progression, plug it in, and then start making subsets.
the trick to applying this sort of analysis would be identifying which archetype to use
for any specific song: which chords are hidden, and what does that tell us? going back to
our original notation, maybe that's what the second box was for: you write the full progression
on the left, then use the right-hand side to show which chords from it are actually
played.
honestly, this whole thing kinda makes me think of Schenkerian analysis, which is a
topic that deserves its own video, but the really short summary is that it about breaking
music up into layers. you have the surface, which is what you actually hear, but you can
strip back layers of decoration, elaboration, and complexity to reveal much simpler underlying
structures.
all our new system is doing is the same thing but in reverse, finding the foundation by
adding details instead of subtracting them.
so is Archetype Analysis about to take the music theory world by storm?
I... doubt it.
I haven't even taken it outside the lab yet: I've never used it to actually analyze a song,
I've just been looking at abstract, contextless theory devices, so I have no idea which kinds
of music are best suited for this sort of approach, or even if any of them are.
I don't know that it tells us anything about music that we can't already learn with another
system.
the model needs a lot more thought and development before I'd argue that it actually reflects
much of anything about the music it's analyzing, and "This was once revealed to me in a dream"
is not generally considered a reasonable academic citation.
but I had fun thinking about it, and this is my channel so I get to pretend it's a real
thing if I want to.
besides, music theory has a long history of people just declaring that random models they
came up with are actually the secret to truly understanding music, so why can't I get in
on that too?
anyway, the reason I had to make a video about this is that you can't read my dreams, but
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