hey, welcome to 12tone! if you've ever taken a music theory class, it probably started
off with what amounts to a set of rules.
certain notes and chords have certain default behaviors, and good music lets them behave
the way they want. as you get to more advanced classes, you'll learn exceptions to those
rules, and more complex ways of applying them, and if your teacher is good they might even
stress that these are the rules for Western tonal music, not just all music ever made,
but ultimately the message is still that these rules probably lie at the heart of most of
the music you actually listen to and want to make.
but what if that's not true? what if it's just one of many possible rule sets, and more
importantly, what if you've actually known that your entire life?
(tick, tick, tick, tick, tock)
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how do we know which sets of musical rules you actually know?
well, that's what music cognition research is for, and to get a better sense of what
it can tell us, I want to look at a study by neuroscientist Dr. Dominique Vuvan and
music theorist Dr. Bryn Hughes where they examine one of the most important musical
rules in all of Western tonal music: cadences.
cadences are basically just the last couple chords in a phrase, serving to either wrap
things up or imply further motion.
there's a couple main types of cadences that you'd probably learn about in music theory
class, but the big dog is what's known as the authentic cadence, which is the resolution
from the V chord to the I chord.
now, if you haven't encountered this before, you may be thinking that calling it the authentic
cadence is kinda pretentious.
I mean, what does that say about all the other cadences? are they fake? and if you ask your
teacher, they'll probably explain that… don't worry about it.
I mean, sure, it makes it sound important, but that's because it is.
the authentic cadence is the strongest sense of resolution you can get from two chords,
and it, more than any other cadence, is the most satisfying way to close out a phrase.
to paraphrase renowned music expert Marshall Mathers, all the other cadences are just imitating.
that's the message you'll get from most music theory classes, anyway, but Drs. Vuvan and
Hughes were suspicious, for one simple reason: in a lot of styles of modern music, the authentic
cadence is nowhere to be found, and listeners don't seem to mind.
are we just willing to overlook their poor choice of cadence, or is there something deeper
going on?
I mean, music theorists, including myself, have been claiming for years now that modern
music operates with a different harmonic vocabulary than the more classical language we teach
as music theory, but is there a way to prove that?
they decided to find out.
the experimental design was pretty straightforward: first, they played what they call a prime,
which is basically just a short piece of music designed to get you thinking about a specific
style.
these primes were constructed using as many stylistic cues as possible, including rhythm,
melody, instrumentation, and a whole lot more.
if they wanted you to think classical music, they'd play this: (bang) which, yeah, pretty
classical.
they also needed a modern style to compare it to, and they settled on rock because it
has a long, instantly recognizable tradition that's both sonically and harmonically distinct
from classical.
they primed it like this: (bang) which is a little 60s for my taste, but if the goal
is to make me think rock music then it definitely gets the job done.
once they have you primed in a certain style, they hit you with a cadence and ask you how
well it fits. in order to keep your head in the right genre, the cadences are timbre-matched,
which is a fancy way of saying they use the same instruments: the classical cadences use
a piano (bang) while the rock ones have an electric guitar.
(bang) they're playing the same notes, but the tone is different.
now, a brief aside on something that didn't really come up in the paper: because the rock
guitar is distorted, it runs into a phenomenon called intermodulation, where the interactions
of the different notes in the chord wind up producing all these extra bonus frequencies
that muddy up the sound.
this is part of why heavily distorted styles often stick to power chords: using really
simple voicings with just a couple notes prevents the intermodulation from fundamentally changing
the quality of your chords.
but the cadences here use full chords: does that impact the results we're gonna discuss?
I mean, maybe: there's no easy way to tease it out, but the fact is most guitars in rock
are gonna use some level of distortion, so intermodulation is almost inevitable.
if rock does have a distinct harmonic vocabulary, that vocabulary is built around intermodulation,
so it seems reasonable to include it.
anyway, they could've tested all sorts of cadences, but for simplicity's sake they decided
to stick with two.
the first was, obviously, the authentic cadence. as for the second one, if you're familiar
with rock harmony, you might be expecting the plagal cadence, or IV-I resolution, and
that'd make sense: it's by far the most common resolution in rock music.
heck, there's a pretty popular four-chord loop that's just the plagal cadence over and
over again, but the authors decided not to use it here because, while it's clearly the
biggest cadence in rock, it's pretty popular in classical too.
it's even nicknamed the Amen Cadence for its frequent use at the end of hymns, so it wouldn't
feel out of place in either style.
if the goal is to establish a difference between the two, you need something that only shows
up in one of them.
for that, they settled on bVII to I. technically speaking, this doesn't even appear on the
list of cadences most of us learn, because that list is derived from what's called Common
Practice, a pretentious name for the vocabulary of classical music.
the idea that bVII could resolve to I comes mainly from jazz, where it's called the backdoor
resolution, but for the sake of consistency I'm gonna call it the backdoor cadence for
the rest of this video.
while it's no plagal cadence, the backdoor cadence does show up fairly often in rock,
and since it's basically unheard of in classical, it's a perfect way to differentiate between
the two.
from there, they just had to get a bunch of test subjects and see what happened.
they'd play the prime, then one of the two timbre-matched cadences, then ask them to
rate how well the cadence fit with the prime on a scale of 1 to 6.
they repeated this in all 12 keys, twice each, in a random order, then switched to the other
style.
then they smashed the data together and did some math to it.
what'd they find?
well, let's get the easy one out of the way first: with the classical prime, participants
strongly preferred the authentic cadence.
it was rated, on average, at 4.5 out of 6, while the backdoor cadence was down around
3. on the rock side, though, there was no significant difference at all.
both the authentic and backdoor cadences were rated slightly over 3.5, so if this result
is to be believed, the authentic cadence holds no special place in the vocabulary of rock.
it's just one of the many equally appropriate ways to approach the I chord. or, I say one
of many, but again, they only tested two chords.
personally, I'd love to see what the results would've looked like if they'd included the
plagal cadence as well, since it seems to be rock's go-to resolution.
might be interesting as a follow-up experiment or something.
but, of course, the "if this result is to be believed" bit is important.
every study has caveats, and I think it's worth looking at some of them here.
first, there's the obvious problem that the participants were recruited from college campuses,
many of them with formal musical training, so they may not be representative of the population
at large.
this is an issue with most psychological research, and I don't think it's especially relevant
here, but it's always worth being aware of.
a more specific issue, though, is the question they asked.
I think there's two main ways of framing this: the analytical frame, where you ask if the
cadence fits with the prime, and the experiential frame, where you ask if the cadence feels
good, resolved, or whatever, and just let the prime inform that answer.
they went with the former, but I've been talking as if it implies the latter.
is that a problem?
I decided to ask the authors, and they assured me that no, not really.
the analytical approach is standard for this sort of research, but some studies have used
the experiential frame instead, and the results are highly correlated.
that is, it seems like our sense of what fits and our sense of what feels good are linked
enough that we can pretty reasonably use one as a proxy for the other.
and the last issue I want to mention is with the primes themselves.
let's listen to the classical prime again: (bang) did you hear it? there, in the last
two bars.
(bang) it's an authentic cadence.
it's a bit less obvious than the block voicings they used for the actual test, but it's the
same harmonic motion.
meanwhile, the rock prime: (bang) ends in a plagal cadence instead.
I asked the authors about this too, and they explained that the use of a stylistically
appropriate cadence was one of the cues they used in order to establish the style.
if they want you thinking classical, they can't really use a backdoor cadence, can they?
that's not a classical sound.
but that's a bit circular.
isn't it possible that the preceding harmony, not the style, was what drove the results
in the first place?
I mean, if you just heard an authentic cadence and then I play you another one, it's gonna
sound like it fits, right? this can't be the whole picture 'cause it doesn't really explain
why the backdoor cadence scored higher in rock than classical, but still, it's a weird
thing to overlook.
fortunately, they didn't: Drs. Vuvan and Hughes are actually pretty good at what they do,
and they preempted me here with a second study.
basically, the first experiment used as many cues as possible in order to ensure that they
successfully evoked the style, but that makes it hard to tease out which ones actually mattered.
was it the sound of the instruments? the rhythms? the melodies? or maybe it was just the harmony
itself.
in order to test this, they decided to strip it down to just one single factor, one that's
obviously and intrinsically linked with genre: the timbre. in the second study, they used
a piano for classical and a distorted guitar for rock, but beyond that everything else
was the same.
they just played the I chord a couple times to establish the key, then played a cadence
to see how it felt.
here's the classical authentic cadence: (bang) and
all the others were basically just that but with different chords and instruments.
so what did they find?
well, there's good news and bad news.
the good news is the effect still exists: people liked the authentic cadence more on
the piano than the electric guitar, while their view on the backdoor cadence didn't
really change.
the bad news is the effect was weaker here: people still liked the authentic cadence more
in both styles.
there's a couple ways to interpret this result: maybe timbre alone isn't enough to evoke the
different genres, or maybe the rest of the effect was driven by the difference in cadences
used in the primes. or maybe both.
honestly, probably both.
that's the thing with cognition research: the human brain is complicated and variables
are hard to isolate, so it's almost always more than one thing.
the point, though, is that both results confirm that if you can just get someone to think
about rock music, the supremacy of the authentic cadence starts to collapse.
now, this may all seem obvious to you.
I mean, music theorists have been saying for a long time that rock has a different vocabulary,
so maybe it's not that surprising that research would confirm it, but I still think it's important.
if nothing else, defenders of classical ideals will often cite some pretty dodgy science
and math to prove that their music is objectively the best, so it's good to have some studies
of our own that show the deep cultural dependencies of even pretty basic musical ideas.
but more than that, I think this gives us some really fascinating insights into how
music affects our brains, and while I've long held that rock music has its own vocabulary
I'm not sure I would've predicted this result.
I'd probably have guessed that people's experience of cadences would change based on what styles
they preferred, so rock fans would care less about the authentic cadence than people who
listen to more classical music, but the idea that individuals are doing this sort of musical
codeswitching, literally changing their preferences when they listen to different styles, is amazing.
there's a lot more research to be done in this area, but I'm excited to see where it
goes.
but the evolution of music didn't stop with rock, either: we're constantly developing
new styles, along with new tools to make those styles work.
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