AUM162: Week 4

The topic for this week's lecture was melody, which is what Milestone 2 project was going to be about. We discussed major and minor scales, intervals and degrees, and the functions of melodies. Again, even though I was familiar with melodies, I still took away a few things that never really clicked to me.

With degrees, I actually never knew the term "degrees" but I know about them as I use them all the time to plan melodies and chords, so now I can finally put a name to it instead of just calling them "The Roman Numerals" (eg, I II III IV V VI etc).

It was also good to know that about some points about melody that I've never really thought about such as:

- All melodies should go up and down

- Most good melodies restrict their basic range to no more than an octave-and-a-half

- Can be comprised of stepwise motion

- Has climatic points

- Has a discernible relationship with the bass line

With intervals, we talked about chords as well in that topic and our lecturer talked about strong chord progressions and major scale order of stability, which is something I've never really thought about. The strongest chord progression is I & V which I use frequently and chords I V III VI II IV VII are the major scale order of stability which was interesting. Definitely need to do more study on it to see why it is, as well as the strong chord progression.

There were two websites that our lecturer recommended to us: hooktheory.com and tonedear.com. Hook Theory is where you can find popular songs and how their melodies have been mapped out, and you can map out your own melodies of songs as well, which I think would be very useful. Toned Ear is probably one of my favourite websites now as it gives you quizzes test your hearing of pitch. I've developed Absolute Pitch or "Perfect Pitch" over the years but I want to improve on being able to pick up really complex chords, mainly with jazz chords so this will definitely help, and they are nice and quick quizzes too. I've started with Ear Master and it's helped me with not only music theory but just getting familiar with chord names too.

For our activity, we had to find a song to transcribe through Hook Theory. I chose 6056 by Demon Days, which is in 3/4 and in the chord of D#/Eb major. I wanted to challenge myself and also figure out the chords, which was pretty easy after as they were only using 2 chords: AbMaj7 and Cmin7 (great chords and IV and VI are degrees I use a lot). I just transcribed the first verse and chorus. It was interesting to see what was going on melody-wise in the track.