Great talk: How to Solve a song
Here’s my favorite talk from last month’s Seattle Ignite 12 – How to Solve a Song, by Karen Cheng.
The video doesn’t do it justice – which happens sometimes (any theories? leave in the comments).
Not sure if it’s that the audience energy isn’t picked up well in her microphone, or what, but this was awesome to see live. If you get bored, jump to the medley around the 3 minute mark:
Brilliant.
Most of the people who know music/play instruments know this :) Most songs are made of the same three/four chords (mainly I, IV, V and sometimes VII). There are lots of videos about it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpB_40hYjXU
Totally awesome, I wish I’d been there to see it.
It would be good to know what slides (if any) she was using for the second half of the talk. Matching the slides to the music would have been an interesting challenge.
at 4:28 I started to smile, let it be all the same one and only song … very humorous!
I’m reminded of this talk, not only because it also has that “same chords in every hit” part:
How to write the perfect pop song
It’s more about creativity, methods and user experience. Well worth watching.
Hm. What’s interesting to me is what this says about how ideas move in society. As Pablo mentioned, it has long been noted that many songs share a similar chord structure. Here’s another example of the medley trick, from 2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM And from a music theory perspective, she is presenting a pretty over-simplified idea of consonance, more or less what you teach college freshmen who don’t know anything about music.
In short, this is old stuff. She’s nowhere near the frontier in creativity or knowledge. Yet her audience has presumably never encountered these ideas, and she’s doing a great job of catching people’s imaginations – you posted the video because you found it fascinating, and see Rich’s response too.
I guess what I find fascinating is how the difference between “old hat” and “brilliant” here is almost purely a function of the audience.