Where to Begin - Intervals - how to recognize and name both melodic and harmonic intervals

Hi, it's Chris with Implied Music. Where to begin, what fundamentals, what basic knowledge do I need to have in order to think about my music, in order to discuss my music and other people's music in a way that's meaningful and that can get us forward into something new and interesting. We've talked about a bunch of things already today. I want to talk about intervals, intervals, the distance between any two notes. When we discuss intervals, the distance between any two notes in music, we usually discuss them from a fixed point. And for the purposes of this discussion, we're going to talk about them in the system, which divides the octave into 12 equal bits. And that's the conventional thing, the layout that we see on the piano that divides the octave from, say, that C to that C into 12 equal bits. It's kind of an artificial thing, but it's what we've got. So the first thing that I want to talk about is the distance between these two notes here. Now, on the keyboard, you can see they are next to each other. But I'll tell you what, there is a note that lives in between those two. The major second has a partner, the minor second. The minor second is the smallest distance between two notes in our system. Is it possible to have smaller distances? Of course it is. You can bend notes up and down and singers do it all the time. But we're going to talk about the intervals that divide the octave in 12 equal bits. And in order to do that, the first thing we're going to talk about is the major scale. I just played it on all white keys from C to C. The C Ionian or major scale. We name intervals in relationship, and this is, again, purely arbitrary, but you just got to know this in relationship to that major scale. And I'll show you what I mean. The distance between these two notes is called a major second. This is the second from C to D second because it's two notes major because it's the two notes C to D from the major scale. This is a third. There's three notes involved. It's a major third. We're going to come back to this in a second, but when you go four notes, we call this a perfect fourth. When you go five notes, we call this a perfect fifth. Now there's two more notes in the scale. Here we go. That's a major sixth. Why? Because it's one, two, three, four, five, six up from the root. It's a major sixth. And finally, a major seventh. Despite the fact that this is kind of a weird sounding interval, it's the major seventh. Each of the intervals from the root of the major scale, from the tonic of the major scale, really, I should say, going up is a major or perfect interval. Let's review them one more time. Major second, major third, perfect fourth, perfect fifth, major sixth, major seventh, and then finally, an octave. An octave is eight notes, and those are both C's. It's barely an interval. It kind of sounds like the same note, doesn't it? Of course, there is also the I'm also singing the same note you're singing, where I'm singing a C, you're singing the same C. It's called a unison. Octaves and unisons, they fold into each other. Nice. So that only covers seven, you know, kind of like notes of the 12 possible ones. So let's talk about the alterations. That is to say, the minor intervals, minor intervals, as you probably guessed, are just a little tighter, a little narrower than major ones. This is a major second. To make it minor, I'm going to take the top note and bring it closer to the first note. Those two notes are right next to each other, and they're pretty spicy sounding. The spicy word is dissonant. We use the word dissonant to describe something that has that kind of friction. Continuing on with this idea, the major third has a minor third that's a partner with it, right? And you can see that what I've done is taken the top note and moved it down a half step or made the interval narrower. When I get to the fourth, if I make the interval narrower, I get a major third. And that's a peculiarity of the major scale, right? There's only a half step between the third and fourth degrees. So a perfect fourth when, you know, when you try to make it minor becomes a major third. And actually, this is a fairly kind of famous sound musically. Plagal cadence. That's interesting, right? Let's go on to the fifth. Here's a fifth. When I make this minor, I get a very special interval. It's called a tritone. It's not a minor fifth. We actually use the word diminished instead. And there's reasons for it, but we're not going to get into that until we talk about chords. Perfect fifth, diminished fifth. Yeah, so great sounding. There's our major sixth. There's our minor sixth. Makes sense, right? You notice that so far, all of these notes are falling down to black keys from C. There's our major seventh. There's our minor seventh. Paradoxically, the minor seventh, perhaps a little less dissonant than the major seventh. Every interval has a quality, dissonant or consonant. Consonant's a word I haven't said yet, but I want to talk about it because they're really important to how we experience intervals. All right. Here's a major second. When I play them one at a time, it just sounds like a melody. But when I play them together, I get a harmonic second. Harmonies are consonant or dissonant. This is dissonant. This is subjectively, perhaps, more dissonant. Cool. Some intervals are very consonant. For instance, this fourth and fifth are strongly consonant intervals, right? They really sort of... They're great sounding. In fact, the unison fourth, fifth and octave are called perfect consonances. They're perfect intervals. They're perfect consonances. There was a period of time in music history when kind of that's all that they thought of as consonances. But the truth is, these days we have other consonances that we use routinely. The imperfect consonances are thirds. Major third and minor thirds are considered consonant. They sound great. We like them. Sixths. Major sixth, minor sixth. Imperfect consonances sound pretty good to us. We don't mind them at all. In fact, they're an important part of how we arrange things. And then we got to the seventh, don't we? We're back to dissonances. Dissonances. Strongly dissonant, less strongly dissonant. Consonances. Perfect consonances. Imperfect consonances. Intervals. Major intervals. Minor intervals. Now, you can mathematically learn your intervals by half steps, and it's probably worth talking about it because different people learn different things different ways. For instance, the half step or minor second is, you know, just one half step and that's it. It's the minor second. Major second. Two half steps. You get where I'm going. Three half steps is a minor third. Four half steps is a major third. It's not a bad way to talk about intervals, right? If you don't care about major and minor and many composers don't work that way, it's fine to think about a perfect fourth as just just say it's five half steps or a five. A tritone. Six. A perfect fifth. Seven. Minor sixth. Eight. Major sixth is, of course, nine. Minor seventh. Ten. Eleven. And then twelve. There's a whole set of composers out there in the world who work on what's called interval theory that just respond to those half step measurements. So when I, you know, you can't talk about a perfect fifth with them. You have to say a seven. OK, it's really not a bad way to think about it. In fact, if we were really, really mathematically oriented, we would talk about the relationship between the frequency, the actual sort of like beats per second frequency of one note between the second note and talk about. Fractional relationships between the two. Two thirds. Thirteen. Seventeenth. Twenty four. Eleventh. You know what I'm saying? These are essentially intervallic relationships, and they're an important part of the harmonic series. And in a way, people who are very into this kind of thing find this functionally kind of like a better way to think about their music. For us, we just have to know how to name our intervals because it's super important to be able to recognize the distance between two notes. There's two ways to recognize intervals. One is notes together. The other is separately, melodically. Harmonic intervals sound one way. Melodic intervals can sound another way. Different people hear things differently. But it may be easy for you to hear the fact that this, for instance, is a strongly dissonant wide interval. And to be able to guess it's a major seven hearing this may be more difficult for you. Ear training is a really important part of our intervallic knowledge and just sort of like ability. And so it's not the sort of thing that happens quickly and overnight. And generally speaking, the best way to teach it is to have a fixed kind of dough, like a solid center note. And you work from there. Learn, probably learn harmonic intervals first. I actually think that I was taught melodic intervals first and it didn't serve me well. I'm much better at recognizing harmonic intervals than melodic intervals. It's just me. I don't know. Different people are different. Try to recognize intervals that go down as well. Intervals that go down are identified by the bottom note. Study your intervals descending as well. So far, I've shown only intervals that ascend. Right. But intervals also descend, especially in melodies. And recognizing those are crucial. Now, we name descending intervals from the bottom note. Does that make sense? This is a minor third, a descending minor third. Melodically, is it worth saying that inverting major intervals get to a minor interval? It's an interesting piece of mathematical data about intervals. All intervals may be inverted. A major second down becomes a minor seven. And we name that interval from the bottom note. The computer has accurately identified it as a D minor seven. This is a hard topic to discuss in just a short amount of time. Let me know what you think. I'm pretty sure that it's going to take a couple of views or at least a little while to integrate this information. I hope it's been useful. Like and subscribe. Ding the bell. You'll be notified when I do more videos. We're going to keep this series going. Where to begin? What's fundamental? I'll see you next time.