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Negative Harmony


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Eric, it's nothing new, it is a traditional composing technique. I don't know about scripts or apps, I usually do it manually but I'm sure if you look there are probably some apps for it available somewhere. Chances are that it is something that you already employ; you just don't call it negative harmony.

 

To answer your first question

is a pretty good explanation of what's involved. Enjoy.

HTH,

Alan.

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Eric,

To answer your first question here is a pretty good explanation of what's involved. Enjoy.

HTH,

Alan.

I saw that video too. I was finishing up on scripts based on that video as well as the other video I posted.

 

Here's some more Negative Harmony stuff I've been working on.

This video shows an Apple Loop (MIDI) that I'm playing and applying the Negative Harmony scripts I'm working on.

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  • 2 weeks later...

"So, did J.S. Bach actually assign notes to the letters of his last name and then use these to 'sign his name' to his compositions in the days before copyright?"

 

One wonders, but it was certainly true that many early composers "were mathematicians." (Or, if not, that they certainly recognized the very-mathematical foundations of what they were doing.) Which is part of what makes these two very-different interpretations of "essentially the same idea" so interesting in their contrasts. Each of them focuses on entirely-different, yet fundamentally joined, harmonic principles:

 

  • The first presenter point out how some notes naturally want to "resolve" either up or down to their neighbors, and points out how a "negative" corollary exists on the other side of the Circle of Fifths. (The arrows here are bi-directional hence "two arrows.")
  • Meanwhile, the next presenter observes the "difference between one note and the next, in half-steps," and points out that you can instead go in the opposite direction ... and thereby arrives at exactly the same mathematical(!) conclusion.

 

So, believe it or not, both presenters are arriving at exactly the same mathematical conclusion, albeit in two apparently very-different ways. Even though the approaches are different, the outcome is actually the same. [Western] music is very much about intervals, and any interval can be inverted.

 

The purely-mathematical underpinnings of Western music have always interested me although I have never fully understood them. I do remember watching one video – URL long lost although I'd love to be reminded of it – where the presenter basically said: "I could wander into higher-order calculus(!) right now if I wanted to, :shock: but I won't, since I know this would scare you all off."

 

(Hell, "music theory class" pretty much scared me off anyway – until, many decades later, I began to appreciate what it was actually all about.)

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  • 4 months later...

Here's a link that offers a good explanation. Scroll down to Curtis Lindsay's thorough reply.

 

https://www.quora.com/What-is-negative-harmony-in-music

 

Even if you're not a theory-geek, "the circle of fifths" is still a good thing to have on your wall, especially when you're running short of ways to make your "three chords and the truth" sound better. The very-essence idea is that, if you're "coming up boring" with your escapades around the circle, there might be more interesting possibilities happening across it.

 

Lots of very interesting musical harmonic ideas seem to come from "briefly borrowing from" the harmonics of a somehow-related key that you don't actually send your song permanently into. "The mirror image" sometimes produces some very interesting harmonies, especially if you use them as a surprise. (Maybe one "unexpected chord.")

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  • 2 weeks later...

As I was looking at the videos explaining negative harmony (a concept which I've never bought into as a jazz musician or a music theorist), I immediately thought, this just sounds like 12-tone axial inversion. And then the guy drew his inversion graph, and I realized, oh, that's exactly what this is. Alan's comment should have been a clue to me, but he was brief enough that it didn't click at the time.

 

Not to bag on a personal discovery here, but the inversions going on through this process are things Western composers were doing around the turn of the 20th century, without the branding. In some senses, it can be analyzed through 12-tone theory or Neo-Riemmanian theory, because based on what I've seen and read thus far, it looks like the concept of negative harmony specifically rests on inverting across the m3/M3 axis of the given key. To that end, while the scripting is interesting, I'm not sure that "negative harmony" is an authentic label anymore once you pretend the MIDI region is in a different key than it is. (That Argentine Piano, for instance? That's just in C major, which happens to have the same pitches as E phrygian, which also happens to have the same pitches as the Maqam Kurd.)

 

So while this is all interesting stuff, I would humbly recommend studying up some on these topics within Western music theory, because many of the chords that have been arrived at mathematically through negative harmony also have justifications in Romantic era and 20th century composition that don't necessarily need the inversion axis (or better yet, can become even more adventurous once untethering from the axis). As for the further edits to the script, I'd be very curious to better understand what parameters it's applying.

 

Oh, and as for Bach: he didn't assign anything. In German music, B-flat is B, and B-natural is H. His name is literally spellable in German musical training.

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Alan's comment should have been a clue to me, but he was brief enough that it didn't click at the time.

 

Apologies for my brevity, though in fairness I was responding directly to Erik and I assumed he would respond to the video in exactly the same way that I did.

I came across the video when it first came out and I was intrigued. I had never heard of this 'negative harmony'. I watched the video and thought 'why do people have to give new names to established methodologies? Is it just click bait?' I felt that Erik's reaction would be the same (as was your's) so I didn't go into detail. I have read your post twice now and yes, I agree totally - well, except for the Bach thing, I had no opinion on that anyway.

 

Hopefully this thread has opened a door for some of forum members that they may not have otherwise come across.

 

Alan.

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I watched the video and thought 'why do people have to give new names to established methodologies? Is it just click bait?'

 

I'm not actively teaching anymore, but from the time that I was, I've always been interested in seeing the different ways that people connect with and internalize new (to them) techniques. I don't know if Collier himself coined the term or if it predates him, but I imagine that's how the term came to be.

 

An example: in high school, I wrote something with chords that blew me away. No idea why I liked it or what sounded good. Fast forward to Theory III in undergrad, and I learned that I was using modal interchange, which, as the years wore on, I heard identified by no less than three other names. Similarly, I've seen pre-cadential chords labeled in texts used in three different classes I took as i64, cad64, and V64 (that last one blew me away once I understood it). In both cases, it's the exact same thing, just labeled differently. A quirk of the field, perhaps?

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  • 3 weeks later...

I have a network on display that was constructed by calculating correlation coefficient between the nodes.

 

However I havent figured out how to display positive and negative egdes based on the correlation coefficients i.e. positive co-occurences and negative co-occurences.

 

Can anyone kindly show me how to do that? Havent come across this in the tutorials, but havent gone through all of them.

thank you,

nelly

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