![]() The findings are consistent with previous observations that suggest damage to the brain’s left hemisphere is more likely to affect speech abilities, while damage to the right is more likely to impair musical abilities. This revealed that the left half of their brains detected the timing information that allowed word recognition, while their right halves detected the frequency information required to identify melodies. Next, the experiments were repeated while the participants’ brains were scanned using functional MRI. When the researchers distorted the frequencies of the songs, the participants could still understand the words but could no longer identify the melodies. In contrast, our capacity to recognise melodies seems to depend more on their frequency patterns. When the team distorted time elements in the songs, the participants could still identify the melodies but could no longer understand the lyrics. Speech contains multiple syllables per second, making its time structure more important than that of melodies, which tend to be more fluid. I think it's probably true across genres that what really comes first (or at least, early on in the process) is a set of assumptions that come from the style that the artist is working in and the function a song will have.The researchers found that the ability to recognise lyrics is heavily reliant on a song’s timing patterns. ![]() ![]() These specifics can be very different in different styles (grunge will have very different norms to modern r'n'b), but within a style they often form strong guidelines. whether it has a dance rhythm, and if so, which one) and so on. One of the things that makes it possible for pop musicians to quickly flesh out an idea in different directions is that they will quite often be working in a well-understood form, where there are strong expectations about how a song will evolve, what kinds of chords will be used, how the lyrics will relate to the song structure, the function of the song (e.g. Sound on Sound "Classic Tracks" ( newer articles require subscription, but most can be read in full) It's always interesting to read more accounts to get a feel of how different creative processes can work: Journey's Don't Stop Believin' is an example of this, as recounted here. The main difference between melody and rhythm is that melody is a timely linear sequence of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity while rhythm is the way music is systematically divided into beats that are repeated a particular number of times within a bar at a collectively understood tempo. What may be more common is to almost simultaneously come up with a melodic fragment and accompanying riff or chords, and expand that structure into a whole song. I think it's relatively rare in pop music to come up with a complete melody and only then to harmonise it. This account of R.E.M.'s Losin my Religion. Another common type of story is for a player to be experimenting with an instrument and come up with an interesting sounding riff or progression over which lyrical ideas are generated - e.g. One extremely common story is for the a concept or a lyrical idea to give rise to a little fragment of sung melody, which then evolves into a song. ![]() From having heard/read hundreds of accounts of 'how I wrote this hit song' over the years, it's fairly clear that in the world of popular song, approaches that might be characterised as 'Harmony First' and 'Melody First' are both frequently used. ![]()
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