12/5/2023 0 Comments Landr syncopatio.Just as the tension of the dominant function in blues is often expressed through alterations or extensions of a dominant 7th chord such as raised or lowered chord fifths or ninths, temporal dissonance in rock music is typically expressed by patterns that create tensions against the underlying backbeat. A pitch-based analogy is the consonant status of the dominant 7th chord in the context of the blues: it is the basic harmonic unit, which does not resolve. He backbeat is contextually consonant because it is a basic rhythmic unit that typically continues throughout the song, with no expectation of a resolution to a consonant pattern. The classic example of grouping dissonance is hemiola, which is ubiquitous in both Afro-Cuban drumming and jazz.īiamonte also has a useful term for devices like the backbeat, syncopations that are such a central part of the groove as to become completely expected.īecause it is an essential component of the meter, functioning as a timeline-a rhythmic ostinato around which the other parts are organized-I consider the backbeat in rock music to be an instance of displacement consonance rather than dissonance… There’s also grouping dissonance, where events are grouped together in unexpected ways that destabilizes your sense of the meter. Rock uses this technique in just about every song. Displacement dissonance is a shift of the beginning of a rhythmic phrase a slot earlier or later than expected. In it, she describes two different kinds of metric dissonance. Nicole Biamonte wrote a fascinating paper, Formal Functions of Metric Dissonance in Rock Music. Instead of dissonance vs consonance, we’d do better to think in terms of predictable vs surprising. In rhythm as well as in harmony, dissonance is a function of context and expectation, like food spiciness. Ellington and Monk are particularly good at this. In fact, once you’ve established your syncopated feel, you can create rhythmic dissonance by unexpectedly accenting strong beats instead. If you repeat a syncopated groove long enough, it starts sounding “consonant”–you come to expect those accented weak beats. Syncopation is an objective quality, but metric dissonance is subjective. Even greater metric ambiguity can be found when you subdivide by five, or higher primes still, but this is not common practice in Western music. The harmonic analogy would be polytonality. The effect isn’t so much rhythmic dissonance as it is a sense of multiple simultaneous meters. Dividing in thirds (or sixths or twelfths) gives you various flavors of three-against-two polyrhythm. You can get even greater metrical dissonance when you divide up the bar by bigger prime numbers. Current hip-hop and dubstep songs use thirty-seconds, and even sixty-fourths. In theory, you could keep subdividing to get even weaker beats. If you accent an odd-numbered sixteenth, your groove is going to be very syncopated. Finally, the sixteenths are the weakest beats shown here.When you accent the odd-numbered eighth notes, your rhythm starts getting interesting. You accent the backbeats in blues, country, rock, jazz, funk, reggae, R&B, hip-hop, and pretty much every other form of African-descended popular music. The ones at east and west on the circle are called the backbeats. These are the beats you count “one, two, three, four” on. It’s sometimes nicknamed “the invisible barline” because you can think of it as the downbeat of a half-sized sub-measure.
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