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Negative Harmony
YouTube just randomly introduced me to an intriguing concept called negative harmony.
In the language of music theory, according to a video explaining it, “we find the negative equivalent of a note or a chord by reflecting it about the harmonic axis in the circle of fifths”.
From a listener’s perspective, quoting a YouTube comment, “minor turned to major and vice versa, melodies that used to move up suddenly going down, yet somehow the harmonic tension is preserved and the whole thing still works perfectly”.
My take: you can choose any existing song and formulaically change it to one with a completely different tune and mood that is just as listenable as the original.
Obviously examples are called for. A YouTuber named Steve Cruickshank has recorded dozens of songs this way. Here’s a good one to illustrate the concept:
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29 Replies
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I’m not a fan of Negative Harmony and using it on existing songs. To me it ruins what the composer wanted the song to sound like. A musician can easily understand the concept just looking at the circle of 5ths. If I tried playing the inverse chords and melody of an existing song, it would take me a long time to learn it and it would be pointless anyway. I guess I’m just not that smart or talented of a musician. It’s hard enough to learn some songs as they were written. Any examples of inverse chords, or “Negative Harmony”, of existing songs that I have ever listened to sounded terrible compared to the way the songs were originally composed. I listened to the example of “Help” by The Beatles you provided and it hurt my ears because I am so used to the original composition. Negative Harmony used on existing songs is a novelty and I don’t think many people would actually like it. Just my opinion.
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I understand how you feel, Phil. I just think it’s cool that you can generate a whole new song mathematically from an old one. I wonder, if you changed the lyrics and the durations of the notes, how many people would even be able to deduce what the original song was.
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Wow David, that is an interesting concept. Sounds like something Bach would do, or have done in many of his abstract works. In fact I am pretty sure he has done it within a piece, inverting a melodic line creating negative harmony. Now “Help” I am sure would sound even more interesting if it went through a repeating cycle of negative harmony. Perhaps to Phil’s point, changing a well known song we are all used to into negative harmony, would yield a negative experience to most as it is not what our brain is used to. However, I think if it was done on a song that no one really knows, and you did two versions, applying negative harmony to one, the two versions would be in fact interesting.
Taking the concept of negative harmony a little further, to key change, apparently the Beatles “Now and Then” goes through key change of minor to major and then back to minor again. It takes you from a melancholic mood to a positive upbeat mood, and then back to melancholic again. In the same vein, if you took “Now and Then” and took it from a major to minor and back to major key, it would have a more uplifting mood, going from a happy mood to melancholic, and back to happy again.
Chopin’s Funeral March is a great example, where the music starts off in a very sombre minor dissonant key, and about a 3rd way into it, it shifts to a major key, and then back to minor towards the end. To me it is the experience of the sadness of a funeral, where it is very sad and painful, and then you begin remembering the good times and love and there is a shift to major, and your mood changes to feelings of joy and happiness, but then towards the end, it shifts back minor, bringing you back to reality and the loss that is inescapable. Music and art expresses the human experience, so the consonance and dissonance in music, and shifting between the two is so very important in expressing the human experience.
I hope I didn’t go off on a tangent too much, but the discussion of negative harmony, made me think of how amazing music is in creating different moods and emotions.
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Thanks, Jung. Yeah, I’m endlessly amazed by the fact that a collection of musical notes can elicit an emotional response: happy chords and sad chords, etc. So it really blows my mind that you can “calculate” a new mood for a song this way.
I just listened to a negative harmony version of the menacing “imperial march” from Star Wars. Several commenters said that it sounded like circus music!
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Hi David
I had never heard or thought of this concept before, I went on YouTube and listened to a few songs. I can say when recording covers of songs we all know and love, I am not a fan at all, some songs in my opinion are unrecognizable. I don’t know, maybe there is a cove song out there that would sound great. It is a neat concept, just not for me,
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Hey, Mike.
I really don’t even think of them as covers, but rather as alternate universe realizations. Sort of like the audio equivalent of photonegatives.
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I guess if I get the cover song thought out of my head and look at it that way, you are correct!
I will have to explore this further. Its still a neat concept!!!
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Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop Dave? Stop, Dave.
[sings while slowing down] Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you. It won’t be a stylish marriage, I can’t afford a carriage. But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.
(love HAL quotes)
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I won’t stop until you open the pod bay doors, Hal.
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I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do
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Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like somebody superimposed over The Beatles track with Simon & Garfunkle. But it works.
Funny thing about music, it can be overlaid with major blended with minor scales and as long as you don’t throw the minor notes in the wrong place, it does work. Keep the root notes where they belong and it all falls into place. Not always seamlessly, but even a note that would otherwise be totally out of place can add depth and different feelings to a piece or movement. Blues does it all the time. Minor pentatonic scales can be played over the major chord structure/base of a song in a guitar solo and it works just fine. As long as you don’t stray too far from the root or in absolutely the wrong spot, like at the end of a movement where it turns sweet milk into sour cream. 😉-
I agree that it has a S&G feel, Daryl. The same guy also posted a negative harmony version of Sound of Silence, but it still sounds like a S&G song and not a Beatles song!
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Hi David,
thanks an interesting approach that I didn’t know. The whole thing sounds like dark matter to me. Music that has exactly the opposite polarity and when the two pieces of music collide in my head they neutralize each other. Cognitive dissonance. I personally don’t like that. I listened to “Here comes the sun.” For me a positive song that sounds happy and cheerful. The negative counterpart sounds exactly like what it implies: melancholic and ghostly. Where is George Harrison’s idea? As Jung suggested: composing new pieces of music in this way is an interesting idea. That sounds kinda cool, but it’s a shame to manipulate music that’s already been produced. The artists themselves should do this, not a stranger who doesn’t care about the idea behind the music. But in art there is actually no good and no bad: You have to like it.
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I wouldn’t even call this art, Juergen. It’s just painting by the numbers: completely deterministic and without creativity. It would sound the same no matter who did it.
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Pardon my Pun here , but being a Positivity-fied Person and Positivity-fied Personality mindset, this Negativity Harmony, concept, sorry to say but that does not interest me, don’t care for Negativity in any way , not my cup of tea, Yes, there are bad cover attempts out there, that , in my opinion, kills the goodness out of the Positivity-fied original, that ruins it for me, as I’d rather /prefer/respect/appreciate covers, that equal and/or surpass the original to an even better outcome, Team MLT excels proficiency at that undertaking, they’ve proven it… right voices, arrangements, instrumentation , for/to me that all intertwines cohesively, complimentary, makes all the differences while the Negativity Harmony concept , does the opposite for/to me, kills and destroys what was good, just makes it worse, even more disheartening, when bad musicians with bad singing, no sense of musicianship, etc. , just all don’t jive poetically, it doesn’t sit well in my perspective, sorry to say …
~ This is my own personal reflectionary-opion of 2 cents worth thinking, of thought to which one may respectfully/diplomatically agree/disagree with ~ ☮🤘
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This reply was modified 3 months, 4 weeks ago by Jacki Hopper.
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Hi, Jacki, and a belated happy birthday!
I’m not arguing that anyone would want to listen to these song versions for enjoyment. I just think it’s fascinating that they can be generated in the first place in a manner that guarantees they won’t be discordant.
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This reply was modified 3 months, 4 weeks ago by
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Just one more way that people with little to no creativity can bastardize someone else’s work and call it their own “creative” expression. I have my own expression for that. lol. Fortunately, I’m sure it’s a passing gimmick.
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I don’t know that anyone is calling it creative, Roger. It’s clear from the definition that it’s fundamentally a mathematical manipulation. Maybe I’m in the minority here, but I see negative harmony as a tool for appreciating harmonic structure and chord progressions by standing on the other side of the looking glass to gain a new perspective on a song.
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I find it really fascinating how movement between notes create emotion and the tension and release aspect, like your mind anticipates what the next note should be, and if you don’t get it, it leaves you hanging. Music is also defined as the movement between notes. It is also interesting the mathematical relationship there, where a symmetrical opposite in emotion can exists across the harmonic axis in the circle of 5ths. They say math is in everything, even in emotions as felt musically.
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We’ve discussed this before, Jung, but I’ll probably go to my grave wondering why we have an emotional response to music. I know that music and language are processed in the same area of the brain, so perhaps it’s physiologically inevitable that the mind would try to ascribe meaning to notes and chords. But why are specific musical structures and sequences associated with happiness, sadness, building and resolving tension, etc.?
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David, this was my first thought after reading your post, but I think you getting a little deeper. Anyway, why does this one make me smile so much, besides Lisa’s contagious smile. The music makes me smile. I was also thinking of The Wrong Child by REM, but the lyrics are the driving factor of emotional control. Hmm…I am still posting this one, because it’s so kool.
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I was looking for a piece of classical music that I find very moving, only to realize that most classical music gets its hooks into me. Then I thought of this one. It’s hard to be objective with this one, as I can’t help hearing Daltrey’s voice in my mind. But sans vocals, it is still very moving. I feel loneliness and despair and then excitement and relief.
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I wanted to contribute Time by Pink Floyd, but that whole album is roller coaster of emotions.
Then I remembered this one. I hope you like it. I think it is very kool. Wait for 3:20
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JP
Oh yeah that little piece by Lisa is always so joyful. Her Uke tickles my brain in the most wonderful way.
Some great piano in those 2 videos. I love that white piano she plays. If I win the lottery ticket one day, I will have a house with a very nice piano in every room.
That second video, playing piano with one hand doing the pedals too, and then playing the xylophone with the other hand takes some incredible skill. She is very good. It’s like Mona singing, playing the guitar, tapping rhythm with her feet, and doing the blues harp, and doing every part superbly. By the end of the Pink Floyd piece, her piano is just captivating, so rich in emotions.
If you want an out of body or out of this world experience, you can if you let yourself get into this Chopin masterpiece. For many decades of my life, I fluffed this piece off as depressing and pointless, a funeral march, and never got my attention past a few bars. Then one day the genius of this piece hit me like a ton of bricks. The first part of this 9 minute piece is sombre and sad, but then at the 2:30 mark, the clouds part and you float to heaven, carried by a most beautiful piano voice, then at 6:30 you are returned back down to the earth to feel the heavy sombre mood of reality again. The 4 minutes of escape between 2:30 to 6:30 evokes tears of beauty and joy for me. The emotional mood change in this piece is amazing. There is such a contrast, a shift from dissonance to consonance back to dissonance again. Music expressing our human experience. It is so moving.
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Nice one Jung. I think you showed this to me before. As I was listening this time I kept imagining Bugs Bunny as the conductor
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Hi JP
I’ve always associated this to comedies from Get Smart to Gilligan’s Island as well.
Within Chopin’s Piano Sonata No 2, the 3rd movement “Funeral March”, is hidden the really beautiful gem. It’s like human nature I think when something sad happens, we reflect on it and often try to find something positive or some meaning out of it. This beautiful passage hidden within the sad piece is a reflection like that.
One thing to note is that Chopin himself did not name that 3rd movement a funeral march, it was by others who observed the mournful and solemn character of the movement. It’s too bad, because this beautiful piece got labeled as something to do with death, when in fact it can be much more than that, open to each individual’s interpretation as art is meant to be. It’s Chopin’s expression of something sad, and beauty he finds within it.
Yuja Wang’ gives an expressive performance of it too on youtube.
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Thanks, Jung. I hear what you mean about finding light in sorrow. You know I love watching her play, as well as listening. One of my favorite parts about live performances is watching the musician’s face and body language. They often give away where the music is going right before a change in tempo and feeling. Lisa and Mona do this, especially Lisa during her solos. I have Yuja going in a mini player while I type. She is almost unbelievable. It seems like she has a built in metronome. Hey, there’s an idea. Implant a chip which triggers a metronome effect in the ear, hmm. Uh oh, here comes the march. Whoa is me. Seriously though, how does she keep the timing so perfect? Oh that’s right, four to six hours of practice before a performance. She is a true musician/athlete. Aah, Presto, I love it.
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Here is what I was watching. The audience is so quiet I can hear a quiet cough at 11:50.
I wonder if this would sound good parked down by the lake.
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Hi JP
In that video you posted a while ago where Rick Beato was amazed with the speed, precision, and dexterity Yuja Wang could play some of those blistering fast pieces like Flight of the Bumblebee. her approach to the beautiful, slow and tender pieces is just as impressive, she plays with such feeling and sensitivity. She did Chopin’s Piano Sonata No 2 wonderful justice, especially the 3rd movement (Funeral March), very moving.
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