In his ongoing attempts to seek out the answers to why we like the music we like, Hunter Farris has uncovered a melodic hierarchy via Whitney Houston.
Tag: pop music analysis
The Most Poetic Lyrics We Heard in Pop Music in 2018
We’ve compiled some of our favorite lyrics to hit the Billboard pop charts last year and isolated them to give them the attention they deserve.
What Makes a Song “Catchy?”
This article looks at some of the psychological explanations around why songs are considered catchy and how they get stuck in our heads.
St. Vincent’s “Los Ageless” – a Song or a Production?
As an example of a song that could be called both a “production” and a “song”, we look at St. Vincent’s “Los Ageless” to break down those differences.
Our 10 Favorite Rap Beats of 2018 and Why We Still Love Them
We count down and break down our ten favorite hip-hop beats of 2018 to find out what’s going on inside them and why they’re still so good.
How Imagine Dragons Writes Such Memorable Melodies
Imagine Dragons’ “Demons” plays with our sense of memory about how the melody is supposed to play out each time. How does this work?
How Blood Orange Uses Chasms of Harmonic Ambiguity on “Negro Swan”
+ Join our email magazine, Soundfly Weekly, a weekly review of the best in music learning…
Billie Eilish’s “You Should See Me in a Crown” Is Microtonality Gone Pop
+ Producing and mixing music at home? Check out Soundfly’s brand new mentored online course, Songwriting…
Why Ariana Grande’s “no tears left to cry” Is So Uplifting, Even in a Minor Key
+ Producing and mixing music at home? Check out Soundfly’s brand new mentored online course, Songwriting…
Lots and Lots of Colored Dots: A Fretboard Explanation of Pop Tonality
Using the guitar fretboard as a template, music theorist Dean Olivet has redesigned harmonic notation in a colorful, intuitive methodology for learning.