In “Charting The Mix” (LSI March 2016), we saw how a song’s production incorporates various sounds to control the song’s momentum and differentiate its sections.

In truth, the way a song sounds isn’t an isolated thing. Although we tend to think of flangers and ping-pong delays as “special effects,” a successful producer knows that every sonic decision should support the song’s message or mood.

Here’s an analogy: in cinema, it’s not just the dialog and action that tell the story, it’s also the director’s visual decisions that affect the way the story is told. Colorful, bright, well-framed shots feel good, safe and stable, whereas darkness, shadows, and off-kilter camera angles build tension, suspense, or unease. (Compare and contrast the early and late Harry Potter films – as the story grows darker and more ominous, so do each film’s visuals.)

Music is no different. A song tells a story using more than the words. A good songwriter uses melody, harmony, and rhythm as lighting, set design, and camera angles to influence the listener’s mood and support the song’s message. Songwriters use the term “prosody” to describe this relationship between how a song sounds and the story it tells.

If your eyes are glazing over at this point, here me out – this is important, because a song is the result of many deliberate decisions by the songwriter, and the artist is trusting us to faithfully deliver this product to the audience. This is just as critical as the guitar tone or the system EQ.

We want to assure our artists that we’re doing everything we can to help their songs translate effectively to the listeners, but how can we make that claim if we don’t understand even the basics of what they’re doing musically?

I can say first-hand that an understanding of the musical side of things improves my working relationships with artists a million times over. (That’s 120 dB!) We have a technical language to describe sound, and artists have an artistic one. Since they’re the ones everyone pays to see, let’s try to understand it. (No one buys a ticket to hear your vintage reverb unit.)

Professional motives aside, once you gain an awareness of prosody, you’ll likely never listen to music the same way again. Think of it as the musical equivalent of upgrading to HD.

The three main elements of a song are melody (the primary notes that are played/sung), harmony (the chords played/sung under those primary notes), and rhythm (the timing of the notes and chords). Note: I admit I’m simplifying this because many of us aren’t trained musicians, so if you happen to hold a music degree, please cut me some slack here.

Melodic Prosody

This is probably the most straightforward, so let’s look at it first. Most of us are familiar with Garth Brooks’ pub anthem “Friends In Low Places.” (If not, go look it up. I’ll wait.) In the chorus, the melody note on the word “low” is really, well, low. Tada! Prosody!

The song is fun to sing along with, far more so because the low note makes sense with the meaning of the lyric. If he were singing “I got friends in pizza places,” it would be significantly less appropriate, and as a result, less fun to listen to. This “up and down” being literally represented is prosody at its most basic.

For the theatre geeks, how about “Bring Him Home” from Les Miserables? The song opens with the lyric “God on high.” Guess where the high note is.

In the chorus of Sara Bareilles’ beautiful ballad “Gravity,” every single phrase has a downward-sloping melodic contour. (The lyric “I don’t wanna fall another moment into your gravity” rolls gently down to land on the word “gravity.”) The exception is the last line, “all over me,” where the melody goes up on the word “over.” The technique is so powerful because even listeners with no musical background are emotionally responsive to the way the melody supports the song’s message.

Here’s a textbook example of melodic prosody – in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, he opens the song “Maria” with a musical interval called a tritone. Tritones sound unpleasant. (On a piano, play C and F# together. Not so pretty, is it?) In fact, the tritone used to be nicknamed the “Devil’s Interval” for its extremely discordant, dissonant sound. Composers usually take great pains to avoid tritones in their melodies.

Why does Bernstein intentionally set Maria’s name over a tritone? In the story, her character represents something forbidden, risky and unsafe. This won’t end well (the story is a modernization of Romeo and Juliet) and Bernstein illustrates the unease of the situation by using a small musical idea (a “motif”) that’s literally uncomfortable to listen to.

These psychological associations run deep: Although modern trumpets have valves, their ancestors didn’t, and so could only play certain notes – namely the root, third, and fifth of the musical scale. Military bugle tunes “Taps” and “Reville” use these tones exclusively.

Since the days of yore, horns have been used to herald the arrival of royals, so these intervals still carry a connotation of importance. Play B♭, B♭, F on the piano – this leap from the root to the fifth is heard at the beginning of the triumphant “Prince Ali” in Disney’s Aladdin and opens the iconic Superman theme composed by John Williams.