Pop song melody as a hierarchical sequence

Consider a piece of pop song melody. You may say it is a sequence of pitches. But if I simply randomly put all those pitches into a MIDI sequence and playbacked by machine, it may probably become a dead sequence. Namely, it does not convey any logically meaning.

So the melody does not contain only pitches. Pitches are the most direct phenomenon we got, but it's more than pitches. To simply extend below, pitches are modulated by the rhythms. Even considering a simple 4/4 time bar with 6 notes inside, there are infinite possibilities of rhythms. Each of them express a different musical feeling. So we take also the rhythm into our previous MIDI sequence, it sounds more logical, meaningful,but somehow still feels dead.

Something is still missing. When a singer sings, she not only sings out pitches according to the rhythms, but also expresses her highs and lows at the same time. These emotional highs and lows can be related to the pitches' highs and lows, but not exactly the same. The emotional feelings adds another layer above the pitches, which is called "dynamics". Dynamics can be simply understood as the loudness or velocity of a note. As you know, we can still do an experiment of dynamics within our MIDI sequence, but, as you may guess, it's still not perfect.

Now we have pitch, rhythm and dynamics, and what else?

Most of the time a singer sings each pitch at a time, but sometimes she drags a pitch here and there. And still some other times, she put an unnoticeable slightly lower or higher pitch slightly before the pitch she's going to sing. By such, the singer creates a smooth flow of sound. This is called articulation. Can we do articulation in MIDI sequence? Yes, but not as easy as the previous three. Simply because there is no simple way to encode articulation. Our effort to emulate a beautiful melody using MIDI sequence can safely stop here. But anyway, we discover the 4th layer of a pop song melody.

So pop song melody as a hierarchical sequence, from bottom to top, as I see, is: 1. Rhythm; 2. Pitch; 3. articulation; 4. Dynamics.

tangkk

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考虑流行歌曲旋律一块。你可能会说，它是一个序列的球场。但如果我只是随机把所有这些球场成MIDI音序和机playbacked的，它可能成为一个死的序列。也就是说，它不传达任何逻辑上的意义。

因此，旋律不包含唯一的球场。球场是我们得到了最直接的现象，但它是多球场。下面简单的扩展，球场的节奏调制。即使考虑一个简单的4/4时间栏里面有6笔记，有节奏的无限可能性。他们每个人都表达了不同的音乐感觉。所以我们又到我们以前的MIDI音序的节奏，它听起来更符合逻辑的，有意义的，但不知何故，仍然觉得死了。

事情是人仍下落不明。当一个歌手唱歌，她不仅唱了球场的节奏，但也同时表示她的高点和低点。这些情绪的高点和低点可以与球场的高点和低点，但并不完全相同。的情感又增加了一层以上的球场，这就是所谓的“动态”。动态可以简单地理解为一个音符的响度或速度。正如你所知道的，我们仍然可以做一个实验动力学在我们的MIDI序列，但是，您可能已经猜到，它仍然是不完美的。

现在，我们有音高，节奏和力度，还有什么？

大多数时候，一个歌手唱的各个节点的时间，但有时她拉着一音高在这里和那里。而且还有另外一些时候，她把一个不引人注意的略低或较高的音调稍前她要唱歌的音调。通过这样，歌手创建一个畅通的声音。这就是所谓的衔接。我们可以做MIDI音序衔接？是的，但不容易，因为前三个。很简单，因为有没有简单的方法来进行编码的衔接。我们的努力，来模拟一个优美的旋律，使用MIDI序列可以安全地停在这里。但无论如何，我们发现一首流行歌曲旋律的第四层。

所以流行歌曲的旋律，从底部到顶部，我看到的，作为一个层次序列是：1。节奏2。间距; 3。衔接; 4。动力学分析。


tangkk