For all Musical Composers

With music that has a steady beat, like pop, R&B and hip-hop, your brain doesn't have to work very hard to figure out when the next event is going to happen - that's pretty predictable - but it doesn't know exactly what's going to happen.

The skilful composer manipulates this sense of expectation. Your brain's trying to predict what's coming next, it makes a prediction and the skillful composer will meet those predictions a certain percentage of the time and violate them a certain percentage of the time.

If those violations are done in a clever way and in an interesting way, your brain gets really excited because it's now learned something new. It's learned a new pattern. It incorporates that knowledge, but it's still surprising relative to the thousands of songs that you've heard before that don't do that. And you want to hear it over and over again because it was surprising that first time.

Take the song Yesterday by the Beatles. It's got a seven-bar phrase, and almost every other pop song is either four bars or eight bars. Even if I tell you this and even if you've known this for years, the song still is rewarding because, although it's not violating your expectation for that song, it's still violating your expectation for pop songs in general.

That is fascinating to me.  It explains why I don't particularly enjoy pop music, r&b, hip hop etc...it is too predictable for my brain!  It also explains why I enjoy Jazz, Classical, World and Folk music.

So all I need to do to write a hit song is find the perfect proportion of violations and adherences to music tradition...so simple...and yet so heartless at the same time!

I think I will just stick to my hit and miss method...it might be more miss than hit but at least I am writing from the heart and not from the head!