Texture: Still Alive, Portal

Still Alive, the ending credits song from the video game Portal, became an overnight cult classic. A perfect ending to a perfect game, Still Alive is sung by the main villain of the game, GLaD0S; a murderous, sentient robot; after you supposedly destroy her.

Still Alive is very different from The Confrontation. There is only once singing voice in Still Alive, for example, so the texture of this piece is based almost entirely on the instruments.

(NOTE: my times are off about six seconds on this timeline. I was writing based on my mp3 of the song, and the YouTube version has six seconds of set-up before the music starts.)
0:00 - GLaD0S's voice enters by itself and the song is briefly monophonic
0:01 - Electric (possibly synthesized?) harp enters
0:17 - Shakers enter
0:31 - Drums enter
0:45 - Electric bass enters, bells replace harp
0:53 - bells exit, leaving voice, bass, drums and shakers
1:23 - Electric guitar enters and becomes lead instrument, synthesizer enters
1:45 - Synthesizer, guitar and bass exit, leaving voice, harp and shakers
1:57 - Electric guitar enters
2:01 - Electric bass enters
2:15 - Synthesizer enters, harp exits
2:30 - Synthesizer exits
2:52 - All instruments fade abruptly
2:54 - Voice exits
2:56 - Song ends

The instruments in this song are all very specifically electronic instruments. The premise of the game is that you, the player, are in a large building that is only inhabited by GLaD0S and other, non-sentient, robots. It could easily be assumed that the game takes place in the future, but it never explicitly stated. Technology is a major focal point of the game, so having acoustic instruments for the song--while it may sound nice--would not fit in with the theme of the game.

Texture: The Confrontation - Les Miserables

The confrontation is one of my favorite pieces of music to listen to in terms of texture. The incredible use of voice in this piece makes it both haunting and intense.

For this analysis, I used the 10th Anniversary edition, with Colm Wilkinson as Jean Valjean and Philip Quast as Inspector Javert for the Les Misérables 10th Anniversary Concert at London's Royal Albert Hall, 8th October 1995.

This piece was actually incredibly fun to break down:
0:00 - 0:54 - Two singers, playing Javert and Valjean, begin singing. They are both singing different melodies, but with effectively no overlap, making this part of the song homophonic, once you take the accompaniment into account.
0:54 - 1:38 - Javert and Valjean begin to each sing their own melodies at the same time and at the same volume. As the verses progress, they switch back and forth between who is singing louder, putting slightly more focus on one character or the other, but the difference in their dynamic level is never enough to drown one of them out. Character development happens in this part of the song. At 1:28, there is a very brief moment of homophony when both characters should "Javert!" at the same time, accenting both singers.
1:38 - 1:50 - Musical interlude. No voices during this time, and only one instrument, making the texture monophonic.
1:50 - 2:07 - Javert "talks" to Valjean while Valjean "talks" to both Javert and Fantine. Both of them speak one at a time, bringing the texture back to homophony. During this part of the song, a lot of plot happens, so it has to be clear to the listener.
2:07 - 2:18 - Both singers sing the same words at the same time ("I swear to you, I will be there,") putting huge emphasis on them. This is the basis for the rest of the play. It is during this song that Valjean promises Fantine that he will be there for Cosette, and Javert swears that he will be "there," hunting Valjean to bring him to justice.

Throughout the song, there is minimal accompaniment and the focus is put on the characters and the singing voices.

Harmony: Seasons of Love, Rent

Seasons of Love, a song from the Broadway musical Rent, has probably the most well-known line from the production: "525,600 minutes, 525,000 moments so dear, 525,600 minutes, how do you measure, measure a year?"

One interesting thing about Seasons of Love in terms of harmony and melody is that for almost the entire first half of the song, it is sung in unison, the only harmony coming from the piano accompaniment. Then, once it first makes the switch into vocal harmony, there is very little, if any, unison singing.

The vocal harmonies start at 1:05 and continue almost uninterrupted until 2:58, going into unison or a single singer from 1:24 - 1:26 and again from 2:08 - 2:21.

The harmonic rhythm goes very slowly through the chorus (first heard at 1:09 in this video), quickly through the second male/female split (first heard at 1:31), especially in the male part, and moderately fast through the verses, where there is one prominent soloist and the other singers make vocalizations under them.
During these verses (from 1:37-2:10), the harmonic voices imitate instruments very softly, giving focus to the melodic line.

Harmony: Girl, The Beatles

Girl, by The Beatles, is among my favorite of their songs. I tend to enjoy songs that have a strong melody with patches of harmony, and this is a great example of one.

The harmonies in Girl are short, but they make a huge impact on the song as a whole. The added voices change the song from one guy lusting after this girl to all of the guys lusting after her. The vocal harmonies during the chorus (from 0:21-0:28, 0:50-0:58, 1:20-1:28, 1:50-1:58, and 2:20-2:28) when heard with the music behind it sounds like a deep, sweet sigh.

There are several examples of parallel harmonies in this song. The vocal harmonies during the chorus is an example of a repeated use of parallel harmony. You can also hear a parallel harmony from 2:00 - 2:20 instrumental interlude, where the harmony has two notes for every one that the harmony has.

You can also hear a variation on an upper drone from 1:01 - 1:19, when the harmonic voices are dinging "doot doot doot doot..." This is a drone because, while it is not in one continuous flow of pitch, the notes that are being sung change very infrequently.

Overall, the song has a slow harmonic rhythm and simple harmonies, mostly filling out chords.

Rhythm - Because, Across the Universe

Because, from the movie Across the Universe is a cover of the Beatles song by the same name. It is also an entirely different song from Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, my earlier rhythm analysis piece. I thought it would be more interesting that way.

Because has a very weak pulse right off the bat--it is not something you could dance or tap your foot to. If you listen closely, you can hear that is does had a beat, but it is also somewhat wavery. Occasionally, there are longer pauses between two notes than there was between the previous two.

This continues until about 1:09, when a soft guitar enters, steadying the beat overall.

The piece is done in a slightly exaggerated duple meter. As stated above, some notes are held slightly longer than others, preventing a totally steady rhythm.

The voices in the beginning of the song are very ethereal, keeping the beat very unclear and almost non-metric for the first minute or so.

Rhythm: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger; Daft Punk

In terms of popular techno music, Daft Punk is pretty much the top tier. Performing techno before it could really be considered a popular genre, Daft Punk has really made a name for themselves. One of their most well known songs is, of course, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (herein "HBFS").

(So this video is kind of strange. But I know the quality of it, and there are a lot of videos on YouTube that use HBFS.)

Being a techno song, HBFS a very strong, very obvious pulse through the entire piece.

An interesting thing about this piece starts at 1:57, when the pulse of the song speeds way up. This makes the song sound like it is going double time until 2:39, but in fact the tempo has not sped up at all! While playing two copies of the song at once, you can match up the words during the "fast" section exactly with the words during the "slow" section.

There is a static tempo throughout the whole entire song. The whole thing is very metric, and is in duple meter.

Project Design Notes

Bekka M.
Introduction to Music
Fall 2012
11/4/12
Project Design Notes
    In order to put this project together, I did several things. After choosing which four elements I wanted to work with (Melody, Harmony, Texture and Rhythm), I read through the listed ideas to consider for each element, trying to see if any of those descriptions made me think immediately of any songs in my library. I then went through and selected my eight songs, based on genre, length, and whether or not I actually liked them.
    I chose to write use the blog format for my project because I thought that, if done well, it could be a really great layout for something like this. Honestly, my first thought was to make a video, but I soon realized that I have no idea how to work the latest version of iMovie.
    I think that the hardest part of getting this project together was picking out the right songs. There were several times where I thought, “Oh, that would be the perfect song!” only to find that it was too short or too long, or that I had already picked a song from the same genre for that category already. I actually had a very hard time finding a second song for Harmony that was not from a musical. I ended up settling on Girl, by The Beatles.
    The thing I found in my research that fascinated me the most related to my analysis of Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. Late in the song, it appears to speed up quite a bit, but it turns out the tempo does not actually speed up at all. I found this out when I played it from two sources at the same time with one of them offset by about a minute. It happened to work out perfectly the first time so I got the words from both copies of the sings to line up exactly right.