The first 1000 people to use the link will get a free trial of Skillshare Premium Membership: skl.sh/12tone10201 Some additional thoughts/corrections: 1) The paper discussed is Musical Style Affects the Strength of Harmonic Expectancy, by Drs. Dominique Vuvan and Bryn Hughes: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full... 2) Obviously, the framing of rock changing everything is overly simplistic: If nothing else, the blues and jazz helped pave the way. The reason I emphasized it here is because that's the only style used in the study: I brought this up with the authors as well, and they were interested in the idea of repeating the experiment with other sets of genre cues to see how that affected results. For now all we can conclusively say based on these specific results is that rock and classical are different, but obviously plenty of music theory work has also been done on the different harmonic vocabularies of other genres as well. 3) I should also note that, as a music theorist, I don't necessarily believe that musical observations _need_ to be verified through scientific methods in order to consider them valid. The humanities exist for a reason, and our methods are useful too. But I still think cognition research is useful and interesting, because it gives us another angle by which to probe the musical experience. It's not that all the scholarship on the harmonic vocabulary of rock was meaningless until someone came along and did A Study® to it but it's nice to corroborate your ideas through multiple methodologies, y'know? 4) Seriously I _really_ wish they'd included the plagal cadence as well, that data would've been so cool to see. Oh well. The authors were super receptive to my feedback so maybe we'll see them try it at some point. But even if not, huge thanks to Drs. Vuvan and Hughes, they were wonderful to work with and they're doing super cool stuff. 5) Oh, another thing: I'm honestly not convinced that the classical concept of cadences is actually all that applicable to rock in the first place. Rock music doesn't tend to want to create "stopping points" in the same way, so the harmonic tools you would use to do that just kinda don't fit with the ethos. I didn't address this in the video because it goes beyond the parameters of the study, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Music teachers: we live in a society Jazz: 20 minute solo Rock: *0-3-5*

I enjoy it when a video actually goes into the details of how an experiment was conducted and how the results were interpreted. It might put a lot of casual viewers off but it's essential to any genuine search for truth.

I thought this was going to be about how the power chord is made of parallel fifths, which are so taboo in classical music, but sound awesome on a guitar. I guess you touched on that a LITTLE, but I'd love to hear more about it!

Would the real cadence please stand up!

One thing I've always struggled with in my composition classes was this notion that "the V WANTS to resolve to the I!!" ...I was always just like "Sorry, I really only hear two independent chords." Eventually I just internalized the notion that that's how "normal people" hear it and learned to apply it, but I've never actually heard this supposed gravitational pull for myself.

I wonder how many people will appreciate the Riemann Hypothesis reference over the line, "Is there a way to prove that?"

Ive never heard V-I called authentic, ive always called it a perfect cadence

I don't know much about the techniques of the field but from a general methods perspective I feel improvement could be made. The paper definitely could've used a control. If we know the plagal candace is common to both, they should've tested that as a positive control. Similarly they should've tried some outlandish harsh non-cadance as a negative control.

My teacher told me my D7b5 was "wrong" He plays christian rock...

You put a lot of effort and thought into this video, but it doesn't tell us 'why classical harmony doesn't work anymore'. Thanks though, it was an interesting watch.

Something I'd love to see if it's been studied in more detail is the impact of factors outside of harmony on the listener's feelings of resolution, particularly in EDM genres where harmony is far more secondary to the rhythmic and timbral aspects than in western classical genres. The fact is that in western classical music, while timbre is still important, you can nearly always re-orchestrate any piece of music to different instruments and most listeners will still hear it as the "same" piece, because in the western classical tradition it's the abstract harmony and melody that define a piece of music. In EDM, changing the instrumentation and/or timbre, particularly when it comes to transitions like the drop that can confer feelings of resolution and transition to a new section of the music, will fundamentally alter that music and can easily make it into something most listeners will hear as completely new. I'd love to know if there's been any of this kind of cognition research into these aspects of EDM genres and how they affect listeners' feelings of resolution in the same way that different harmonic cadences can on western classical music. If there are studies that can prove that modern listeners can have feelings of resolution that are entirely independent of the harmony, that kind of torpedoes the whole idea from western classical music theory that harmony is the strongest driver of the listener's feelings in the first place.

Wouldn't it make more sense for the study to bake each cadence into the primer? Like, write a classical piano primer that ends with a V-I cadence as well as one that ends in a bVII-I cadence instead, and then do the same thing for the rock guitar. That would put the cadences more in the context of what an actual song in those genres would do.

I liked when you mentioned Marshall Mathers and draw an M&M

this must be why i’m jobless

I’m laughing way harder than I should be at the real slim shady joke

Pretty much all music theory books specify that the theory is derived from the ‘common practice period’ of western classical music from 1750 to the early 1900s.

I came to traditional music pedagogy later in life after being a rock person for a bunch of years and I had VERY difficult time getting the V-I in my ears. I truly think that at the time I wasn't experiencing the same degree of "tension and release" that the Schenkerian bros ship so aggressively and had to consciously develop it with ear training. It's clear as day now of course, but I don't think we should consider any music paradigms to be innate or self-evident. Harmony is socially constructed, yo.

Is 'authentic cadence' the American name? I've always used 'perfect cadence', is this just a British thing?

The classical vocabulary is definitely different from the common rock/metal vocabulary. This is why neoclassical metal is a defined genre, because it is fundamentally different from a theoretical standpoint. Would love to see you and Adam Neely do a collab, you seem like you would have a lot of synergy in your presentation and research styles.

you should do an analysis on The Pixies's Where is My Mind!

I think it's pretty cool they made an effort to analyze the effect of timbre. I've got no education in music but I've always though the insistence that C3 on a piano is exactly the same as C3 on any guitar is oversimplifying. For that matter I don't think C played on different octaves sounds the same and therefore shouldn't be treated identically. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I feel like the broad-strokes equivalence assumptions can mask some of the complexity that flavors the final piece.

Maybe my experience isn't the most common, but I was taught that while the authentic cadence was the "strongest", strongest doesn't always mean "best" or "most appropriate". Like in a rock song which uses the lowered 7th and no leading tone, a V - I cadence would sound horribly out of place. If you want a strong finish, a IV - I is almost certainly stronger than a v - I and bVII - I is still at least modally consistent.

If plagal cadence is so common in both styles, wouldn't it make sense to rely on it in the priming?

Having just watched a video on sociolinguistics, I was amused by the concept of musical code-switching.

1:34 Ah yes, the authentic slender shady.

Very interesting, I really like the analysis of the validity of the results. Too often, people think that one experiment/paper can provide conclusive evidence, so it's good to see you putting the paper into perspective. I think you ask exactly the right questions and the suggestion for follow-up research is very good.

For me the authentic cadence with piano sounded like an ending of a piece, while with electric guitar is sounded more like an intro. That is cool.

Usually I speed up videos so I watch the same information in less time. In this case I have to slow down the video because if I don't do it I don't get the information

Uhhh Mr Mathers didnt exactly say it that way but i mean im sure that is what he meant

6:58 Is that a Black Lotus? Nice.

Another way to interpret the results is not that V-I is less important today, but is that harmony is less important today (it is to be expected that variations of something that is less important tend to be scored lower). It is amazing how many #1 songs that are made of 2-3 chords. Trying to learn more myself, I found thousands of video hours/books that music theorists have created about harmony and very few about rules that dictate how a good leading melody is made.

This confirmed something that I've been noodling on for a while, that rock and classical use a fundamentally different vocabulary. I noticed this because I learned most of my music theory via this channel's intro videos and song analyses, which worked perfectly well for someone whose primary musicological interest is rock. But anytime I attempted to read works on music theory or musical philosophy, I found that they exclusively dealt with classical music and/or high-art challenges to classical music like 12-tone serialism, treating rock and other popular music as debased and musically vacuous. I obviously disagree, and I started to wonder if perhaps the issue was that the framework by which these theorists were evaluating rock music was simply unsuited to it.

I am wondering if you ever studied physics or mathematics? I just love the fact that you keep putting little diagrams, graphs and functions in these videos. I love both music and maths , but I am going to try to persue science and live music as a passion, it seems like you took the opposite decision. Btw your content is always fricking great so congratulations!

I'm sure the music theory bit here is sound, but that sloth is definitely upside down.

Another aspect of this might be .. does rock music really need "cadences"? Does it need to "resolve"? In bands I've been in, we've never written songs with "resolution" in mind. We jam until we stumble across something that sounds good, and tweak it until it's a song. This riff four times, this other riff four times, and end on a big E chord (really E5 or maybeeeee Em).

Having listened to rock and metal all my life and when I started learning music theory at first the V7-I cadence sounded absolutely awful to my ears, there was something goofy and off-putting about the sound that I didn't like at all.

I've been talking about this for years. The paper completely misses what's actually happening today as they are looking in the wrong place. Perfect cadence has been not only largely abandoned but completely subverted by much of modern pop, where standard Western Harmony often has little to no functionality at all in the classical sense.

One thing that I think is really important is that most classical music is through composed (it goes from one phrase to another without really repeating anything verbatim) wheras most rock is in some sort of ABAB/rondo form. So things that work in classical, like the very definitive PAC might not work as well in rock, where you have to loop the form over and over. Not only that, but (most) classical doesn't use chord loops, so the PAC makes more sense when ending a large phrase. This is just my perception, but the plagal cadence sounds a lot more soft than the PAC, making it more useful to loop because it is less strictly defined. Idk though, that's just how I see it, which definitely isn't universally true or correct.

I've been watching this channel for a few years now, and I just realized that you're left handed

I’ve always thought that on electric guitar using power chords, a IV to I sounds a lot more satisfy

"Why Classical Harmony Doesn't Work in Pop Music" There, I fixed it. Not to diss on your video or pop music, classical harmony can be very effective in film music, musical theater, and others. Also, the authentic cadence is only a tiny part of classical harmony, so it's a bit of a stretch to say that because a lot of modern music doesn't use the authentic cadence that classical harmony "doesn't work anymore".

"To paraphrase renowned music expert, Marshall Mathers......" Gee, never knew Eminem was so darn good in music theory. 😋😋

Any two chords can be a cadence with the right context and preparation. Different styles of music are different contexts, I'm not surprised that the quality of "resolution" evoked by a particular cadence depends on the context. Honestly, in isolation, the authentic cadence doesn't sound like a resolution to my ears, or even really anything at all. It could just as easily be a I - IV intro to some new idea, bIII - bVII in the middle of a minor key progression, or could even be a minor scale borrowed chord setup for a backdoor cadence bIII - bVII - I.

I LOVED the Riemann Zeta Function as the graphic for, "is there a way to prove that?"

Hey 12tone, I recently found your channel and it helps me understand some things and learn new things as a self taught amateur musician. Nothing really much to say but thank you!

Really appreciate the clarity of these videos. Particularly the explanation of the relationship between intermodulation and distortion.

5:00 The backdoor IS a plagal cadance if i may. It derives from the mol dur scale and is basicly IV-6 resolving to I.

Man busting out the reinmann zeta function when we least expect it

Can’t express how thankful I am for your videos. Incredibly insightful and helpful

Classical Harmony is not only Tonal music, tonal harmony it is still working when it comes to tonal music, when it becomes modal, it is a different topic. We all still really unprepared for modal music since we are taught to focus on tonal understanding of music.

The yinyang elephants are great! I’m obsessing on the symbols today.

Every musical genre has its own vocabulary, structure, articulation, meters, etc. The point here is that depending on what you’re trying to build, you will use different tools, different materials, and do different operations. So nothing new under the sun, just different.

We actually watch your videos in band class, the teacher says he's a patreon of yours. Pretty cool videos 📹 😎 👌 👍

Love the drawings. Do you actually make music?

What would you say to an analysis of the IV-iv-I cadence? Such a staple of English rock...

I really like your study breakdown videos. Keep up with the good work!

I really enjoy these videos but the icing on the cake is always one or more little stand-out doodles. A quick throw-away Feynman Diagram in this one was excellent.

For example, the point of V7 -> I is to use the harmonic motion 5 -> 1 and melodic motions 2 -> 1 and 7 -> 1 including the tritone resolution 7 -> 1 and 4 -> 3 to highlight the tonic chord(1-3), while also defining the key with the tritone resolution, as the tritone is a key-defining interval(the only interval that's in each major key only once, and every tritone is unique to every major key). If you use block motions, you only get the harmonic motion 5 -> 1 but you completely miss the melodic motions of 2 -> 1 and 7 -> 1. That you use "authentic cadences" without these melodic motions as any sorts of examples and don't mention them makes it seem like you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.

I'm glad you have a forum to express your opinion and earn a living.You tend to use a form of logic that works for you and many of your subs, but I have my own doubts. While I don't have a label for it, I would describe it as the "I might be wrong" doctrine. It seems to be working for most. Either way, best of luck.

I love how when he said is there a way to prove that he drew the riemann zeta function. Clever humor

One day were gonna see 12tone explaining the poincare conjecture and 3b1b analyzing mf doom lyrics and i cant wait

Really good vid. Particular props for the Picasso cameo. One of my favourite works of his!

I'm an undergrad in anthropology, and don't know much about ethnomusicology, but I feel like the music theorists have nothing but rage for the entire field given your videos.

I like how you sneak in physics into your sketches

I’d love for you to do an analysis on Anesthetize by Porcupine Tree.

I heard "Vuvan" and was expecting to see something like "Vieuvignt"

I think you are being a little bit narrow with your description of the classical genre, not all classical music is 17-19th century made with the particular aesthetic that you displayed there

As a church musician with a strong sense of Baroque music theory (and little knowledge of pop music), many chord progressions in contemporary worship songs break my tonal anticipation algorithm. I have a hard time understanding them, and they feel kinda like they just ramble.

I've kind of always had a bit of an issue with cadences while studying music and it relates to this. We are taught that some resolve better than others, but that doesn't always apply, as seen here, and that changes a lot depending on our backgrounds. I personally prefer the sound of the backdoor resolution (especially in minor), the bII (or bii) to i and IV to i. I've talked to other people that are a bit skeptic of classical ideas and what we think is that it may be due to the music i've listened to the most, both growing up and currently.

It's unfortunate that so many rock/metal guitarists deal with intermodulation by only playing the simplest chords. There are tons of interesting chords that sound great on distorted guitar.

3:12 Ah, the good old Kontakt electric guitar. I'd know that sound anywhere!

1:34 the fact you drew an M&M while saying Marshall Mathers lmao

0:31 I've watched a number of these videos and I still can't figure out what that thing is on the elephants head. great videos! but what is that thing?

I was a classically trained guitarist guitarist at Belmont university and AIM when I heard EVH said the guitar only has 12 notes so don’t drive your self crazy I do use some of it mostly to communicate with other musicians. Remember it’s called theory for a reason.-:frank zappa

Also, the rock example didn't end in a plagal cadence, it was a very obvious I V motion. How can you have a musiv theory channel if you cannot hear basic stuff like harmonic function?

Surely the resolution used depends somewhat on the emotion or feeling that is being attempted to portray with the music

@12tone I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on how this applies to "metal" Does metal have the same vocabulary as rock. I say "metal" because there are so many sub-genres I doubt even within metal there is a single vocabulary. I often hear metal being associated more with classical music and its pretty common for metal bands to "shred" some very classical sounding riffs and solos, and often they will directly utlise classical pieces such as Nightwish's Greatest show on earth, leveraging Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Are these simple "callouts" or are they fundamental to the genre vocabulary?

I make rock and metal music, and the concept of cadences are one of the most useful tool I use to compose my songs.

I've never heard of any "classical music defenders" cite scientific studies or mathematical formulae to prove their music is superior. No theorist that I've interacted with has claimed the Authentic cadences are like objectively best, or perfect cadences are literally perfect. They're just perfect within the harmonic language of classical music especially of the 17th and 18th centuries. Within that cultural framework, the hierarchy of cadences serves to build a long form structure to the piece, but outside of that framework it's essentially meaningless. This is taken as a given by music theorists that you understand this, it's not necessary to have some disclaimer that the PAC and IAC don't apply in other styles of music because it ought to be understood when you take a class in Western Music Theory. Rock has no such hierarchy because the music tends to be very short, and thus requires no such unifying structure as a well-developed and systemized harmonic language. This is why when Schoenberg completely broke from the old harmonic language of common practice, his "freely atonal" pieces tended be either short, or unified by a lyrical text. Only when he had worked out serialist 12 tone music could he return to long form instrumental pieces.

They don't understand what an authentic cadence is. It doesn't need a V chord, it doesn't even need a dominant chord, the second to last chord just needs to have a dominant function to the final chord.

Great video! Incredibly interesting topic, especially on the heels of Adam Neely's "18th Century Musicians" piece. Love this subject matter and look forward to more thought-provoking insight in regard. I tell my advancing students that there are really cool and original means to cadence using voice-leading which can create some non-traditional bass movement. Not really a classical vs rock thing, per se but...Anyway, thanks for this.

Just a little sidenote that could potnetially be interesting: There is a niche for the bVII -> i and that is Power and Melodic Death Metal. This cadence is ALL OVER THE PLACE, if you make an corpus analysis of Amon Marth songs (that absolutely nobody, especially the poster of that comment would ever do) you would find that like 75% of all the songs would use either a i, bvii pendulum or another loop that uses v, vi or iv while relaying on the bvii to get back to the tonal centre. It's also very common in other styles of modern rock an metal. The sentiment that the plagal cadance sounds very 60 is kinda true and it has been somewhat overshadowed by the i -> bVII in the later years. So that music theory study was kinda smart about it's material which is something quite unusual nowadays. :D Still an amazing video!

I think all this shows is that music theory relies more on tropes than it does math. The human brain does this everywhere. When it comes to our ideologies for example, it’s well proven that we go with our intuition first and then justify it with reason after the fact. It’s the same pattern here. We have various intuitions about music and can then go back in later and justify it with math and explanations to do with voice leadings and so on. We create tropes that become ingrained in us from a child, and when we grow up and create things ourselves, we really only change those things a little bit. This is how the dialectic happens, and so this effects art, politics, and culture. Every aspect of our lives are touched by this combination of relying on our intuitions/feelings, and our intuitions being based on what we were exposed to as a child.

Thinking about many of my favorite songs, the cadence 7th minor/tonic or 2nd Minor/tonic are actually more pleasant to my ears than the 5/1, maybe it's just a matter of habits?

I don’t have the time to delve into the literature surrounding academic questions like this (or to learn how to do so in a field like music theory) so I’m glad we’ve got 12tone here to do it for us. Specifically emailing the authors in universally Hell on ice. I don’t want to spend 15 minutes agonising over “best regards” vs “all the best”

I have recently watched a bunch of your videos and didn't realize before this very minute that you are actually drawing the opposite direction you would write (in english that is). For some reason it wasn't really an issue, I believe it might be since you arent using latin letters (the only letters I know how to read) you have made your own language that compliments your voiceover and I actually don't know how to finish this sentence, but that was very interesting! :D Hey! 20 min older me here, I realized it is probably because you are left handed, and as a left hended person I know the struggle of smudging and others not being able to see what you're writing.

I'd love to see you conduct a study on this - I'm sure many of your viewers would be happy to participate! (myself included)

Well, though this video is interesting, all kinds of chord changes have been used in classic rock, so I was hoping that you would talk a little bit about the most important difference, which, for me, comes from the blues concept of making the tonic a dominant. And for me it opens up all kind of possibilities in "popular perception of good" sounding chord changes, even if this didn't come itself firstly with the blues, but rather contemporary music itself (and maybe even medieval music without the theory behind it, or even before and/or elsewhere). And even if you can see a I7-IV as a plagal cadance rather than a V7-I, authentic. Also, not related, but you have surely noticed that the ii-V has a simlar effect than the IV-V, and the vi-V (or even just the ii, the viiº, or V) in the major tonality, and in minor tonality the iiº-V, the iv-V, and the VI-V? Whatever, I don't know why I'm commenting. Have a good day!

Props to Drs Vuvan and Hughes for having a crack at this. I think the paper should be titled “Musical Style Affects the Strength of Harmonic Expectancy in a small sample of US College Students”. I’m not confident the findings would generalise well to, say, Tuvan throat singers or much beyond folks steeped in Western musical styles.

Thank you for the Eminiem (M&M) doodle.

So heres what I got from this video... There was a study done to conduct which sets of music rules people know, and whether or not peoples perception of those rules is more determined by classical or modern tradition. This came into questions because much of modern music lacks the 'authentic cadence' a resolution key to much of classical music. They would use primes, musical pieces that hold many of the traits of its reflective genre, and genre-appropriate timbre to create a genre "mood", doing it for 'classical' and 'rock'. They then played both the V-I cadence and the VIIb-I cadences (reflective of classical vs modern eras of music), following the primes. In doing this, they would have participants select which one they liked more. The results showed that while people greatly preferred V-I in classical, there was no great differences in people's classical preference. This is impressive, because it shows that people might not be so heavily effected by style, and that classical influence still carries over to much of people's preferences. However, the presence of harmonic tendencies of genre can carry over into peoples preferences, which is why the 'tie' found in the experiment for rock music is so impressive.

I’m glad to see you’re doing something with your music degree

(10:20) Are you allowed to do such a smooth transition to the sponsored segment? Because there are some strict laws regarding ads and sponsored content mixed with entertainment.

12tone, are you familiar with the writings/lectures of McLuhan?

Is there a particular reason you draw from (mostly) right to left, as opposed to left to right? All I can think about is this

Is there a 12tone symbol dictionary published?

As a professional statistician, I'm interested in seeing the data they collected. I wonder what other sorry of experiments you could run to examine these preferences. I bet you could set up a regression with dummy variables for differing aspects of the music. Might be cool to try at least.

god i love the use of a drawing of Black Lotus for the idea of "proxy," what a niche thing

My theory(that i just started to develop on my piano), as to why 5-1 works better in "classical" (or on an instrument that doesn't distort and has the ability to clearly voice every note), is as follows: when you can hear every note of a chord, in a 5-1 you change the 3rd up by a half-step and the 5th up by a whole step, but you can keep the root as the new 5th. this makes for a satisfying, yet not overwhelming amount of change. while on an instrument (or setting) where you can't really pick out details beyond a certain point (eg distorted electric guitar; maybe with distortion even weakening certain notes and their harmony with others), you have might have a harder time making the change 3rd+1semi = new root stand out enough to be satisfying, so you have to introduce the root of the 1 chord a different way. that is by making it the 5th of the previous chord, thereby making it a 4-1 cadence. This is just a thought I had whilst playing around during this video. I know it isn't very scientific, nor is it backed up by facts, but I wanted to write it down somewhere, so why not here. Also, play around with "power chords" on piano. resolutions will sound very different. (4-1 > 5-1 in powerchords imo, whilst I would prefer 5-1 in full chords)