Creating Tension & Release Keeps Audiences Listening

Creating musical tension entices an audience because they want to hear how it’s eventually resolved.

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Tension and release in music means presenting something that sounds unresolved, something that needs to be, in a sense, “answered.” A typical example of tension-release is the playing of a D7 chord. On its own, that chord sounds incomplete, needing something more secure following it. Playing a G chord after the D7 offers a strong sense of resolution.

Tension-release is an important part of making music attractive and enticing to listeners. By incorporating elements that sound unresolved or unstable, the audience automatically (and usually subconsciously) expects and waits for a resolution. When they hear that D7 chord, they automatically know that a resolution – the G chord – is the next logical chord, and they’ll wait for it.

Tension-release needs to happen in all components of a song: lyrics, chords, melodic shapes, instrumentation, and so on. Ideally, it works well when the tension-release happens at different times throughout a song, overlapping each other. For example, lyrical tension is often created in a verse lyric, with the chorus providing resolution 45 seconds to a minute later. At the same time, chord tensions can be created and then resolved in mere seconds. Melodic tensions can be created by melodies working their way upward, then moving downward 10 to 20 seconds later.

Often, tension and release happens instinctively in the songwriting process, but it’s worth putting a microscope on your music from time to time, and ask yourself, “What have I done to create tension and then resolution in this song?” If you’re wondering how you do this, check out the following ideas.

1. Lyrical tension-release: Use the verse to ask questions, present situations, and describe people, while leaving the listener wanting and needing more. Let the chorus be the place where questions are answered. Allowing the chorus to be the place where emotions are displayed helps to achieve this. P!nk’s “Just Give Me a Reason” demonstrates this well.
2. Chord tension-release: We’ve already mentioned the special power of the dominant 7th chord (D7) as a way of keeping listeners’ minds from straying. But there are other ways of doing it. Try using mostly minor chords in your verse, and switch to major chords in your chorus. If your song is in a major key, start your bridge on a minor chord and use the 8 bars of the bridge to move back toward the major key. Listen to Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors” to hear how this works.
3. Melodic tension-release: As melodies move steadily in one direction, whether upward or downward, we feel enticed to keep listening. We know that there is a limit to how high or low a melody can go, and so we automatically wait to hear the moment that it turns around. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (downward) and “It’s Only Make Believe” (upward) are great examples.
4. Instrumental tension-release: Good instrumentation is often worked out and finalized during the recording process, after the songwriting is complete. Tension is created when instruments are dropped from the mix, and then added back in afterward. It’s a favourite trick in pop music genres to drop instruments in the chorus that follows the bridge, adding them back again for chorus repeats.

Regardless of how you do it, presenting musical ideas that sound unresolved is what makes music attractive to us. And one more important point: a song’s climactic moment often happens in the bridge, where overlapping tensions are all resolved at approximately the same time.

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