If you take a look at a photograph that’s been reversed, or look through your car’s rear view mirror, you’ll probably not see anything that looks weird, unless there’s a road sign or something else with words on it. Most of the time, you can look at things that are “backwards”, and they still make sense to your eyes and brain.
Music usually doesn’t work that way. If you reverse music, a lot of what you hear might make some sense, but you’ll notice that there’s a strange feeling of the music being without direction — kind of meandering and wandering about without the normal sense of drive or direction.
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Some elements within a song might still work in reverse. For example, the simpler the chord progression, the more likely it is that it will still sound acceptable when played backwards, like these short examples:
- C-Am-Dm-G-C
- C-F-G-F-C
- C-Dm-Bb-G-C
What about melodies? You can find lots of examples of music being played backwards if you do a YouTube search. You’ll have to ignore the sound of the instruments if the recording is reversed, because you’ll get the reverb of a note before you get the actual note… a very strange but familiar effect:
Trying to focus on the melody is probably the most difficult part of this listening experiment. You hear aspects of the melodies that still sound reasonably similar to the ordinary beginning-to-end rendition, but as I mentioned earlier, there’s a missing sense of direction to those melodies. They work best when played normally, and sound stranger played end-to-start.
Certainly you’d have to agree that what we experience with music is not at all the same as what we experience when we reverse a photograph. With the reversed photo, you have to be told, usually, that you’re looking at something reversed, while playing music backwards is obvious from the first note.
Forward motion
There is an important aspect to music called forward motion, or momentum. It refers to the fact that for every micro-moment that occurs in a song, there is a musically logical “follower”. For example, when we hear these chords: C-Am-Dm-G7, the logical follower is a C chord. That’s not to say it must be a C. There are other ways we can finish that progression. But certainly with that progression we experience that well-known phenomenon we call forward motion.
Another way to say all this is to focus on the audience. All songs are collections of micro-moments, some of which create tension where an audience might unconsciously think, “I wonder what’s going to happen next?”, and some of which create a sense of release in the mind of the listener.
And the best songs, it’s fair to say, are ones that create a satisfying balance between tension moments and release moments. That term, tension and release, is the evidence we need to prove that music works best in one direction, and not in a reversed state: there is no satisfying “release-and-tension” that I’m aware of.
Your own songs are collections of tension-and-release moments, all of which give your songs that important sense of forward motion. Most of the time, you don’t need to think hard about this. You naturally and instinctively create these moments when you write a lyric: you set up scenarios in your verse lyric (tension), and you describe how you feel in your chorus lyric (release).
But from time to time, it’s a good idea to take a closer look at the songs you write, put a magnifying glass on what you’ve written, and ask yourself: what is the tension that I’ve created, and where does the release actually happen?
It’s a good troubleshooting technique to do that, because that’s when you might discover, for example, that you’ve created all sorts of tension in your verse lyric, but have done little to express emotions in your chorus.
As with all troubleshooting in the songwriting world, it’s best done with songs that, to your ears, might have a problem. There’s no sense in fixing a song that’s working nicely.
But time spent looking at your songs as collections of tension and release moments is a great way to assess their potential success in front of an audience.
Written by Gary Ewer. Follow Gary on Twitter.
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