Your Brain on The Pink Panther
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Artist:
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Album:The Essential James Galway
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Track:The Pink Panther
Okay, this is deep, music theory kind of stuff, so skip it if you're not into it. I'm still reading from Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy, and this is what I've learned about Mancini's "The Pink Panther." But first, go to the website below and listen to several versions of the tune. Now, according to Robert Jourdain, this tune is a good example of how music works. He goes into a good bit of detailed discussion about peaks and slides, plateaus, and the E-minor scale, but what interested me most was his focus on the melody's contour: "To keep the melody interesting, there's minimal repetition of individual tones... Moreover, the melody's contour is in sync with rhythmic accentuations. The melodic contour effectively starts on the downbeat of the first bar, and then restarts on the downbeat of the second. It peaks on the downbeat of the third bar. And it resolves back to the starting note at the start of the fourth bar. Within the prevailing rhythm, these are the theme's strongest, most attention-grabbing moments." But --- Mancini "holds back" and doesn't "make the long-held peak the highest note, thus maximizing the melodic effect" --- because he is "building a larger, eight-bar phrase and he does not want it to climax too soon. Although the fifth through the eighth bars mirror the first four, they employ a higher-pitched dissonance as the long-held note (an E-flat instead of a B-flat). The point of all this is that the listener "remembers the first dissonance when he hears the second, expects the first dissonance to be repeated, and so hears the second as a divergence from it." So, we're surprised, and pleased, and struck by the novelty. What's going on in the brain: "Although the two dissonances are divided by four bars, at higher levels of comprehension the brain hears the upward transition from the first dissonance to the second as if they were adjacent notes. Because nearly every other note in the first four bars is exactly repeated in the second four, the rising pitch of the dissonances is the only changing relation the brain has to observe. But this relation is so strong that the second four bars become an advancement of the first four, and not mere variation." We don't get bored, and we like that.Name some other very memorable, very catchy, movie soundtrack tunes and why you think they stick in our brains.
http://www.high-tech.com/panther/source/sounds.html
http://www.high-tech.com/panther/source/sounds.html
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