As some of you already know (since you were participants), I recently conducted a little pilot study to investigate some aspects of music cognition. My main focus was how different levels of repetition factored into a listener’s preference for a song. In other words, if a certain part of a song is repeated more or less often, does this change affect how much you like or dislike a song?

In popular music, I think we can take for granted that the repetition of portions of a song is one of the basic tools that songwriters use to structure their tunes: “second verse, same as the first.” The chorus of a song, for instance, often reappears exactly the same way at multiple points in the song: lyrics, harmony, melody, instrumentation are all identical from iteration to iteration. Does it matter, then, how often these identical parts get repeated?

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that at some point, we as listeners would get bored with a song that repeated the same section over and over without any change. Of course, many songs have repetitive harmonic structures, but often a balance is negotiated (in a good song) by having other domains change and thus add interest: melodies get embellished, instruments get added, rhythms change. It’s this balance of variety versus unity – a balance that lots of composers talk about – that keeps our interest in a song. For a stripped down guitar/vocal arrangement, there is going to be more pressure for harmonic and melodic variation than were more instruments involved.

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When sitting down to write a song, I think harmony and melody are often at the forefront of one’s mind. Musicians love to talk about harmony (the vertical component) and melody (the horizontal component) as two sides of the same coin. That “coin,” of course, is the domain of pitch.

But yet in much popular music, pitch seems to play less of a central role in the structure of a song than the role pitch plays in classical music. Take for example rap music. In a lot of rap music, there is typically no discernable vocal melody since the vocalist is speaking more than singing, and the underlying harmony is often static throughout the entire song. So our interest in the music, therefore, must be activated by another domain.

Beck’s breakthrough hit “Loser” provides what I think is a good example of how variety in a domain other than pitch can sustain our interest during the course of a song. In “Loser,” Beck uses just a small assortment of repetitive samples. But throughout the tune, the combination of these samples is constantly changing – the instrumentation is always reshuffled in new and different ways.

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Warning: this post will be discussing face-melting guitar solos, so please don’t read any further unless you are OK with the melting of your face. Heed your potential future forecasted in the album cover below:

I have to admit that I was recently jamming along with Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” (from their album Machine Head). I probably haven’t jammed along to that song since I was 15, so my memory of the song was a little faded. On casual listening, I always assumed the form of “Smoke on the Water” to be basically a pair of verse/chorus parts, followed by a solo over the verse/chorus part, with a final verse/chorus and riffs inserted in the middle. In other words:

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Rhythm guitar is an instrumental role that can found in almost every popular style of music. As well, the approach to rhythm guitar playing is fairly similar across a variety of genres. For example, in bluegrass, the rhythm guitarist mostly strums big open chords on an acoustic guitar; in rock, the rhythm guitar player typically pounds out power chords; and in jazz, rhythm guitarists usually comp chords through an often complicated set of changes. In each case, the rhythm guitar part mainly functions to fill up the sonic space with purely harmonic content.

As basically harmonic filler, some may think that the particular notes played by the rhythm guitar part are not very important as long as those notes fit into the chord. The rhythm guitar’s foremost job, as its name implies, is to simply keep the rhythm. On a lot of country albums, the rhythm guitar is equalized to the point where it almost sounds like someone is playing a washboard; all the bass frequencies are rolled off and only the sound of the pick hitting the strings is what is left to cut through the mix.

The duties of the rhythm guitarist do not always have to be relegated to mere timekeeping, however. In the guitar parts of Freddie Green, for example, we can see rhythm guitar playing transcend its original function as solely a rhythmic and harmonic element. With Freddie Green, the rhythm guitar becomes an integral melodic and contrapuntal thread to the musical fabric.

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Amy Winehouse seems to be everywhere these days with her hit “Rehab” off her Back to Black album. I saw her play on the MTV movie awards and now she’s on the cover of Rolling Stone. I admit I like the song; it’s catchy. But does anyone agree with me that it’s a little repetitive?

A little more than half way into “Rehab” I start to get bored. The same chorus, albeit a catchy one, keeps reappearing without much if any variation. The B section keeps coming back unchanged as well. To show this lack of development, here’s a quick sketch of the form of the song (CH = chorus, B = B section):

CH – B – CH – B – CH(1/2) – B – CH

Admittedly, when the chorus comes back that third time, it is cut in half. But my boredom begins exactly on the downbeat of this chorus, so by the time the song slightly alters this third chorus by shortening it, I have already started to lose interest. Even though it’s a great chorus, I think listeners start to get tired of something the third time they hear it; we crave variation as much as we crave unity, and there isn’t enough of it here.

So my questions is: what could she have done differently to improve on the structure of the song? In trying to answer this question, I thought it would be good to take a look at some girl groups from the 1960s since they are often cited as sources for Amy Winehouse’s music.

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