I’ve watched this short video, and the background music made me feel uncomfortable. While there were literally no words and the music itself was very simple yet it made me feel unsettling. How does it work?
https://youtu.be/go7v3dqEq64?si=Yhi5RC1jysmgG2vb
(The first 8 seconds and a bit at the 14 second of the video)
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Melody is a language in itself. You communicate feeling. I dont know exactly whats happening but a good example of the power of melody is thinking about the power of tone. If you say youre a good dog but with a mean tone to a dog itll cower.
A lot of horror music and, even more so, horror ambience relies on unpleasant, “broken” sounds. A low hum in and of itself isn’t bad, we’re used to that, but add some distortion and some “texture” to it, and before you know it, you have a really disturbing soundscape that’ll impart this sense of impending doom.
There have been some hypotheses suggesting that especially low-frequency sounds can elicit this subconscious sense of fear and dread due to, for example, lions growling and it kind of sticking with us as we’ve evolved.
It’s not just the low end of the frequency, of course. I’m sure you’ve heard sounds like these: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UrukxRVvHwk These scraping, metallic, discordant noises, again, play into the unpleasant and broken vibe we get, but on the higher frequencies. “Something’s not right.”
It’s been a long long time since I’ve done any music theory and don’t know the right terms, etc…
Certain chords, like minor chords, naturally sound downcast and moody, while other chords sound upbeat a joyful.
Also, with any chord progression your brain has certain expectations on where it should go and how it resolves itself.
By playing with these two facts you can create a sequence that feels off and edgy. Slightly wrong but you can’t put your finger on it, etc.
Might have to be for a very patient 5-year-old, but I’ll try.
There are many different things at work, I’ll go into detail about what’s usually the main bit, consonance and dissonance.
In an octave, the cleanest interval we have, one bit of the instrument vibrates at twice the speed as the other. The further you stray from a clean multiple, the more tension. Tension and release makes a lot of music “work” – very little tension sounds boring, a lot of it without release makes us uneasy.
Some other “mellow” intervals come close to other simple fractions. Ideally a fifth would be a 2:3; in practice it usually isn’t.
(OFF ON A TANGENT: there are different “temperaments”, i.e. ways how to divide notes between a full octave. Modern practice usually divides them evenly, at the cost of not having perfect fractions. Some historic systems have some near-perfect intervals, at the cost of having others sound very very wrong – composers need to know what to avoid, and you can’t simply play everything a note higher – differnt intervals would be off, and the whole feel changes greatly).
Exactly half an octave is about the highest tension we get – ratio is one to the square root of two. We get this from b to f or vice versa.
Most “happy” music is in a major key, and the perfect fifth – e.g. c to g – comes up often.
If you have something with piano-like keys available: Take a simple happy piece, try to play the same thing starting one white key lower – it’ll sound unsettling and wrong.
(Bonus: start two keys lower and it’ll sound sad; one key higher and it’ll be neither happy nor sad. Modes are cool, but that’s another whole thing).
Consonance and dissonance, e.g. how much things sound together or clash, is usually the main thing, but there’s more.
Getting out of the key entirely, e.g. a half-tone up or down, is eerie in a different way.
Less “a monster is going to jump me and bite me in the butt”, more “the world went sideways a bit, and now I’m dizzy”.