Apologies for dropping the ball on finishing my overview of the online songwriting course I was taking. Here’s the last installment of the overview of the specific weeks of the course and what we learned in them. Picking up with where we left off (the final week) . . . The other thing Pat Pattison talked about in the final week of the songwriting class was the relationship between the pitches we use when talking and the melodies we should create when creating music for lyrics. The idea is that our speaking voices make use of pitches (even in a non-tonal language like English) and that those pitches suggest to us what the melody might look like. He gave a number of examples of cross-cultural pitch patterns in various things that you’re trying to express. Apparently we wine and tease (across many different language groupings) in minor thirds. He also argues that we each have a natural tonic – a pitch that is essentially home base for our speech (and he showed how you might find yours, by focusing on certain less important parts of speech), and that speaking in that tonic shows trust and belief. The tonic represents “honesty, fact, statement.” The subdominant (4th) represents motion away from the tonic and the dominant (5th) represents motion towards the tonic. The stressed syllables in speech show a relationships with the tonic that demonstrates the sentiment they contain. We’re happy in major thirds and ask questions in major 5ths, and we tend to threaten each other in the 5th below the tonic and plead (“I don’t want to die!”) in the 7th. Throughout the course his point has been good songwriting mirrors speech and so we need to pay attention to how we actually do things when speaking naturally. This melodic bit is an extension of that argument, and he demonstrated it extremely well in the videos. It also made me think of the times that I hear a phrase in my mind (which is how my songwriting almost always starts) and it more or less arrives with a melody attached to it. There are definitely parts of my songwriting where I’ll go hunting for a melody and try out various options until I come up with something I like, but almost always at least some part of the melody suggests itself. I now wonder if it might be doing that based in part on the harmonic functions of speech. And it does suggest, when I’m stuck melodically, how to consider which types of intervals in a particular context might be good ones to try. He concluded the entire course with reference to a book by Joseph Jordanian called Why Do People Sing? It argues that music has been key to human survival, that tones came before words in communication. Pat talked about the value of singing together and urged us to “write a song that is capable of engaging the tribe” (with a simple, singable chorus). Which is, regardless of the evolutionary logic, a good thing to remember to do.