Clash and Crunch

 This week my friend Sean invited me to help him work on a song he was arranging for one of his music classes. The song is called Oscar Winning Tears by RAYE. I immediately agreed. This is a song we both fell in love with after seeing it last competition season. He gathered a group of people from our a cappella group and another on campus to practice for the recording next week in the MUB. I am a Mezzo-Soprano on this arrangement which is really fun for me because I usually sing alto, so I got to play around in my upper range. With this arrangement we got to play around with crunchy notes which was so cool. This inspired me this week to explore the nature of clashing harmonies.

I think that when we think of music and sound we tend to think of swelling orchestras and what I like to call "pretty singing".  Now it's interesting think about because what makes a sound "pretty" is really subjective and up to the listener. I find myself associating "pretty" with pure tones, higher pitches, and light vibrato. Does this make lower, raspy voices (like my own) worse? Of course not. But I feel myself associating those qualities to having a good singing voice. Our brains also like order, so we tend to gravitate toward harmonies that lock and sound correct. When we hear notes that clash our brain automatically senses that something is wrong and it can feel like it doesn't sound right. However we are still creating music, and just because it sounds different doesn't make it wrong. This is what I had to ponder on as I played around with clashing harmonies. They can end up making interesting effects in the music. It might not be aesthetically pretty but we can end up making some really cool sounds. I found that the more I played around with the sounds the more I grew to love the crunchy feeling of the cord. We talk a lot about how we express emotion through music and these cords I found to carry heavy emotions, and also more complex ones. I found that these cords provide new avenues to express feelings such as confusion, desperation and turmoil that you don't get to feel as much with pure tones. Playing around with these chords honestly gave me relief coming off a huge test week and I honestly got to channel some of that stress through these chords. 

Below is an attached clip of me and a friend playing with clashing harmonies. There was also a very heavy presence of resonance and buzz in this chord which made it fun to sing.