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Musical Investigation


Lynsey

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Hello,

So I am comparing Finnish folk music (using the song Vot Vot Ja Niin Niin by Varttina) and modern day Western Finnish rock (using the band HIM, The Rasmus, Poets of the Fall, or Negative... haven't decided on a song yet). I am having trouble finding a common link between the two, however, since I don't have physical music to look at. Any ideas? :(

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Hmm... so u want the actual scores to compare? Well I suggest you try to obtain them asap, but in the meantime you could try downloading the midi files of the songs which should show up on a program such as Sibelius. However, don’t expect a nicely laid out score, IT WILL BE A MESS with hidden notes and lots of ties, basically the result of a computer interpreting music. So it might not be worth doing if time is important. Have you tried searching for free scores on google?

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I see, well I'm no music expert but I did do music for gcse. I DO NOT TAKE IB MUSIC, so the advice I am giving is purely my opinion and may seem elementary.

I listened to Vot vot ja niin niin and there were some key features which could be related to pop songs nowadays. The first was call and response, the lead singer would sing a phrase and the chorus would imitate the lead singer in the bars after.

The second was the repetitive base. I could not hear whether it was a four bar cycle or an eight bar (I bet four bar) but most pop songs follow a four bar chord progression which repeats and repeats. Another feature of the base was that it played the base note then played and octave higher. So in one beat it would have quaver base quaver octave and so on. This is extremely similar to Euro trance and other types of club music.

The third is a hook line, i.e. the most memorable melody of a song which is repeated throughout the song in phrases. ALL songs have a vocal hook line.

The fourth is the percussion, I think it is a tamberine. It syncopates or plays every off beat. So it plays on the second quaver of every beat. This is like the snare drum or high-hat which plays in such a way in most rock or pop songs.

I hope this gives you some ideas. You may have already detected all of them and you maybe looking for a more sophisticated analysis, but that's all I can give. Hope this helped.

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I don't think I will be able to get the scores at all, I just need to find links that are apparent in listening to the recordings.

I suspect if you ask your school's music department they will be able to get the scores for you. They usually have good connections with online score companies and other musically related things (my school anyways). So you might want to ask them to get the scores for you and pay them back later? I mean with the scores certain things might be more obvious and pop up.

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To find further connections, I suggest just listening to the pieces and doing your best to musically analyze them for specific musical aspects.

Analyze each for:

Melody

Harmony

Rhythm

Tone Color(Timbre)

Tonality(Key)

Form

Instrumentation

Once you've done that for all of your pieces, you can pick out common factors that way.

And yes, I highly recommend getting even one of the scores, if possible. This will make analysis easier, and with a non-audio format you will be able to copy snippets of this music into your investigation to illustrate your points.

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  • 1 month later...

Instead of buying the scores can't you just listen to them and do things like write out scales and melody lines? I just finished mine and that's what I did.

I used Jethro Tull and Japanese Shakuhachi. There weren't any notes or scores for pieces I chose online, so I just wrote it out myself on Sibelius with a lot of listening - It took me an afternoon to write 20ish bars...

But it looks great now it's done!

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