This week, my music teacher decided to try something a bit different with me after finishing up our voice leading exercise with different modes. He showed me the intro to the show the Legend of Korra which was the sequel to Avatar the Last Airbender. It was quite similar to the original Avatar intro where they say the four elements and each one has a different chord.
The first thing that I tried doing was figuring out at least one note being played during each chord. For me, it was the easiest to pick out he highest notes that the choir was singing, and I was able to get those notes pretty easily. At first, I thought that it would be simple and that the highest note would be the root note and we could go from there. However, my music teacher reminded me that in full orchestration the highest note isn’t always the root note and that you can’t automatically assume.
Since, we needed more information, the next best thing for us to do was to listen to see whether or not the first chord was major or minor. To be honest, it was really hard for me to tell especially since an entire orchestra was playing and I was hearing all sorts of different timbres. In the end though, my music teacher helped me out there quite a bit and we established which chords were major and minor.
After that, we listed different major and minor chords that included the high notes as any of their chord tones and slotted them in until we found one that fit the sound. After the first two chords we started to try and determine the key and mode. Eventually we narrowed things down to a few possibilities so that we would be able to predict what our next chords could be. Unfortunately, we had a problem when it came to our third chord because theoretically there wasn’t any chord within our possible key signatures and modes that included the high note that we were hearing.
I spent a good few minutes trying to figure out whether or not we did something wrong or if I heard the wrong note, but eventually my music teacher just told me the key was a harmonic minor scale where the 7th degree of the scale is raised by one semitone. This allowed changed one of the previous minor chords that didn’t work into a major chord and we finally had our third chord figured out. The last chord wasn’t too special since we figured out that it was just the first chord again but an octave higher.
Once we finished figuring out the first four chords, there was a second section with more instrumentation and an actual melody. Just like the first section, I didn’t have much trouble figuring out the higher notes, or in this case the melody. What was different this time around though, was that now I know exactly what key we were in and was able to fill in chords based on what the melody was outlining.
Overall, I think that even though the intro was 20 seconds or so, it was still kind of difficult to pick out specific things. The fact that there were lots of different instruments playing which makes voicings a lot larger made me pretty confused, but in the end it was a good listening exercise for me to practice with.