大象传媒

Jacob Collier – the 24-year-old composer, arranger, producer, singer, multi-instrumentalist and all-round musical genius – brings his trademark energy and enthusiasm to 大象传媒 Radio 3 with a brand new series, Jacob Collier's Music Room.

His new show explores music's universal language, revealing surprising parallels across an eclectic range of tracks from classical and jazz to folk and world. Here's a selection of some of the incredible things we've learned so far – facts that may change the way you listen to music forever.

1. The key to a good melody lies in the space between the opening notes

What’s the secret to writing a catchy tune? According to Jacob, it’s all about the intervals between the first few notes – from perfect fourths to minor sevenths (with a few tritones thrown in for good measure).

Don’t panic if this all sound a bit technical. In this clip, we get to hear plenty of intervals in action, with examples ranging from West Side Story to The Simpsons. You’ll be humming minor ninths in the shower before you know it.

2. Folk songs get lodged in your head for a reason

From Danny Boy to What Shall We do With The Drunken Sailor, folk songs have some of the most earwormy, memorable tunes around. From a musical perspective, this is because they’re made up of short, often repeated phrases that feel natural and human.

Plus, as a largely oral tradition, folk songs evolve over time and across genres in a way that makes sense to every new generation – there can be dozens, if not hundreds of variations on one particular folk song. So there’s no wonder they strike a chord with all of us.

3. We’re all hardwired to be attracted to a regular pulse...

From the moment our ears physically develop, we’re exposed to one of the most regular sounds of all – the human heart beat. A regular, predictable pulse has been a feature of music in every era of history and in every conceivable geographical location, from medieval plainsong to Grime.

4. Yet music with a disrupted pulse is naturally intriguing to the ear

As listeners, we’re so used to hearing music with a regular pulse that it really grabs our attention when a piece of music deviates from it, even slightly. Jacob cites a technique pioneered by Hip Hop producer J Dilla as an example of how slightly off-beat music can sound strange, even sloppy, and yet still utterly enchant the ear.

We can trace this phenomenon in sound (known technically as “inequality of rhymthic grid”) through history and geography – from Hip Hop to the Viennese waltz, Moroccan gnawa music and Samba, whose pulse has been memorably described as “rolling like an egg”.

“I’m a firm believer that embracing the imperfections of making music is so much of what makes something groove,” says Jacob. “Getting rid of these imperfections runs the risk of removing a lot of the magic that makes this music really special, and diminishes music's ability to connect with us as human beings. We are all imperfect, after all.”

5. Some music forces our brains to invent their own pulse

While most modern music has a regular beat that’s easy to pick out and count along to, some composers go out of their way to write music with a deliberately ambiguous pulse. In Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, for example, you can count two beats in a bar, or three, or four, six or ten… (you see where we’re going with this).

Music like this invites the listener to impose their own patterns on the music – or simply sit back and let the hypnotic rhythms wash over them.

6. Harmony may seem natural to us, but it has only been around for a few hundred years

The idea that music consists of a melody with a harmonised accompaniment is very deeply ingrained in our culture. It’s easy to assume that humans have been singing or playing instruments in harmony since caveman times – but in fact, musical harmony as we know it in the West only started to develop in the medieval period.

This clip takes us on a whistlestop tour through the history of harmony – from the single line melodies of Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century right through to the gnarly harmonies of Benjamin Britten, Charles Ives and Django Bates in the 20th. Along the way, we learn a lot about music theory (and yet weirdly, it doesn’t seem that hard).

7. Composers manipulate our feelings by anticipating our expectations, then unexpectedly taking us somewhere else

One of the simplest yet most effective methods of doing this is to use “suspensions”, which means having one note in the tune or chord hang on for a little longer than you expect it to, while the harmony changes underneath. The effect on our ears can range from “slightly poignant” to “emotionally devastating”.

Composers toy with us even more radically by using harmonic language to suggest that a phrase is going to resolve prettily, but then confounding our expectations by going somewhere else altogether... Step up, Schubert.