Investigate Layers of Sound

Instrumental Activity

Feel the Eighth Note Pulse

• Listen to your chosen arrangement. Clap along with the beat. Remember that when you clap once on every beat, you are playing quarter notes. Occasionally play eighth notes by clapping evenly two times during the course of one beat.

  "Black to Gray" -- Arrangement 1
  
  "Black to Gray" -- Arrangement 2
  
  "Black to Gray" -- Arrangement 3

• To help you feel the difference between the quarter notes and the eighth notes, clap along with the recorded hand claps at 0:43 of 7/4 time signature. You will hear a measure of hand claps every quarter note alternating with a measure of hand claps every eighth note. (The eighth notes are twice as fast.)
• Return to your chosen arrangement and practice switching between clapping quarter notes and clapping eighth notes. Improvise rhythms that incorporate both quarter and eighth notes. Be sure they work well with the song. If you can, notate these rhythms.

Create an Arpeggio Texture

• An arpeggio is an interesting way to add a musical layer to a piece of music. An arpeggio is created when the notes of a chord are played one at a time. They work very well on pitched instruments that can play multiple notes at once, such as the piano, guitar, or harp, because the sounds can overlap. However, arpeggios can also be played on single-note instruments, such as the flute, oboe, and saxophone.
• Since the song is in D Dorian, which has a minor-like sound, listen first to the three D minor arpeggios. The notation below shows different ways of playing D minor arpeggios:

Tune Your Guitar

• Now practice playing the arpeggios with a pitched instrument. When you are comfortable playing each arpeggio voicing separately, practice switching smoothly between them.

• When you are comfortable with switching, try playing the different arpeggios along with your chosen arrangement. At first, play a new note on every beat. Find interesting places to switch between arpeggios. When you are comfortable with this, try playing a new pitch on every eighth note (two notes per beat). As you do so, try to create interesting dynamic effects by playing loud notes at the beginning of a measure and then gradually playing softer notes toward the end of the measure.

  "Black to Gray"--Arrangement 1
  
  "Black to Gray"--Arrangement 2
  
  "Black to Gray"--Arrangement 3

• Optional: Perform your improvisation for others.

Improvise in D Dorian

• The tonality of this piece is in the mode of D Dorian. It uses the same pitches as C major—the white keys on the piano. However, the tonal center, or "home tone," is D. The notation is provided below.

• Practice playing the D Dorian scale. The D Dorian scale is similar to the D natural minor scale. The difference is that the sixth pitch (B) of the D Dorian scale is a half step higher than the sixth pitch in the D natural minor scale (B).

Tune Your Guitar

• Now practice playing the D Dorian scale without the audio file. Frequently change the direction of step-wise movement and skip notes to invent melodies.
• When you are comfortable with the scale, improvise over your chosen arrangement. Try to complement, not compete with, the other musical layers in the audio file. Let your phrases begin on beat 1 of the given measure. To hear examples of how you can phrase your improvisation, listen to the vocals on the audio file "Black to Gray"--Improvisation. If possible, use your ear to identify the exact pitches you hear in the vocal part.
• Optional: Perform your improvisation for others.

Advnaced Percussion Activity

• Recall that because a measure of 7/4 contains seven quarter notes, the same measure in 7/4 time contains 14 eighth notes, since each quarter note can be divided into two eighth notes.
• In Section 1 of this project, you learned to divide the 7/4 groove of the song into groups of 3 and 2 beats. Specifically, you divided it as 3+2+2. Now consider how the 14 eighth notes in the same measure can be divided into groups of 3 and 2. One grouping is 3+3+3+3+2, which would be counted as:

1 - 2 - 3 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 1 - 2

Another grouping would be 3+2+3+2+2+2, which would be counted as:

1 - 2 - 3 - 1 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 1 - 2 - 1 - 2- 1 - 2

• Write down other possible combinations. Practice playing them by clapping a steady stream of eighth notes, accenting the beats shown as "1."
• When you are comfortable with the various combinations, play them along with your chosen arrangement, either by clapping or by playing on a percussion instrument.
• Remember that the song is counted off as quarter notes, so your eighth notes should be played twice as rapidly. Make sure to begin your patterns on beat 1 of each measure.
• Evaluate which patterns are the most interesting and why. As an extra challenge, perform your combinations of eighth notes again, but remain silent on the unaccented eighth notes.

Web Links Extension

Go to the Web Links Extension to compare layers of music in two songs and to explore how visual artists also show layering in their artworks.

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