I wonder if this joke has been made already, but with the shipname for Rose/Kanaya being Rosemary, I'm not sure I want those two to have a kid. Spoiler: explaining the joke Rosemary's baby
I don't understand how people can find instrumental music so... informative, for lack of a better word. here's a review from the One Year Older album- "okay i love this album so much. it really captures this side of the guardians that the readers never necessarily assumed, and the way the tracks tell a story is So Good. i personally really liked the tension in cancerous core and game over--it feels like the auditory representation of losing that kind of childlike naivety about what a parent's life is perceived as." It's not that deep .jpg
-throws vivaldi and several other historic musicians at you- no seriously, you can tell stories with music alone
music makes me feel and sense different things depending on how it sounds. order the different sounding/feeling parts together, and it paints a story. it's more open to interpretation than word or picture sometimes, but when it's meant to stand alongside an existing word/picture/general story setup, then the story the music is telling is even clearer. sequences of music that rise and fall and try to evoke different emotion is an auditory story the same way a set of pictures is a visual story. you can lead in, have the fall and rise of a hero, action and adventure, and even have a fairly good idea of what ending is in place depending on the sound. idk how to explain it better than that, i'm not wordsing well and music also hits me in the color/taste section already and vice versa so it's kinda confusing to explain it without that bc i know not everyone has that.
it's like....i don't know that everyone does this, and i'm a synesthete so i'm trying not to color (ehehehe) my explanation with that, but uhhhhhhHH a bass drum can sound like booming footsteps, a violin can wail because it sounds a little bit like someone crying when done right? i'll listen to karkat's theme from alterniabound and try to explain that, as an example? i picked that because toby fox described it as "a leader on the warpath" so i have evidence that this one at least is that deep and that i'm not just spouting nonsense ;p the time signature feels 3/3, so it's not slow, but it also doesn't feel manic or hurried. the song is going forward at a very structured, regimented pace kept by the bassline. the higher notes feel a little hollow, a little woodwind-y for the first half, and the way they run together and sort of trail down the scale is supposed to feel a little frustrated, or at the very least definitely not happy. so for the first half of the song, the strong bassline plus the higher notes is supposed to evoke the sense of someone on the warpath, maybe someone who's biting off more than they can chew, but definitely-definitely someone who's going to march up into your face and tell you what to do. the song loses that regimented structure about halfway through for a bit, and extra sections come in, including (notably) an elephant trumpeting. the tempo doesn't change, but it does get harder to detect beneath all the noise. to me, this feels like the sort of unhappy tones we hear in the beginning are rising into anger. i think the elephant trumpeting is an interesting addition that makes that clearer, because we associate that sound with anger and shouting. and when the main theme becomes clearer again there's a crescendo up to the end of the song, which brings that hollow feeling up into something that feels a lot more directed and forceful does that make any sense?
Basically music tends to tell stories the same way onomatopoeia conveys meaning: It sounds like the thing it is meant to evoke. (Unless it's modern art music, then it just sounds like Uncomfortable but in a neat way.) Character themes especially are a tricky thing, because if they work, they are incredbly clear in their communication but if they don't they fall flat *really* hard. When it comes to that I recommend reading up on Leitmotifstil, and Wagner Operas, as he is the one who "invented" that style of associating certain melodies with certain characters, then begin approaching more modern pieces. Homestuck is in fact very good about Leitmotifstil, which is what leads me to believe that at least SOME plot twists must have been planned a long time off, due to things like Gamzee and John sharing a leitmotif/theme song. Music is its own language and stylistic choices inform the context in which the work is meant to be viewed enough to convey a lot of meaning. It's actually a pity that musical education falls by the wayside for a lot of people. One Year Later is very much informed by classic concerto forms and conventions but I'd need to review it again to properly explain it. But believe me, especially with things Toby Fox worked on? ItsReallyThatDeepDawg.jpg
... well the words you are all saying make sense, but I'm still not sure I understand. Maybe I'm dumb?? I can understand how songs can convey very simple things, such as "this is melancholy" or "it's springtime!", or even a series of simple things, like "this is an action sequence! Things are going good for our heroes. Oh no, the scary bad guy is here!" But I don't... think music speaks to me the way it speaks to you, for some reason. (Also the fuck do you mean gamzee and John share a leitmotif)
yep, same here. i'm generally bored by purely instrumental music when it isn't accompanied by images or words or whatever. like, i can get vague feelings or a vague sense of what kind of thing might be happening but i need images and/or words to really connect with music.
A leitmotif is a "a recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation". So John and Gamzee share a musical motif, which links them thematically.
Okay so: John's theme as established by Act 1 of homestuck is Showtime/Harlequin, depending on mix (It's showtime, but Harlequin is a different song associated with the charatcer using the same leitmotif) In all fairness I actually had the timeline on song releases and plotpoints wrong, BUT the point stands that post-murderstuck-meltdown one of Gamzee's songs, "The Carnival"? Uses Harlequin as thematic material. I think it was published after it was revealed that the reason John doodled clowns on his wall he himself couldn't perceive were Gamzee's chucklevoodoos. The Carnival is also the song most people remember for Gamzee since it was actually used in the comic and, unlike other songs associated with gamzee wasn't simply supplementary material. But yes this heavily suggests that John's leitmotif is a direct result of Gamzee's influence. One of the twists that could be called early though is that one of Gamzee's songs back from the AlterniaBound album is called "Midnight Calliope" Make of that what you will :P
Actually if you guys want me to write up an analysis using some homestuck music and recurring motifs therein I probably could, just to like show my thought process.
I think it must be an individual brain thing, like some people are naturally really good at learning math or languages.
that would be interesting to see. :D you're able to pick up a lot more about music than me, it would be neat to maybe learn some things and to see your process.
I'm not sure what you're offended by? Did I not explain it enough? I'm... I did my a-levels with focus on music so I sometimes skip steps that seem completely obvious to me? Where do you need me to back up and explain more? I can try to seperate out the notes and handwrite them if it would help?
So you got the individual parts denoting stuff like "melancholic" or "springtime" or "action sequence", and then you string them together like movie scenes, or words. -enables- yes please do ::D
