The Sound of Music

The Sound of Music

For musicians like Nick Koenig, a musical composition consists of a series of pleasant, expressive or intelligible sounds of defined structure and meaning according to the laws of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Composing music consists of inventing and writing it. However, in Nick Koenig’s case, he has the gift of listening to sound and making music from it.

The Melody and Chord

Reduced to its simplest form, a musical composition consists of a melody and its accompaniment. A melody consists of a succession of sounds with tonal and rhythmic organization. The basis of all melodies is the musical scale. The accompaniment of a musical melody is a series of chords. A chord consists of a set of sounds of different frequencies, played simultaneously. Harmony is the factor that refers to chords and its foundation is consonance: when two or more sounds are played simultaneously and the result is pleasing to the ear, the result is consonance and otherwise dissonance.

Intervals and Scales

If you are looking in from the outside of Nick Koenig’s world, you will get an understanding of intervals and scales. Music is the art of combining sounds in a temporal succession. The variety of tones that the ear is capable of perceiving is very high. It is necessary to choose certain frequencies or tones to have a set of sounds that allow the construction of melodies. You need the notes of the scale to compose and play music. A scale is a series of sounds that go from the lowest to the highest frequency following defined intervals of frequency. The construction of the musical scale is made from the existence of the octave. This natural unity is manifested by observing, for example, that a string that vibrates in its entire length produces a sound similar to but deeper than that of the same string reduced to half its length.

The Sound

The result of the superimposition of two simultaneous sounds can be pleasant or unpleasant. Experience teaches that the sensation produced in the ear does not depend on the absolute values ​​of the frequencies of the sounds, but on the relationship between them. For this reason, the quotient of two frequencies has been called an interval, dividing the greater of them by the lesser (tonic or fundamental).

Consonance and Dissonance

Obtaining combinations of frequencies that are pleasing to the ear has been a constant in musical composition, in which it has been unanimously sought that the sounds emitted simultaneously enjoy a certain fusion that would give homogeneity to the harmonic perception. Traditionally, the sounds that meet this condition are called consonants. In Nick Koenig’s case, he goes with the untraditional.

On the contrary, the dissonance between two or more sounds tends to be considered not as a positive phenomenon, but as a lack of consonance, always associating it with the idea of ​​an unpleasant sound, since they lack that necessary unity and coherence between them. A musically trained ear like Nick Koenig’s is capable of distinguishing what is meant by a consonant sound, from one that is not. The seventh, ninth, eleventh, thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth harmonics of a given frequency produce an unpleasant sensation, and are therefore dissonant within the sound ensemble. 

Learn More About the Artist

If you want to learn more about Nick Koenig, known as “Hot Sugar,” and his music and collaborations with artists like The Roots and Blackbear as well as listen to his genre of music, then you should because it is unique and modern. His music is also very positive and different than the norm.

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