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Home » Why Do You Like Your Favorite Songs? – Scarlet Keys (Transcript)

Why Do You Like Your Favorite Songs? – Scarlet Keys (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Scarlet Keys’ talk titled “Why Do You Like Your Favorite Songs?” at TEDxPortsmouth conference.

In this TEDx talk, Scarlet Keys explores the profound impact of songs on our lives and emotions. She describes songs as a powerful time capsule and emphasizes their ability to transport us to different times and places. Keys, a professor at Berklee College of Music and a songwriter herself, delves into the technical aspects of songwriting, such as the significance of tone, melody, and chords in evoking emotions.

She illustrates her points with examples, including a unique interpretation of Adele’s “Someone Like You”, demonstrating how different musical elements can alter the emotional impact of a song. She also discusses the therapeutic power of music, sharing personal experiences with music during challenging times, like her battle with breast cancer. Through her talk, Keys underscores the intricate and emotive power of songs, explaining why we resonate with our favorite music.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Soundtrack of Our Lives

Songs are the soundtrack of our lives. From birthday parties, lullabies, our first love, our first heartbreak, our wedding song, our next wedding song, and ultimately the song that’s played at our funeral, songs enhance the moment or the season. They help us dance. They make us cry, run the extra mile, and even make sitting in traffic just a little bit less tedious.

Songs help us remember our lives. They are a time capsule and a time machine. Imagine you’re riding in your car next to your partner in your perfectly happy marriage, when all of a sudden that song comes on. That song, you know, that song from that one summer love, and as your partner is sweetly giving you a traffic update, you are gone, evaporated.

Evaporated from your heated seat back to that Greek island with the sunset lips of Pericles, Constantine Danos coming in for a kiss. You have been transported by a song that was encoded in your brain that summer. It’s not your fault. Songs are powerful. Have you ever thought about what’s in a song, what’s in those three and a half minutes of arranged sound that have such impact?

The Power of Songwriting

We all listen to and turn to songs. I’ve had the privilege of being someone who writes songs, and as a professor at the Berklee College of Music, I help other artists write theirs. And there are tools we use as songwriters that affect emotion. One of the tools we use is tone. That’s something we all understand, tone.

Imagine you’re sitting in a cold hospital room waiting to meet your doctor, wearing nothing but your underwear beneath your dignity gown, and your doctor comes in. Nobody wants to hear, “Hello, my name is Dr. Watson, and I’m your brain surgeon.” We want to hear, “Hello, my name is Dr. Watson, and I am your brain surgeon.” Because when his tone of voice goes up, so does your heart rate.

And when his tone of voice goes down, you feel calm and like, “I’m in good hands.” So, tone of voice matters. The next time you go on a first date, you can either say, “I haven’t been on a date in a while,” or you can say, “I haven’t been on a date in a while.” It matters. It matters. So think of melody as the song’s tone of voice. How we say what we say is oftentimes more important than what we say.

As Western listeners, we have a relationship to melody, and we have an expectation to that relationship. So I’m going to play something, and when I stop playing, I want you to tell me what you expect me to play next. (Music)

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There it is. Exactly. So some notes feel stable, and some notes feel more unstable, begging for resolution. And that’s very powerful information for a songwriter to know.

The Impact of Lyrics

The words we place on those notes make the listener feel certain things. I’d like to take a moment to ruin an Adele song. I’m sure you’ve all heard her song, “Someone Like You.” In the verse and in the pre-chorus, she runs into her ex unexpectedly, and she’s clearly still in love. And in the chorus, she says, “never mind, I’ll find someone like you.” Okay, you know the song.

What if she had sung it like this? “Never mind, I’ll find someone like you.” What happened? I apologize, by the way. In my version, we believe her. We believe she will find someone like you. No problem. There’s plenty of you out there.

Because I have paired stable notes in the key and stable chords, bringing a feeling of stability. But that’s not the melody she’s singing. Those weren’t the tones that she’s singing. This is her version. “Never mind, I’ll find someone like you.” Do you feel the difference?

So when she’s saying “never mind,” she’s saying it on the most stable note in the major key. When she’s saying “find someone,” she’s saying it on that note that you all wanted me to resolve back to the home note. “Find someone.” And then she sings “you” on the bittersweet sixth degree of the major scale, breaking your heart. “You.” In her version, we know she will never find anyone like you.

Building Empathy Through Song

We know that. We know that because she has paired unstable pitches to match the way she’s feeling, building empathy with the audience. Go Adele. Another way that songwriters emotionalize our lyrics is the use of chords. Chords are just three to four notes played at the same time. Three. Four. And chords have a lot to say about how our lyrics feel.

So let’s say I want to write a song about eating a Snickers bar. And let’s say that I feel amazing about eating that Snickers bar because they just came out with a fat-free vegan version. I would want to make sure that I picked chords that felt as happy about this news as I do.