Emotional Resonance
Emotional resonance can connects deeply with listeners, evoking authentic feelings and memories. Strong emotional resonance transforms technical skills into artistic expression, making the music relatable and impactful.
Research has officially wrapped and I’m moving on to phase 2 - Exercises.
In this phase of the music composition process we take time to go deep into a two topics: emotional resonance and thoughtful listening. The Research phase was all about going wide with ideas, ultimately curating a moodboard that gives us a palette from which to work. In Exercises, we’ll really get to know the genre by listening to our reference tracks and walk away with a clear emotional goal for the piece before we start writing. Let’s dig into the latter.
So what is “emotional resonance?”
Emotional resonance is the quality of a piece of music that allows it to connect deeply with listeners on an emotional level. It's the feeling that occurs when a composition strikes a chord within us, evoking specific emotions, memories, or states of being that feel authentic and meaningful.
It starts with selecting a core theme that will guide the entire piece (for this piece ours is a storm in the Great Lakes). From there, we do a word branching exercise where we let our minds go wherever they like. The goal of this exercise is to get a few layers deep beyond something practical (ie. the summer is hot) and open up our imaginations to curate the feeling. As musicians, we want to be showers and not tellers, so we might start out by saying “summer → hot” but then quickly move to going deep “no school → sprinklers → fresh cut grass → popsicle break → the joy of freedom.” In this little example, I instantly was brought back to being a kid and reflecting on my summers off from school in the backyard playing in the sprinkler. Now, my core emotion to go for maybe a fun summer pop tune (anybody up for a collab?!) is the “youthful joy of freedom.”
Kinda fun, huh?
We intentionally write everything down here and then select some of the stand out words or phrases to keep at the forefront of our imaginations as we begin writing this piece.
Side note: this practice is incredibly helpful when writing lyrics as well, because some of the words you generate can actually inspire the lyrics you’ll eventually sing.
So, here’s the word exercise that I came up with for Project Storm:
Next Scorecard I’ll be digging into my four reference tracks to discuss what I’m hearing, learning, and borrowing. Thanks for being on the journey!
Pat