Jacob Collier on how music impacts us

1. 0:00 – 0:05

   Augmented triad: the “eyes widening” harmonic effect

   1. JCJacob Collier0:00

      This sound [piano arpeggio] is, is the fairy, right?

   2. SPSpeaker0:05

      [laughs]

2. 0:05 – 0:41

   Diminished chord: shrinking harmony into unease

   1. JCJacob Collier0:05

      Ooh. Wow. You know. [piano arpeggio] Everyone knows the feeling. This is kind of built out what, of what we call an, an augmented triad. Augmented means it's got bigger, right? So this is a usual triad. [piano triad] And if I augment that triad, [piano triad] I'm stretching the top note up, and it's like mm. So I th... It's almost like the eyes widening thing is really happening. You've gone [piano arpeggio] right? Yeah. Wow, right? A diminished chord is what happens when you shrink a triad. Triad is a three-note chord. One, two, three. Diminished chord is this sound. [piano triad] So, you know. It's literally, in my mind it's like [piano diminished chord] .

   2. SPSpeaker0:41

      [laughs]

3. 0:41 – 0:45

   Intervals underneath: naming the dissonant building blocks

   1. JCJacob Collier0:41

      You know? It's, it's, that's kind of what's going on. And it's all built out of these basic intervals. Like-

4. 0:45 – 1:51

   Dissonance isn’t “bad”: it can be devastatingly beautiful

   1. SPSpeaker0:45

      Mm

   2. JCJacob Collier0:45

      ... if I play this inter- this interval [piano diminished second] right? This is what we call a diminished second, if you, if you want to give it a name. [piano diminished second] And this is a little bit less friendly. It's like oh, you know what I mean? [piano diminished second] It's like, uh, this is what we call dissonance, right? And so you might say, "Well, that just sounds bad, and the other one sounds good," but the truth is, this [piano diminished second] can be absolutely beautiful to the point of devastating. [piano music] There it is. [piano music] That uhhh. [piano diminished second] Right? If you control the dissonance, you have way more meaningful harmony than if you just play consonant stuff all the time. Baked into music and the study of it is so many of the things that make us better people. But one of them is about not being afraid of dissonance. And actually, in music, if we lean into the dissonance and learn to control it, we have this huge, broad palette that's so much more meaningful than

5. 1:51 – 2:18

   Tension and release: why music moves us

   1. JCJacob Collier1:51

      if we just take the pretty intervals and whatever. A lot of the reason why music moves us is because of all these little tensions and releases that we experience across the, the, the, the kind of path of a, of a musical piece. And it's controlled by all these things like dissonance and consonance and rhythm and time and repetition and... But all these things exist in speech naturally, in a sense, and they exist in our culture, and they exist ob- ob- observationally in the world. So again, it's like no... It's, it's, it's no surprise that music has such an impact on us.

Episode duration: 2:18