CITATION — REFERENCE ENTRY
pop-tonic-ambiguity · yust2024-tonality-racism
- Citation
- yust2024-tonality-racism
- Claim ID
- pop-tonic-ambiguity
- Assertion
- In loop-based popular music, competent listeners can hear different notes as the tonic of the same song, as discussed by Mark Spicer and Mark Richards. Yust argues that this implies hearing a specific tonic is not part of competency in at least some popular styles.
- Quote
Mark Spicer (2017) discusses this and many other rock music examples in which competent listeners can hear different tonics, and Mark Richards (2017) identifies a specific chord loop (the “axis progression”) that gives rise to many similarly ambiguous examples. The phenomenon is clearly relatively common in recent popular music, which implies that hearing a specific note as tonic, at least for some kinds of popular songs, is not a part of competency in the style.
- Quote language
- en
- Locator
- Section (2) Tonic, tonal center, centricity (preprint)
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