I don’t know if this is a universal thing or just me, but I suspect there are many others that experience this same phenomenon. Even if a song is already firmly ingrained in my head and I know it like the back of my hand, as soon as another song is being played out loud in the background – even if it’s one I have no interest in or am not consciously paying attention to – I will ‘forget’ how the first one goes (by that I mean usually my mind goes blank when trying to recall the melody or chord progression).
Is there a fundamental reason for this? Perhaps it’s somehow a quirk linked to our ancient survival instincts whereby the human brain stops whatever it was doing to instead focus on auditory stimuli (i.e. potential threats) in the surrounding environment? Or maybe some of our brains just aren’t powerful enough to focus well enough on two songs playing at once, in the same way that it’s hard to focus on two or more conversations people around you are having?
In: Biology
It’s a difficult thing to do, but you can train to hear multiple melodies. But the stronger force is what we call tonality, that is music that has a tonic, or home pitch or key. We are strongly trained to hear tonal music, where there is a definite home, or target, or tonic (Tonic means rest, cure medicine… think tonic water).
Some people will use the term atonal to describe music that doesn’t do this, but I consider the term pejorative, since it implies that there is no system. Instead, the term post-tonal is more inclusive and can describe the different systems explored in the 20th century.
You might want to research bitonality, which is an interesting concept. Charles Ives is one of the first cited advocates, and since his father was a band director who participated in parades, young Charles encountered the phenomenon of one band fading out in one key, and another approaching in a different key.
You could start by studying counterpoint, the study of two or more melodies interacting. The supreme genre of this is the fugue, e.g. many works by Bach. You can focus on hearing competing melodies (albeit in the same key) in such works as The Art of the Fugue, and the Well Tempered Klavier. Kunst Das Fugue is the most important.
This is a very narrow world view, and does not account for music of other cultures; it is how prevalent the music of dead German white guys is. But tonal music is the sandbox most of us live in. The strength of tonality is overpowering, unless you were raised in a fundamentally rhythmic environment (c.f. drumming of west Africa especially Ghana).
But mostly the answer to your question is that tonality is very strong, and once a new song asserts is new key (by a dominant/tonic relationship) it takes over your sense of home.
Latest Answers