Switched On Pop: How Popular Music Works, and Why it Matters

by Nate Sloan

On the word “see,” Swift makes use of melisma, the practice of singing multiple pitches for a single syllable of text, turning the monosyllabic “see” into the tripartite “see-eee-eee.”

just think of Maria and the Von Trapps singing “Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do” in the The Sound of Music (1959). These eight-note scales are where we get the term octave, whose root “oct” means eight.

the pentatonic scale, is much shorter, containing only five notes and also coming in a major and minor version.

Melodies like this, that stick to pitches drawn from a single scale, are called diatonic. When songwriters use pitches that lie outside of the scale they have chosen it is called chromaticism—as in chroma, adding color to a melody by including pungent pitches that do not “belong” to the scale.

In tonality, the pitch that is most important is the first one in the

“Blues in the verse and gospel in the chorus.”

there's a reason Bruce Springsteen is called the Boss