DJ Jim Q's Playlist: PATTERN

Greetings listeners, and welcome to this month’s playlist. The theme this month is Pattern. Our friends from the Chennai chapter selected the theme. The theme Pattern is quite a match for music. After all what is music but sequenced noise arranged in patterns to create motifs, all while oscillating between tension and harmony. Both repetition and novelty are used in conjunction to propel listeners through an auditory experience. I think about these sonic journeys much like a story, building characters (instruments/sounds), establishing the world (musical scale), creating arcs (composition and dynamics) all working in combination to keep the listener engaged throughout the evolution of the narrative. Pattern is often the most effective player in making a composition propulsive and appealing. Familiarity is built through controlled repetition. Hearing something over and over anchors a song. And with that stability, we are more tolerant of the unfamiliar or even challenging elements in a composition. This balance is what makes the listening experience exciting and rewarding. Some genres leverage pattern repetition far more than others. Pop music genres, like hip hop, rely heavily on these accessible and addictive motifs. The “hook” as it is often described because it ensnares your interest, is usually a repetitive sequence or musical phrase that feels immediately intuitive and appealing to listeners. Typically these familiar patterns are common chord progressions or melodic patterns that we have heard a million times in a million songs. Subconsciously we then anticipate the changes and hearing the songs resolve as expected is just satisfying. Many pop songs don’t go further than this. You can build a successful career off just “three chords and the truth” as country music pioneer Harlan Howard taught us. However this approach can be predictable and even boring, some of the more interesting uses of these familiar patterns and listener expectation, is when this anticipation is used to create tension without delivering the expected resolution, denying listeners the release, and therefore creating a visceral feeling. Again similar to storytelling, pattern and repetition are used to control the experience; not every narrative has a storybook ending and not every chord progression ends with resolution. As you might suspect, this is a somewhat reductive and simplistic characterization of musical compositional techniques. I’m wading well beyond my depth in terms of music theory. What is abundantly clear is that pattern is fundamental to musical composition. Whether it is being used to reassure or destabilize, shifting in and out of motif provokes a powerful response from our listening minds.

Do you see it? This month’s playlist is replete with songs of motif, repetition and sequence. The theme is Pattern and these 30 plus songs amplify the sequenced and organized. Hababi bemoans the repetition of travel with “On the road again”, Simon and Garfunkel sing of vivid imagery and destiny in “Patterns”, and Animal Collective sing of the predictability of life in “Daily Routine”.

Thanks for listening, see you next month with a new collection of songs. If you enjoy these playlists, I would love to hear from you. Give a holler on X and be sure to follow me on Spotify.