The Nostalgia of HOME's Resonance, Explained
0:08 When I play this song, "Resonance" by Home, chances are you're feeling one of two things: one, an introductory experience with the song because you've never heard it; or two, a longing for a deep purple '80s utopia surrounded by neon beaches and cool synth grooves. But why?
The second feeling seems to be the majority opinion when it comes to this song, not only because 9 out of 10 comments on it seem to deal with its nostalgia, but because, on YouTube at least, it's always accompanied by visuals that evoke that similar nostalgic feeling. But the nostalgia that many people feel when it comes to this song is no mistake, because the very composition of it was actually built to evoke these emotions.
The music theory behind this song is pretty simple because there's actually only three simple chords that make up the entirety of the song: an A-flat, an E-flat, and a B-flat. Chords are pretty much what makes up the baseline of the song—that juicy synth you hear in the beginning and later on as more pieces are layered on top. However, this baseline is only really made up of the A-flat and the E-flat, the B-flat only making appearance twice in the song.
1:14 Musically, this makes for a simple yet effective technique of making a song that's generally happier, as the A-flat and the E-flat are both major within the song, the A-flat being the 1 chord as the song is written in A-flat major, and the E-flat being the 5 chord as its 5 intervals away from the A-flat. B-flat is minor within the key, so those sprinklings of B-flat create musical tension that ultimately resolves back to the one chord each time it's played, the A-flat. But if I just play these chords back and forth, the occasional B-flat, the song sounds distinctly boring, but not only that, it doesn't sound like Home at all. It's too happy; too upbeat.
Here's what the genius of the song comes into play: while the progression is simple—A-flat, sandy flats often being played multiple times over—these basic A-flat and E-flat and even B-flat chords are not what is used throughout the song. What Home did when he composed it was add different notes to these chords, usually G's, F's, and C's, to create what are referred to as major 6, 7, 9, and 13 chords. These are really the stars of the show when it comes to Resonance because they have a really unique tendency to them.
2:18 In the case of an additional F note and a 1 chord, our A-flat, adding that extra 6 creates what are really two three-note chords, or triads, being shared across a total of four notes. Though when Home lays these chords out, he'll typically add another note on the top, meaning, there's actually five notes being shared. The first chord that is being created is that basic A-flat major triad, but what's also created is an F-minor triad composed of A-flat, C, and F. This happens with every single chord in the song.
Adding a G, C, and B-flat to the A-flat major creates an A-flat major 9 composed of an A-flat major, E-flat major, and C-minor, while adding just a C and a G creates an A-flat major seven composed of just the A-flat major and another C-minor. It's this tandem playing of both a major and minor chord at the same time across a single set of notes that blurs the lines between the brightness of the first and the darkness of the second to create that signature melancholic sound that's so integral to the song. So it ends up happening is you get this continued melancholic aura with each chord as two progressions play out: one that's major, and one that's minor.
3:21 But now if I play all these chords in the same position, that is, in the same octave, everything sounds kind of muddy. There isn't really much movement, so that doesn't make for much of the quality sound either. What Home does to compensate is change up the ordering of the notes that make up each of the chords, or, in musical jargon, invert them to create what are referred to as chord inversions. Doing this creates that rising and falling feeling of each chord as it passes.
[Home-Resonance is played on a traditional piano]
[Home-Resonance album version plays]
While only eight unique chords are being played, these chords are struck a total of 44 times with different chord inversions being used that either have the majority of their notes clustered higher or lower than the previous chord, creating the idea of a more complex progression. When you remember that these chords are really only built on just three simplified chords,
4:24 you start to get an understanding of how simple this song really is. The simplicity lends itself really well to that melancholic tone, as it makes it both adaptable and accessible to the audience. The song doesn't utilize something really complex like classical music—Chopins' "Fantasie-Impromptu", for example—and while it itself sounds great, its audio is unique, and, because of that, distant from us, primarily because of things like cross rhythms, tempo changes, and key transpositions, which you typically don't see very often in contemporary music.
On the flip side, when you look at pieces from the childhoods of people that may be feeling nostalgia for this song, music from the seventies into the '90s, you see the same simplicity that's embodied in Resonance. If you look at Billy Joel's "Piano Man", for instance, it's really easy to take note of the fact that the song is written with a simple 1 through 6 progression using a backbone of chords that continually resonate as the song progresses, Joel utilizing a major 1, 4, and 5 alongside on minor 2 and 6 as he lays out a melody over top with the use of his voice:
It's 9 o'clock on a Saturday,
5:25 regular crowd shuffles in. There's an old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gin.
Home, likewise, utilizes the familiar 1 through 6 structure, but limits themselves specifically to the 1 and 5 with varying points of a 2 chord, the B-flat, to create tension that would usually be created with the minor 6th chord. The use of the major 6th note in Resonance, however, integrates the familiar minor 6 into the A-flat major chord as the F-minor, the minor 6th chord of the A-flat, is integrated directly into the A-flat or one chord. The four chord of the A-flat, D-flat major, is likewise integrated into a B-flat minor seven, that two chord I mentioned earlier. Progressions utilizing these four chords are actually everywhere, and while the overt progression of Resonance is one in five, those familiar sixes and fours are still in there.
Likewise, when you look at the melodies in the song, what's done is also reminiscent of modern media. Well, the melody that plays throughout the song, the one that begins around the 23rd second mark, may sound unique,
6:26 it's just a series of notes that make up those same chords that are now in the background. This technique, called arpeggiation, is used by almost all contemporary popular music. Look at something as recent as "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi and Justin Bieber. The chorus in the song is composed of what may seem like a more complex progression, as the song is written in B-minor, but understood as D-major because each key can be interpreted as either major, or corresponding minor, depending on the location of the first note. The composition remains to be made up of the one, six, four, and five, albeit in a different order. In the same way, the melody that sung over these is almost entirely created by notes within these chords, with some passing tones thrown in for tension.
About 20 years ago, "Train" did the same thing and "Drops of Jupiter", and the Beatles of the same thing fifty years ago in "Let It Be". 40 years ago, and a Japanese composer by the name of Koji Kondo was doing the exact same thing, but in the video games industry. Hardware limitations of his company's flagship product, the Nintendo Entertainment System, would force Kondo into creating compositions that couldn't play more than three notes at any one beat in the music. As a result, chord triads weren't really a possibility,
7:29 and at most only two notes would be played together at a certain cleft, Kondo typically relegating this to the treble. In the base, an arpeggiation of chords that would accompany the trebles melody would then be used, creating that distinct sound that anyone who's ever played older video games knows all too well.
[Mario theme is played on a traditional piano]
Known as polyphony, and more specifically counterpoint, the use of multiple harmonic rhythms against each other was the hallmark of this music, as it is for many melodies of Resonance. These compositions were always pretty keen on utilizing those one, four, five, and six chords too, alongside major six and seven chords as
8:35 also with resonance. But all of this being said, if I lay out all these melodies and chords on top of each other, I get this:
[Home-Resonance on a traditional piano with melody]
and not this:
[Home-Resonance album version plays]
Resonance is clearly a synth piece, as was a lot of popular music throughout the '70s and '80s, commonly referred to collectively as "Synthpop". The composition generally includes two things: one, a bass synth melody; and two, a counter melody.
[Toto-Africa plays]
Because this is modern music, though, there's often multiple countermelodies, including a voice and the bass. Enter Resonance, and there's a synth bass and multiple counter melodies of varying pitch. Resonance organizes a lot of its synthesizer
9:37 composition in ways that link it to some of the most popular songs of the 1980s, not only in its melodic polyphony, but in the way that the synthesizers themselves are configured. There's a haziness to its sound, something that's somewhat different from simply pressing sustain on your keyboard and playing a melody. Moderations to the original waveform of the audio, like a low cutoff frequency and audio contour, give the notes a smooth sound, while those to the audio envelope—how the audio rises and falls—allow notes to continue on as new ones are being struck and gradually bleed into each other. Adding further effects to each song, like wetness and rate, creates a perceived echo as each note and chord is struck, further allowing each note to ring out even as the next few are hit. Alterations to these vary from track to track, giving each a distinct sound and feel to them.
The bass chords are going to utilize them very heavily, the main arpeggiation only slightly so, and the lead and bells moderately. But even more than those effects, Resonance also utilizes waveforms identical to those of a lot of synthesized music, which typically come in four varieties: sine, square, triangle, and sawtooth. Synth music, however, for the most part only makes use of
10:40 three of these when creating initial sounds, with scientifically requiring certain configurations to achieve due to the core oscillator that generates each sound being sawtooth. Thus, triangle, square, sawtooth, and in the case of the Moog synthesiser used to generate Resonance, shark-tooth waveforms were all used heavily in the 1980s, giving sense that distinctive computer-generated sound to it, as opposed to the smoothness of audio generated by traditional instrumentation.
Square and sawtooth do sound the most dissonant, however, and that's not really utilized much in the bass chords, allowing them to sound akin to Toto's "Africa", while the arpeggiations tend to make heavier use of them, creating a sound closer to, say, "Take On Me", or "Little Red Corvette". These more biting sounds are also what give 8-bit music its same signature feel, and is the reason those bells towards the end of the song sound like something straight out of Nintendo's Metroid. Add in those hazy effects and that melancholic feeling, and it's pretty easy to understand why Resonance is so nostalgic.
This is MisterAmazing. Thanks for watching.
11:51 An incredible, overwhelming thank you to Robert Mieta, whose transcriptions of the song into MIDI have not only been playing throughout the entirety of the video, but were the very means that allowed me to analyze the music theory and synthesizer composition as heavily as I was able to. Please subscribe to him and show him some love for his incredible work transcribing the song.
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