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Comment by antonyt | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any examples of "a single note for minutes and get it to sound amazing"? I'm finding this difficult to imagine. A lead voice doing this while some accompaniment is changing chords underneath makes sense to me, but then you're back to harmonic relationships.

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Half joking, but Berlin techno :)

You can have a whole set developing motifs, then multiple minutes of a single note being played in the middle, and somehow that sounds awesome (if you’re into it)

A long hold of one note doesn't mean there isn't harmonic progression. It just means the progression is slow in that part of the song. It's often done to create a massive contrast that occurs when the progression finally...progresses. In electronic music, this often comes as the drop or some similar kind of break.

No, in electronic music harmonic progressions are done by manipulating timbre.

Try it yourself - play one note on repeat and start twirling the cutoff knob.

Not quite one note, but "Open Eye Signal" (2023 remaster) by Jon Hopkins has wide spectrum background and heavy rhythms, but once the song gets going the main instrument moves between fifth -> seventh-flat -> sixth -> fifth on repeat, and that's the melody for the song. And yet, to me, it's captivating.

Thanks for the suggestion, that’s a really neat discovery! I will try to integrate that in my own music

Adam Neely has an interesting video about one-note muisc, with some good (and bad) examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSuK_5zW2iM

I can only think of examples which as you describe have accompaniment moving underneath. Neil Young's solo in Cinnamon Girl is one example. Another is Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone in which he sings one note as the chords run up C Dm Em F and only breaks on the G.

I'm pretty sure you've heard plenty of ambient music and just never thought about it. Timbre and rhythm have been the focus of modern music for at least 40 years.

A lot of modern metal is mostly one note played rhythmically. And it is can sound awesome, however timbre is obviously part of this awesomeness.

Chariots of Fire is pretty dope.

I'm finding this difficult to imagine

Maybe go on Youtube and listen to music that you might not be familiar with?

Cage, Schaffer, Stockhousen, Boulez are some composers in the tradition of European classical music.

If you go outside that tradition, there’s even more. Endlessly more.

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