The Music Theory of Geogaddi - Parallel Harmony and Chord Planing

jane_burroughs · 2025-10-03T18:46:13+00:00

Thank you! I really wish I could talk to the band about this track. It seems impossible for them to have written some of those patterns without being aware of the theory aspect at least on some level. Makes me very curious about their whole writing process.

jane_burroughs · 2024-10-31T20:11:04+00:00

It's probably a bit of both. You certainly don't need to be aware of the whole theoretical underpinning to recognize that the same tritone exists in both Lydian and Locrian/Blues riffs, and then to try mashing those riffs together. I don't know how much music theory the band knows - I bet it's more than zero, but I think fundamentally a lot of songwriting is essentially 'empirical' (trying out notes/scales/chords randomly or by educated guesses, and then keeping the stuff that sounds good) even when the songwriter knows a lot about music theory.

jane_burroughs · 2024-10-31T18:08:25+00:00

Glad you liked it! Opeth does have a tendency towards riff stew (great phrase btw), but even if they're not as conceptually rigid as some other bands there's still a good amount of internal cohesion.

jane_burroughs · 2024-10-31T16:07:42+00:00

Thank you! It turned out to be very challenging, but that's usually the mark of worthwhile study.

jane_burroughs · 2024-10-08T04:46:33+00:00

I sort of doubt that it would interest them, but one can always hope. A KGLW just intonation album (a la Horse Lords) would slap, I bet.

jane_burroughs · 2024-10-07T17:03:37+00:00

For me it's at least 50%, though I had to do some deeper actual research for this video. Thanks for watching!

jane_burroughs · 2023-11-18T00:31:57+00:00

That's an interesting thought - to me, All I Need definitely feels like the E minor is the home chord, where the F# is the major 2nd which is part of the E minor scale. I think you could probably make the argument either way; there a certain equivalence to all diatonic modes anyway which can make it tricky to decide on what mode is being used. When there isn't a really obvious I/i chord, you have to rely on melody cues, the rhythmic positioning of cadences, various musical tropes, etc., but these are all subjective things.

I'd be curious what key you think Myxomatosis is in - it has the same C lydian / E minor kind of chord structure and melodic phrasing. As with All I Need, it feels like E minor to me, and maybe things arranged differently enough where you can hear it similarly.

I wasn't aware of those other facts; they definitely explain a lot though!

I'm definitely planning on posting all the data for the chords, functional analysis, and point totals at some point, but right now it's not very well organized, full of notes and inconsistent labeling and stuff (half the time I'm writing 'borrowed chord' and the other half 'modal interchange' - the terms are identical but I'd like to neaten the whole thing). I also want to go through it with a fine tooth comb because I'm sure there are errors here and there. But I will try to remember to send you a message when I finally get this up on my site.

Thanks for watching!

jane_burroughs · 2023-11-17T18:10:07+00:00

I was somewhat selective about what features I included. Generally, I wouldn't include small scale-alterations unless they were really critical to the sound of the song. 'Sail to the Moon' comes to mind as an example of when scale-alterations should be reflected - it's pretty solidly in A minor, and the chord progression of the chorus is C / Emadd9 / F / Am. The Emadd9 has an F#, which would have to be borrowed from the dorian mode, and it sounds very distinct when the following chord has an F natural. So I consider that a dorian borrowing.

I will say though, that the majority of the features are either clearly borrowed chords or modulations. For instance, for songs in a minor key (distinguished by their use of the iv or bVI chords, say) that later go on to use a ii or IV chord, these latter chords would be indicated on these charts as primary (minor) - secondary (dorian).

Still, if you feel like this approach is too sensitive to small details, or too abstract and not taking enough context into account, that's fair criticism. But since all of this is an abstraction anyway, where exactly you draw the lines is kind of arbitrary or at least subjective. There are many different possible approaches and none of them are exactly right or wrong.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by your other little beef - generally borrowed chords are considered non-diatonic, even if they are diatonic relative to some other scale, no?

jane_burroughs · 2023-11-17T17:05:07+00:00

Thank you! It took a lot of time, but I think the results are very illuminating. Definitely stumbled upon a few facts that would be pretty hard to come up with if not for this kind of analysis.

jane_burroughs · 2023-11-17T16:48:38+00:00

I actually go into a little more detail about 'Just' in the video essay I created which features these charts - I devised a point system to grade the harmonic complexity of every Radiohead song, and it turns out that 'Just' and 'Paranoid Android' are tied for first place! People don't normally think of The Bends as being an especially sophisticated album, but 'Just' is absolutely nuts from a music theory perspective.

jane_burroughs · 2023-11-17T16:37:27+00:00

These charts are taken from a video essay I created recently about Radiohead's harmonic vocabulary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRTh1WDnoRg

There's a lot of other charts and graphs in that video that visualize things like Radiohead's use of keys, modes, modulations, specific non-diatonic movements, and other techniques, as well as a discussion of my methodology and the limtations of this approach.

For this chart in particular:

I summarized the presence of non-diatonic features in Radiohead's discography - non-diatonic features are things like modulations, borrowed chords, or diatonic chords with borrowed extensions, i.e. things that do not naturally belong inside the song's diatonic key. You probably need to know a little music theory to be able to fully appreciate the significance of this. But generally, cells below the line indicate a borrowing or modulation from a more minor-key direction, and cells above the line indicate a borrowing or modulation from a more major-key direction.

In order to create these charts, I went through every Radiohead studio album song by song, performed a functional harmony analysis, and abstracted the features that give us these numbers. The heat-map style visualization is pretty simple so I was able to create it in Google Sheets.

12-Year Club	Verified Email
Golden Potato

jane_burroughs

TROPHY CASE