There's one more element about muscles that has something unique to teach us about writing stronger melodies. to uncover this, let's dig a little deeper into skeletal muscles, the muscles that move our bones. And we'll discover that you basically have two types of muscle fibers, fast twitch fibers and slow twitch fibers. fast twitch fibers are more powerful. They're for quick movements, but they tire easily and they're more for activities like sprinting or weightlifting. slow twitch fibers, by contrast, are less powerful for more steady movements.

But they don't tire as quickly and they're used more in activities like walking. Alright, so what does this have to do with writing melodies? Well, just as these muscle fibers are not equal, and they use tension for different purposes, in a similar way, how you might use tension and your melody lines is also not necessarily equal. For example, you might use harmonic dissonance in such a way that is really powerful. But like fast twitch muscles, if you do, so it's going to tire very quickly. And here's what I mean by that.

If we returned to this melody line, and we look specifically, at this one dissonant note, attention right there. kept going with this, you're going to tire this very quickly. On the other hand, if you used harmonic dissonance that was a bit milder and not quite so severe, you could continue it for a longer period of time and its impact would be more subtle. And to illustrate that we could return to this melody line, when we change the chord progression to make it more dissonant. And this was our main dissonant note that held the most weight set against this chord progression. The dissonance is a lot more mild.

It's definitely dissonant, but it's a difference. That could go on for a little bit longer, which it did in this version. So listen again for how this dissonance created an overall tone of dissonance without becoming too tiring. Let me compare these one more time to emphasize the point. When you're using a technique to add more tension, if you use a milder version of it, you can use it more often for more subtle effect. And if you're using more tension, then you might want to use it sparingly because it might tire pretty quickly of it.

And this concept applies to not just harmonic distance, but to any of these ways that you can create tension. Now, I think that there's one more insight that we can draw from muscle fibers that will help us when we're writing melody lines. And that's this interesting fact that these fast twitch muscle fibers and The slow twitch muscle fibers are not separate, they exist within the same muscle. And how this relates to writing better melodies is that these two different types of tension, one that's going to be a little bit more intense, but tires quickly. The other one that's more subtle that you can use for lighter effect, that both of those things can occur within the same melodic phrase. They don't need to be an either or situation, and illustrate how these can coexist in the same phrase.

Let's look specifically at pitch for an example. And we kind of talked about this already in part one, about how these intervals here were a greater leap. And that added tension, but also how the movement of the entire phrase was going up, which was adding tension. This is really easy to identify when we're looking at raising and lowering the pitches of means of adding or subtracting tension because you can move up by A big leap. Or you can do it gradually. Bigger leaps or like the fast twitch muscles, they're going to have a more dramatic impact, but you're going to tire of it more quickly.

Whereas raising and lowering the pitch in the entire phrase can happen by a leap or can also happen. If you move from one note to the next in a very stepwise manner, going step by step is gonna be a lot more subtle. It's like the slow twitch muscles, they're kind of just walking your way up or walking your way down. For effect. The key is that both of these things can happen at the same time. And that means that they can sometimes operate independently from each other.

Now in this first example, that we looked at, the leaps and the general movement of the phrase upward, are working in tandem to add tension in one of the other melodic variations that we created. In the last chapter, the direction of the phrase jumps up very quickly right here, assisted by this very large leap right here. And then it basically tapers down in a very stepwise manner. Except for, there's this big leap here in the middle. And this adds a bit of a twist or a jolt to a phrase that would otherwise just be meandering down from this peak, in a very gradual manner towards a more relaxed state. So as we play this, again, I want you to listen to the interplay of these two types of tension and how they're working, sometimes together and sometimes against each other.

Now, there are countless more musical examples that we can use to illustrate this, but hopefully you're getting the idea that there's another layer to this concept of tension and relaxation. It's not just about applying these techniques that we already discussed, the degree to which you apply them also matters a lot. All right, we just spent a lot of time talking about what two muscles have to teach us about writing stronger melodies. Part of that is because tension and relaxation is such a vital part of music, because just like in life, how muscles are behind our movements, tension and relaxation are how we get drama and movement in our music, but we're going to move on to our last chapter about waves