Anomaly Production Trivia #4 - Writing Singularity - Part One

January 29, 2023

Track three from the album Anomaly is Singularity.  Its original name was called, Quad.  If you read on, you will find out why this is the case.

We do not use a typical verse chorus style of song writing.  This presents a challenge as to how to write interesting instrumental music that doesn't sound like other writers. As a part of the writing process for this collection of instrumental tracks, one of the important factors in the writing was to maintain a level of restriction on musical content selection; ie in the track called quad, the primary rule was to restrict the number of music notes or chords / scale notes to FOUR, hence the name QUAD.

The song opens with a passage in a 5/4 time signature and four basic two note chords:  E5, Esus2, Eminor and EmMaj7

The idea was to create a melodic structure using these four chords and the notes in them without any deviation unless there was a section change coming up (which you can hear at 2m 48s where an additional A minor chord was included).  This restriction was encouraged to try and see how we could come up with something with a given set of parameters.  We generally write music this way because it seems to force us to be more creative with what we have on hand.

The intro and main theme of Singularity goes on till about 1m 18s where a key change occurs and the next set of note restriction occurs;  this melodic structure continues to 1m 42s where it returns to the main theme.

Four random notes were selected to create a structure from without any deviation.  The notes selected for this are Ab, C, D and B and we were to create a section of music that fit within this range of notes in a series of arpeggios:

You will notice that these three sections of arpeggios are the same but just inversions of the first arpeggio; even though they are the same series of notes; for this section you will notice that no matter what is played, it is a variation of these four notes in some way.  A future YouTube video will show more on this.