Dissertation Index
Author: Park, Jinny Title: Diatonic Chord Loops in Post-Millennial Pop Harmony Institution: Indiana University Begun: December 2018 Completed: May 2025 Abstract: In post-millennial pop, formal sections adapted from Electronic Popular Music (EDM) create musical tension and closure through its sonic function instead of scale-degree-based functional harmony. While chord loops in EDM-pop mostly consist of major or minor triads of a single diatonic collection, their harmonic syntax diverges from the common-practice idioms; a melody often appears independently above the cyclic repetitions of the chord loop, where multiple tonal centers are perpetually in non-alignment with each other. By building the metacorpus, I uncover the shift in the harmonic syntax of chord loops after 2000. The harmony is encoded in Nashville numbers using the “relative key” approach which flattens potential tonics into equivocal positions in a single diatonic collection (diatonic positions). This approach allows multiple interpretations of a chord loop while ensuring unequivocal identification of the chord-loop schemas, thus revealing a shared harmonic grammar consistent within a style. From the metacarpus, I define four prominent trends (categories), each of which is determined by the degree to which the main chord loop is transformed, ranging from literal repetition of a single chord loop to multiple contrasting chord loops in a song. My in-depth analyses for each category demonstrate how varying degrees of chord-loop transformations within a song can generate different types of formal syntax and phrase structure. Moreover, I discover style-specific post-millennial pop trends common across all categories. Notably, what I denote as the chord-loop-pairs—two related chord progressions that form a chord loop—is normative to EDM-pop, especially for the “Axis” and “Plateau” loop families. Formal functions are established by transformations of the chord loop; substituting a chord-loop member with a silence function as a “drop,” anticipating the upcoming formal boundary. I conclude that the transformations of chord loops across formal sections determine perception of formal functions and musical tension. Keywords: Corpus Study, Chord Loops, Post-millennial Pop, Data Analysis, EDM-Pop TOC: Chapter 1. Non-functional Diatonic Harmony and the Emergence of Post-millennial Pop Chapter 2. A Theoretical Framework for Analyzing Post-millennial Pop Harmony Chapter 3. Data-driven Music Analysis: Overview of Methodology and Exploratory Research Chapter 4. The Post-Millennial Pop Metacorpus Chapter 5. Analyses and Case Studies from the Metacorpus Conclusion Contact: jinnyparkwork@gmail.com |