Tension Music and Need for Release

Tension music creates tension for the listener. The creation of tension and release of music tension makes or breaks a song. Again there is a critical balance that must be reached for the listener to really feel part of the song. The songwriter must take the listener on an interesting exciting journey without over doing it.

Get 50 FREE MP3s from eMusic

Tension is related to dissonance because dissonance creates tension or excitement for the listener. But provide too much without relief and the listener becomes uncomfortable and wants a change.

They may not know why but they will feel it. Changing the station or abandoning your song is not the way you want them to find relief or release. People have heard tension music all their lives and have come to expect certain ways to release it. Use it to your advantage.

Release is when the tension music ends and the listener feels at home in a safe and comfortable place. In music this is often returning to the home key in the sequence of chords you are using in the song.

All songs must set up or establish the key so the listener can feel grounded and has somewhere to return. This is an important function of the intro of a song. Its needs to establish the key. Don't do that up front and your listener may feel lost in your song and not know why.

You can achieve tension and release in areas such as the songs ideas, theme, lyric, rhyme, sectional differences, sectional structure, melody, melody structure, tempo, grove and stressing of beats within a bar of music. There are numerous tools and techniques that all work on this concept.

Another way to look at this concept in tension music to look at each area above and decide whether it’s having the effect of making the lyrics and music feel stable or unstable. When it feels unstable it needs the music tension released.

Again the trick is to build tension and then provide release and do it over and over again in your song in predictable way as the listener hears the entire song.

It’s like when they get back to the chorus and feel “oh that’s that part again”. Predictability provides stability. It’s good to provide musical surprises in your songs but remember there is no place like home for your listener. You have to take them home continually in your song, unless you want them to feel tension and unstable.

Knowing how to use tension and release will make you a much stronger songwriter. Try thinking about it whenever you listen to a song.

Ask yourself questions about how all the parts of the song are moving from stable to unstable and back again and how the many variables of a song are affection your emotions. Let’s leave tension music and the need for release and move on to using action verbs in your songwriting.