intervals are the distances between the rungs you choose to play on your musical ladder in western music the smallest interval is from one rung of the ladder to another it's called a semmit tone as you'd expect then a whole tone is an interval of two rungs on the musical ladder it's a fact that seems to be true wherever you are in the world that people generally find it easier to sing whole tones than they do semmit tones to sing this interval rather than this interval because of this movement from Whole tone to whole tone underpins a gigantic amount of the world's oldest repertoire of religious and folk songs like Christian plain chant which is hundreds of years [Music] old [Music] plain chant moves step by adjacent or nearly adjacent step Meandering from note to note without any unexpected leaps or Falls the range of the tune fits bang in the middle of anyone's natural singing voice it's almost as if it's being made up on the spot by the singers themselves it sounds solemn and reflective but here's another tune which moves around by adjacent steps also heavy on the whole tones which isn't at all holy or solemn it's a Bulgarian folk [Music] song [Music] the fact is these tune types chant and folk song are what nearly all vocal music sounded like in distant centuries they're just the ones that have survived even when the words had very different meanings the way the voice glided about from note to note was often very similar gradually though those intervals began to widen beyond the semmit tone and the whole tone to make tunes that were more ambitious had a greater vocal range and were less predictable in the Middle Ages the third was popular as was the fourth the fifth and by the Renaissance you could expect to hear an interval as wide as a sixth or even a [Music] seventh to make a tune we can mix and match these intervals to our heart's content almost any combination of our basic repertoire of notes could turn into a half decent Melody to prove it let's do a little experiment I've come to The Splendid new Sage Gates head to find some willing music lovers to help me construct a tune now each of these counters represent the most used of the western note intervals 1 to8 yellow up blue down and I'm going to ask random passers by if they will pick out of this bag counters of these intervals and then just like in the game of consequences we're going to put them in a row and play the collectively composed Melody roll up roll up there you go very much excellent you excellent got many Blues so here we go more thank you now using my starting note of C I'm going to play this tune that we randomly chose [Music] [Applause] [Music] together well I don't think it'll make number one next week but you can also see that it's not that weird either and what composers have been doing for hundreds of years is taking these notes pictures and intervals and making lovely Tunes out of them it's the same task whether you're JS spk or Bert bearak fritz krysler or the Kaiser Chiefs or Carl Maria von vber or Andrew Lloyd Weber once you've got your basic tune you can start having fun with it of course you you don't have to pull your Melody out of a hat there are tried and trusted musical templates that give composes their starting points there are useful comparisons to be made with storytelling storytelling relies on a number of archetypes handed down over the generations for instance Boy Meets Girl family don't approve things go wrong and end in A desperate suicide p or man goes in search of Holy Grail ends up finding truth was to be found at home all along and so on so it is with Tunes there are ancient patterns and Arrangements of notes that function as archetypes for millions of Melodies over time these archetypes have been arranged into note groups or scales that give the composer or the improvising musician a template with which to begin different cultures have developed their own sets as you'd expect but the concept of note families is basic to us [Music] all these note groups or scales are called modes and they all have a subtly different effect on the listener's emotions the ancient Greeks Indians and Chinese all Associated the different modes with different purposes or moods for morning or evening happy or sad for begging prayer or ecstatic rejoicing for meal times birthdays festivals weddings you name an occasion they had a mode for it in Europe the modes were handed down from the ancient Greeks and became the bread and butter of medieval plain chant and folk song they were given names like Dorian aolian frian and lydian as an example let's look at one of these note families the aolian mode here it is in action in a famous and ancient [Music] [Music] tuneu prot for centuries then this was how Melodies were made you find a mode that matches your mood and just make sure that every note in your Melody comes from that mode a tune in the aolian mode will sound solemn and [Music] sorrow this worked fine until around the 16th century after all if it was good enough for the Pope in Rome it was good enough for the rest of Christendom the thing is it wasn't fine for the English who were getting restless and independent minded and they started playing fast and loose with the modal rules they found out what a lot of singers had found out before them namely that certain modes are easier to sing in than others and that the modes could be rather inflexible take the aolian mode that we heard earlier this is a lovely mode sad but lovely yet musicians found that when their tune was heading in an upwards Direction yearning and reaching towards the top of the phrase it was better to sharpen the notes sharpening means raising by a semitone so instead of the regulation scale they had this modified version but on the way La down no yearning and reaching required they left the mode as it [Music] was the result was a mode with a variable rung on its ladder not so great a crime you may think but in Britain the variable rung caught on like wildfire they couldn't get enough of it they went variable rung mad by the time of Elizabeth the first they were taking all those leading notes that were heading upwards and sharpening or raising them and all the ones coming down they were flattening all lowering them so great was their passion for it but there was one peculiar side effect to all this that no one had really seen coming what if you were singing with someone else and you were heading in an upward Direction and they were heading in a downward Direction at the same time wouldn't you get a horrendous pile up with two runs competing for the same slot the answer is yes you would