Brad Osborn talks about the emergence of the major III chord in post-millennial pop music, and how this chromatic chord forms loops that contain elements of both major and minor keys.

This episode was produced by Amy Hatch along with Team Lead Caitlin Martinkus. Special thanks to peer reviewers Bryn Hughes and Evan Ware. Additional acknowledgements to Chris White, Charles Brockus, and John White.

SMT-Pod’s theme music was written by Maria Tartaglia, with closing music by Yike Zhang. For supplementary materials on this episode and more information on our authors and composers, check out our website: https://smt-pod.org/episodes/

[Intro Theme by Maria Tartaglia.]

[clip plays]

You’ve just heard a clip from my song “Serpentine” that exemplifies the topic I’m going to be talking about today: dual leading tone loops. But what does that mean, exactly? A leading tone is the pitch exactly one half-step below the tonic of a key or scale. If I play a D major scale and stop on the leading tone, C-sharp…

[Brad vocodes a 7-note ascending scale, harmonizing leading tone with A7]

you’ll desperately wish for me to play the tonic, D.

[Brad vocodes “D” major chord]

The same thing happens if I play a B minor scale and stop on IT’S leading tone, A-sharp.

[Brad vocodes 7-note ascending scale, harmonizing LT with F#7]

you’ll desperately wish for me to play THAT tonic, B minor.

[Brad vocodes “B” minor chord]

You might then say that the first scale I played was in the KEY of D major, and the second scale I played was in the KEY of B minor. Those two scales are actually called RELATIVE scales, aka relative major and relative minor, because they share the same 7 notes. In fact, the only note they DON’T have in common is the A#, the leading tone of B minor, which is not in the D major scale.

So, here’s the weird thing about my song: its chord loop—or series of repeated chords— contains the leading tone for BOTH of those keys. If I limited myself to the D major scale, I’d use 7 total pitches, but I’m using just a slightly broader 8-pitch palette, one that also incorporates that A# Leading tone for B minor. And this is why I call it a DUAL leading tone loop.

Why have I spent so much time navel gazing at my own compositional process? Well, it was through this creative practice that my initial hunch came about, that this harmonic system, the dual-leading tone loop, was part of a much broader cultural practice. There was obviously something going on in post-millennial popular music that spontaneously and subconsciously influenced me to compose my song this way, and I simply had to get to the bottom of it.

Where, and when, did I start hearing these dual leading-tone loops, and how did they come to influence my creative practice? Let me offer three possible cultural touchstones from about a one-year period between 2014 and 2015…

[transition music is “Departure” from Max Richter’s score to The Leftovers]

You just heard a clip of what I remember as the first time I noticed a dual leading tone loop, which was in 2014 in Max Richter’s score for the HBO series The Leftovers. I was absolutely obsessed with this show, and remember learning on piano this four-chord loop that recurs throughout the show.

Those chords are:

[Brad vocodes lead sheet symbols C minor–Ab Major–Eb Major–G Major]

Which forms a dual leading tone loop on Eb major and its relative key C minor. The leading tone of Eb major, D, is heard in the melody,

[Brad vocodes melodic pitch classes Eb-D-C, F-Eb, last one harmonized with Eb major]

and the leading tone of C minor, B-natural, is heard as the third in that G major chord.

[Brad vocodes arpeggiation of G, B, D, resolves pitch B to C minor triad]

The more digging I did, it seems like a lot of dramatic television episodes were using dual leading tone loops in a five year period between 2014 and 2019, including episodes of Succession, A Handmaid’s Tale, and later, Euphoria, and I discovered a fruitful interpretive strategy in hearing the conflict between these two leading tones as animating internal conflicts within individual character’s psyches.

Take two salient conflicts throughout The Leftovers, for example. After 2% of the world’s population mysteriously vanishes in an instant—these people are known as “The Departed”—their loved ones seek closure, and yet also do NOT seek closure, since, to quote Travis Clark writing for Medium closure [QUOTE] “would indicate that what happened to their loved ones is definitive or explainable, like death” [END QUOTE]. And writing for The Guardian, Sarah Jones identifies an internal conflict among characters who both embrace and reject supernatural explanations of what happened to The Departed, which she sums up nicely as [QUOTE] “spirituality vs. skepticism.”

Then, in 2015, just a year later, I a saw a music video by the band 21 Pilots called “Stressed Out” that uses a dual leading tone loop. In this clip, you’ll hear the four chord loop

[Brad vocodes lead sheet symbols A minor–G Major–C Major–E Major]

…which forms a dual leading tone loop on C major and its relative key A minor. The first three chords fit squarely within the key of C major, while the fourth chord, E Major, adds the G# leading tone for the key of A minor.

[Play 21 pilots “Stressed Out”]

In this chorus, the narrator begins by feeling nostalgic, longing for the good old days with their comforting mother, but laments, now, we’re just stressed out. The music video makes this conflict even more explicit. We see shots of band members doing childish activities like riding humorously small tricycles and sipping juice pouches, juxtaposed with confronting the challenges of their adult lives, namely, how to make money in the music industry. The chorus make this conflict particularly poignant, showing the band members rehearsing in their childhood bedrooms.

Finally, a third example. Later that same year, a little musical called Hamilton came out. Like most people, I got to hear Lin-Manuel Miranda’s music in audio form only before getting to see the show. So, when I heard the opening number from the original cast recording, “Alexander Hamilton,” I immediately recognized its dual leading tone loop. Here’s the clip, containing leading tones for both D major and the relative key B minor:

[play Hamilton Clip]

I hear these conflicting leading tones as animating the conflicts Alexander Hamilton embodies, how he rises up from his humble beginnings as a [QUOTE] “bastard orphan” to become [QUOTE] “a hero and a scholar.” Now, to be clear, I am absolutely not mapping these conflicting meanings onto antiquated notions of major=happy and minor=sad. In other words, it’s not the A# resolving to B minor that represents “bastard orphan,” and C# resolving to D major that represents “hero and a scholar.” It’s just that these conflicting notions in the lyrics map onto a similar sense of conflict between two perceived tonics.

So, in 2024 I published my initial findings as a video in SMT-V, another official publication of the Society for Music Theory. In that video I presented this interpretive strategy, mapping television composers’ use of the dual leading tone loop onto internal conflicts experienced by on-screen characters. Near the end of that video, I speculated on how dual leading tone loops might underpin similar dramatic narratives in multimedia, like musical theatre, and even introduced a little teaser about how they might happen in pop music from time to time.

Then, I started hearing them more and more in pop music, so I got curious: just how common are dual leading tone loops in post-millennial pop music? And, might it be fruitful to borrow this notion of conflict in the two leading tones as an interpretive strategy for understanding meaning in post-millennial lyrics that may also exemplify conflict? So, this is why I’m here making this podcast, to shed light these questions. We’re going to be listening to a lot of music, figuring out how the dual leading tone loops work, and deciding whether or not it makes sense to interpret the accompanying lyrics through this interpretive lens of conflict.

Before I start digging into examples that explore this link between harmony and lyrics, it’s important to understand some of the music theory underpinning these observations. When I started talking about how this music might sound like it’s in two keys at once: the major and the relative minor, some of you may have been thinking about an idea now about 50 years old called the “double tonic complex.” Robert Bailey first drew our attention to this facet of Western Classical Music in the late 1960s, showing how composers such as Gustav Mahler would blend two relative tonic chords, such as C major and A minor, into a single, four-note tonic sonority, C-E-G-A, which was simply the fusion of both chords played simultaneously.

Popular musicians may think of that same four-note sonority—C, E, G, A—as simply a C6 chord, which is extremely common in jazz and earlier Tin Pan Alley music. To wit, in 2020 Drew Nobile enlarged this idea of the double-tonic complex to include popular music chord progressions from artists like The Beatles, Tina Turner, and Sarah McLachlan. He thought such chord loops sounded as if they might be in two relative keys simultaneously.

Nobile believed that this facet of popular music was prominent enough that we ought to start considering that major and relative minor really aren’t separate keys, but rather that they blend to such a degree in popular music that [QUOTE] “tonality encompasses multiple keys within a single concept…their differences reduced to small details that fade from our mental focus” [END QUOTE].

I agree with Nobile that to call any of the musical examples I’ve played for you thus far either “major” or “minor” simply misses the point. Each of the songs I’ve played and will continue to play throughout this podcast blend aspects of both. Where my examples may differ from Nobile’s is that he analyzes fully diatonic, 7-note passages that could fit entirely within a major scale as double tonic complexes. Such passages lack the extra leading tone needed for the relative minor. I would thus call my dual leading tone loops a special case of the double tonic complex, in which leading tones are present for both relative keys, resulting in a broader, chromatic, 8-pitch palette.

A year after Nobile’s article was published, Trevor de Clercq codified a notation system called vi-based minor. In order to explain the importance of vi-based minor, let me first take a second to explain what Roman numerals are. In music theory, we use Roman numerals I through VII to identify chords within a key. For example, in the key of C major, the chord built on C would be I, the chord built on D would be II, and so forth. And, if you prefer Nashville Numbers over Roman Numerals, as de Clercq does, they work in basically the same way.

de Clercq’s vi-based minor system capitalized on Nobile’s observation that CHOOSING between major and relative minor keys in pop music simply misses the point. He points out that analysts are likely to confuse otherwise equivalent chord progressions if we analyze the minor tonic as i. Take the four-chord loops in “Stressed Out,” for example: A minor, G Major, C Major, E Major. One person might say that this progression is in the key of A minor, and therefore analyze it as I–bVII–bIII–V, but another person might say that it’s in C major, and analyze it as vi–V–I–III.

To avoid the confusion of analyzing the same chord progression in two different keys, de Clercq says we should always analyze major tonics as I, and relative minor tonics as vi. I happen to agree. But to those who might complain that such a system tips the balance in favor of major keys—after all, why do THEY get the Roman numeral I—de Clercq offers [QUOTE] “Our recognition of the chord’s location in the scale precedes, and is not mutually exclusive of, our reading of the chord’s function.”

He goes on to explain how we already know that chords whose roots are related by third often share a similar function, like how IV and ii are both predominant chords. Therefore, it should be no problem to also consider both I and vi tonic chords, and both V and iii dominant chords.

So, while I haven’t used Roman numerals to this point, I am, for the rest of the podcast, going to wholeheartedly embrace de Clercq’s vi-based minor notation system. I’ll henceforth refer to all minor tonics in these chord loops as vi, and the dominant for that vi chord as “Major III.” While you don’t normally speak the quality of a chord before a Roman numeral, I’m going to continue to say “Major III” to emphasize that this is a CHROMATIC harmony which needs an extra eighth pitch not found in the major scale.

In order to explain just what this extra 8th pitch is, allow me to quickly introduce the concept of scale degrees. Just like we use Roman numerals or Nashville Numbers to identify CHORDS within a key, we use scale-degree integers 1 through 7 to identify the pitches in the scale. So, just like the C CHORD is Roman numeral I in the key of C, the pitch C is scale-degree 1. But if a pitch is altered relative to the key, we need a sharp or a flat before the integer. So, to make the MAJOR III chord that is heard in every dual-leading tone loop, I would use the following scale degrees:

[Brad vocodes 3, #5, 7]

That #5 is the leading tone for the relative minor, the vi chord.

While vi and Major III represent the tonic and dominant pair for the relative minor, the tonic and dominant pair in the major key is I and V. The V chord is made up of these scale degrees:

[Brad vocodes 5, 7, 2]

with scale-degree 7 acting as the leading tone for the relative major, the I chord.

Moving forward, all of my examples are going to contain these DUAL leading tones, both #5 and 7, which will be resolving to scale degrees 6 and 1, respectively. Despite agreeing with Nobile that this music really is in both relative major and minor at the same time, when I’m trying to tell you what key a loop is in, I’ll just name it using the relative major. So, when I say that a loop like “Stressed Out” is [QUOTE] “in the key of C,” just know that I really mean: in the key of C major and A minor simultaneously”

Let’s now talk a little bit about the kinds of chord loops I’m going to be discussing. First of all, what even constitutes a chord LOOP? In a recent corpus study of chord loops in 541 songs, Aditya Chander and Ian Quinn defined a chord loop as a unit of between 2 and 8 chords that appears, consecutively, at least 2.5 times.

One thing I really like about this definition of a chord loop is that it can help us separate true dual leading tone LOOPS from individual instances of a major III chord. Such individual instances of a major III chord within an otherwise diatonic context would probably be better analyzed as what music theorists call an applied dominant, a chord that momentarily tonicizes a chord other than tonic without disrupting the overall tonality of the home key.

Take the verse of Baltimora’s kooky 80s hit “Tarzan Boy,” for example. That basic chord loop is just three chords long: D minor, Bb Major, C Major, which, in the key of F, sounds like this:

[Brad vocodes vi–IV–V]

After three loops, the V chord is followed by a chromatic A Major chord:


[Brad vocodes Major III]

The A major quickly tonicizes D minor before immediately moving to a V–I cadence to end the phrase in the home key of F. Take a listen:

[play “Tarzan Boy” verse]

In the space of 12 chords, we hear a single applied dominant which seems more like a diversion AWAY from the three-chord loop than a core element of that loop. Chander and Quinn would thus define the 3-chord succession, vi–IV–V, as the true loop, while the longer 12-chord span would fail their test for loops. And I think this accords with the way most people hear things.

In a book all about repetition, Elizabeth Margulis recounts an empirical study she conducted that indicated listeners focus on [QUOTE] “SHORT repetitions when they are first encountering a piece,” and she goes on to talk about how it’s only through immersion in subsequent listening experiences that we perceive [QUOTE] “more global levels of musical organization” [END QUOTE].

Now that we know what KINDS of chord loops we’re talking about, what about the ordering of the chords IN those loops? A forthcoming study in the journal Music Perception by Shea, White, Hughes, and Vuvan aims to figure out how the metric positioning of certain chords in fully diatonic chord loops affects our perception of tonic.

Take a really common loop like I–V–vi–IV. Their findings indicate, unsurprisingly, that if that chord loop starts on the I chord, then people will perceive that chord as tonic, and thus hear the passage as more major. But, if we flip the same four-chord loop around to begin on the vi chord, vi–IV–I–V, then that change in ordering will actually cause people to hear the vi chord as more stable, and thus perceive it in more of a MINOR key.

And while their study focused exclusively on DIATONIC chord loops, it got me thinking about how the exact placement of the Major III chord in my DUAL leading tone loops might affect our perception of tonality. For if a Major III chord resolves directly to vi, that would make a pretty good case for more of a minor hearing. Take the dual leading-tone loop in (B-SAHN’s) “One in a Million,” for example. The loop not only begins on vi, but it ends on Major III, meaning that we hear the minor key tonicized on the hypermetric downbeat of each phrase:

[play Bosson’s “One in a Million”]

While we’re on the topic of how Major III resolves, we should probably also talk about how the V chord resolves. If V goes directly to I in a dual leading tone loop, it’s going to contribute to the sense of major-ness in the loop. But here’s where things get a little tricky: while every dual leading loop, by definition, has the Major III, they don’t always also contain the V.

So, in a dual leading tone loop without the V chord, where do we get that all-important leading tone for the major key, scale-degree 7? Because if that's missing, we don’t actually have a DUAL leading-tone loop. Take, for instance, the chord loop from Cage The Elephant’s 2015 song “Trouble:” C Major, E Major, A minor, F Major, which sounds like this in the key of C:

[Brad vocodes I–III–vi–IV]

It obviously lacks the V chord. But remember that scale-degree 7 is always present as the chordal fifth in the major III chord, since that chord is spelled: 3, #5, 7. Furthermore, scale degree 7 is a common melodic note, especially in lead vocal melodies. As we listen to the Cage the Elephant intro, I’ll do my best to draw your attention to scale-degree 7 in the untexted vocalise with my vocoder.

[play Cage the Elephant; Brad vocodes “7”]

As a way to structure and order the remaining examples I want to analyze, I’m going to continue highlighting which COMBINATIONS of major and minor tonic and dominant—that is I, Major III, V, and vi—are present or absent in the examples. I’ll then assess how well those songs fit my proposed interpretive strategy, that dual leading tones might act as a harmonic animator of lyrics that concern conflict in post-millennial pop music.

Let’s start with loops that contain all four of those tonic and dominant chords. One interesting facet about a chord loop composed of those four chords is that it would treat each member of Bailey’s double-tonic complex, aka the C6 chord, C, E, G, A, as the root of a triad, yielding the chords I, Major III, V, and vi.

We’ve in fact already heard three such songs that do this: D’Archipelago’s “Serpentine,” 21 Pilots’ “Stressed Out,” and (B-SAHN’s) “One in a Million.” I already explained the main conflict in the chorus of the 21 Pilots song—the stress of modern life vs. the nostalgic comfort of a mother’s lullaby—and “Serpentine” also has lyrics that exemplify internal conflict. It’s about two people who meet at a bar and exchanges pleasantries, including a kiss on the cheek, and while both of them appreciate the affection, they know not to take it any further, since both are in monogamous relationships with somebody else.

And (B-Sahn)’s is also singing about conflict. He ruminates on the conflict between fleeting loves that hit you every day vs. true love which might last a lifetime. That song is also looped for about two minutes in the film Miss Congeniality to underscore the conflict Sandra Bullock’s character feels while dancing on stage pretending to be a beauty pageant star, although, in actuality, she’s really an undercover agent investigating a plot to assassinate Miss USA.

So, are there ANY songs that use this most EXTREME form of dual leading-tone loop, with tonic and dominant for both major and minor keys, that DON’T express some kind of internal conflict in their lyrics? Well, I’ll let you decide whether the lyrics count as conflicting or not as I play the chorus from “Stolen Dance,” the 2013 viral hit by German duo Milky Chance:

[Play Stolen Dance Clip]

Well, what do you think? I’m actually not hearing much conflict here. I’m actually hearing the narrator wallowing in a kind of stagnant existence. This accords with Stephanie Acevedo’s observation that [QUOTE] “the repetition and return to a chord COULD…signal stasis, as ultimately having gone nowhere.” The chorus by itself features themes of desire, perhaps sexual, perhaps for drugs, with a cryptic warning not to talk about it.

Within the context of the verses, which are more clearly about someone or something that has been taken away from them, themes of lost love and/or addiction start to arise. But, in any case, I’m not really hearing this narrator being pulled in conflicting directions.

In that most extreme category of dual leading-tone loops, containing both tonics and both dominants, I have three examples that animate internal conflict in the lyrics, and one that doesn’t. Let’s see about another category of dual leading tone loops. This next category contains only one dominant. And since it wouldn’t be a dual leading tone loop if it didn’t contain Major III, that means the chord we’re missing is V. And yet we ARE still going to get the major key’s leading tone, scale-degree 7, provided by the chordal fifth of that Major III chord, and, probably somewhere in the melody, both of which we already heard in Cage the Elephant’s “Trouble.”

Here I’ll let you decide for yourself if you hear internal conflict in dual leading tone loops from two songs. The first is “Listen Before I Go” by Billie Eilish. Her chord loop is FMaj7, E7, Am7, CMaj7, which sounds like this in the key of C:

[Brad vocodes IV7–major III7–vi7–I7…but just say the numbers]

You heard me say the number “7” after each of those chord roots because all four chords are extended to contain whichever sevenths occur diatonically in the key of C major. Interestingly, this means that the tonic major seventh chord—spelled 1, 3, 5, 7—contains its own leading tone! Here’s what that sounds like in the original recording. As I play it, remember to pay attention to the lyrics:

[play Billie clip]

The second clip of this type, missing the V chord, is heard in the verse of Laufey’s song “Goddess.” The progression is FMaj7, A major, Bb Major, Bb minor, which sounds like this in the key of F:

[Brad vocodes IMaj7–MajorIII–IV–minor iv, don’t say “major”]

This four-chord dual leading tone loop is often associated with Radiohead’s 1993 song “Creep.” It also features some harmonic similarities with the Billie Eilish song, especially the melancholic tonic major 7th chord. Check out the chords and lyrics here:

[play Laufey]

The conflicts in Laufey’s lyrics are poignant enough that they’ve already been identified by music critic Alex Harris. He says that Laufey [QUOTE] “lays bare the jarring dissonance between the glamorised “goddess” persona and the stripped-down vulnerability of her true self, questioning whether her lover truly sees her for who she is or merely an illusion” [END QUOTE].

Eilish’s lyrics, on the other hand, offer a disconcerting LACK of internal conflict. Indeed, they’ve caused a good deal of moral panic among critics and parents alike for seemingly glorifying suicide, an aspect of Billie Eilish’s lyrical output described at length in a 2023 article by Jessica Holmes. So yeah, no conflict in this one: it’s just about one of the bleakest Eilish songs I know.

We’ve just heard an incredibly bleak song harmonized with two tonics and one dominant. But I’m about to show you a similarly bleak dual leading tone loop harmonized in kind of the opposite way, with two DOMINANT chords and only one TONIC. Here’s Anohni’s “In my Dreams,” featuring the chord loop Db Major, Eb Major, C Major, F minor, which sounds like this in the key of Ab:

[Brad vocodes IV–V–major III–vi]

Take a listen to these chords and lyrics in their original context:

[play Anohni clip]

We just heard III resolving directly to vi, but the V never resolves to I. And these lyrics are entirely negative, detailing the protagonist’s nightmares about how they aren’t loved by, and are actually hurt by, the object of their affection. There is obviously no sense of conflict here, but, I think we could go further and actually appreciate how this entirely negative emotional valence in the lyrics might be bolstered by the lack of a major tonic chord.

Its also worth noting that, unlike most pop songs, where you have one chord loop for the verse and a different chord loop for the chorus, Anohni’s loop lasts the entire song. An empirical study done by Taher, Rusch, and McAdams studied how listener attention shifts when one of the two primary musical layers is repetitive and the other isn’t. They observed that [QUOTE] “when one of the two lines consists of immediate and exact reiterations of a short fragment, listeners generally attend to the other concurrent more VARYING line…the listeners’ attention moves to other, more attractive and novel parts” [END QUOTE].

So, with our attention more squarely placed on Anohni’s novel melody and lyrics, we as listeners are probably left to wallow in the sadness of these lyrics even more than if there were changes in the chord loop.

With that idea of repetition in mind, let’s now listen to two different sections of a song. I’m going to play you the verse/chorus pair of Eminem’s “I Need a Doctor.” And even though the CHORD loop stays the same, a dual leading-tone loop in Bb, listen for all the other contrasting elements between these two sections, including the difference in lyrics between the rapped verse and the sung chorus:

[play Eminem]

I would say that the chorus, sung by Skylar Grey, is entirely negative. Its lyrics are about impending LOSS at the eleventh hour. But in the previous verse, we hear Eminem rapping about a lot of conflicts. A little bit of context is helpful here: He’s basically rapping in second person to his hero, mentor, and producer, hip-hop legend Dr. Dre. Eminem’s meteoric rise to fame in the late 90s and early 2000s was almost inversely proportional to the decline of Dre’s fame.

Eminem’s lyrics here reveal that he owes a lot to his producer, and, despite his best efforts to convince Dre that he’s still GOT it, Dre’s depression and self-doubt continues to grow. The verse culminates in the most powerful line, with Eminem realizing that, having crossed into the realm of “tough love,” Dre’s gonna react in one of two ways: he’s either going to fight him, or hug him. It doesn’t get much more conflicting than that.

Both of the preceding examples had two dominants, Major III and V, and only one tonic, the vi chord. I’ve actually only got one example where there are two dominants, and the only tonic is I, the chorus of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire.” While the verse uses the same “Creep” progression as Laufey’s “Goddess,” let me help you hear the much more interesting chord loop in the chorus. It starts off with a ii-V-I progression in F:

[Brad vocodes ii–V7–I]

then adds the Major III:

[Brad vocodes Major III]

but never actually resolves that Major III to vi.

[play Olivia clip]

If you know this song, you know that the lyrics THROUGHOUT describe a conflict common to both pop lyrics and real life: you think you know somebody, but then they deceive you. In Rodrigo’s chorus, the conflict turns internal, when the narrator realizes that there were warning signs all along, but they were blind to those warning signs due to their focus on the positive. This causes the narrator to blame themself for not noticing the warning signs sooner. Whereas once they figured themself clever, now they realize they might be naive.

All of this negatively-tinged internal conflict is harmonized by two dominants and only one tonic, ironically, the I chord. And actually, with the verse sticking to the Creep progression, we don’t even get a vi chord in the entire song! So there you have it, a dual leading tone loop that never capitalizes on tonicizing the vi chord. Now if I could only find another…

Well it’s just about time for me to wrap up, and I’m going to leave you with two avenues I’m already pursuing to extend this research. I started this podcast by pivoting from my previous publication on the use of dual leading tone loops in multimedia in order to focus on how they occur in recorded, audio-alone popular music. And this was probably a good call for a podcast—after all, you wouldn’t be able see any visual elements I might be analyzing.

But now I think I need to fully embrace the multimedia moment popular music finds itself in right now by analyzing dual leading tone loops in music videos and perhaps even TikTok reels. Are music video directors, choreographers, DPs, and editors responding to the harmonic conflict in dual leading tone loops—and a sense of conflict in the corresponding lyrics—with any conflicting visual elements such as contrasting sets, lighting, angles, or quick cuts between opposites of any kind?

And while we’re on the topic of interpreting conflict between lyrics and any other musical or visual elements concomitantly, how sure AM I that there is a demonstrable CORRELATION between those things. After all, in a recent statistical study of the lyrics to about 15,000 popular songs, Alberhasky and Durkee identified as one of the three most common lyrical themes in the entire dataset something they call “cognitive tension,” which they define as [QUOTE] “internal conflicts experienced by characters, decision-making, and problem-solving” [END QUOTE].

So, I’ll need to decide, moving forward, if I really am suggesting a CORRELATION between conflicting lyrics and dual leading tone loops, or just posing this idea of internal conflict as a fruitful interpretive strategy.

The second avenue for future research I’m pursuing is producing statistical evidence to support my hunch, driven by decades of close listening, that the Major III chord and thus the dual leading tone loop is more common in POST-millennial music than in PRE-millennial. While I’ll have a more carefully curated corpus study on this in the future, let me go ahead and share some evidence for this. This comes from preliminary data analysis I’ve been doing with Chris White, author of the books Music in the Data and the 2025 forthcoming The AI Music Problem: The Mismatch Between Machine Learning and Musical Creativity, both with are with Routledge.

Chris and I started by looking at a famous repository of Top-20 songs released between 1958 and 1991 called The McGill Billboard Corpus. When we analyzed all of the chords in those songs, we found about 15% of them use some form of chromaticism, and the most common chromatic chords were, in this order: bVII, Major II, and bIII. I hasten to point out that we have heard none of these three chromatic chords in ANY of the POST-millennial songs in this podcast.

Next, we compared the older McGill Billboard Corpus to some data from about 9,000 chord loops in hit songs released up until 2024. In contrast to the 15% total chromaticism in the older McGill Billboard database, we now see that only 5% of post-millennial chord loops use any chromaticism whatsoever. And, more importantly, can you guess what the single most common chromatic chord in post-millennial music is?

Yep, the Major III chord. Whereas pre-millennial music uses a lot of bluesy flat-side modal borrowing, post-millennial music, when it uses chromaticism at all, favors this Major III chord above all else. I hope to have shown in this podcast how the Major III chord engenders my dual leading tone loop, and suggested how its tonally indeterminate nature might be fruitfully applied to lyrics in which narrators express conflicting emotions. Thank you for listening.

Brad would like to thank Chris White who shared data on chord loops out of the goodness of his heart. He'd also like to thank his undergraduate research assistant, Charles Brockus, for creating the audio clips of all these great pop songs. Many thanks to John White, at the University of Kansas Center for Online and Distance Learning, who hooked them up with a lovely vocal booth and state-of-the-art equipment for recording the narration. And of course, this podcast would not be possible without the SMT-Pod team, including Brad's insightful peer reviewers Evan Ware and Bryn Hughes, the incredibly well organized Team Lead Caitlin Martinkus, and my patient Producer Amy Hatch.

[Outro Theme by Yike Zhang.]

Visit our website, smt-pod.org, for supplemental materials related to this episode and to learn how to submit an episode proposal. You can join in the conversation by tweeting us your questions and comments @SMT_Pod. SMT-Pod’s theme music was written by Maria Tartaglia, with closing music by Yike Zhang.