So, what exactly is going on in Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies”? (Complete song and video here on YouTube.)

Sure, it starts off with this peppy exhortation to “all the single ladies,” eventually telling them to “put their hands up,” with the clear idea that all the single ladies are already down on the dance floor, drawn their by the irresistible syncopation of the drum track, and whatever that squeaky, moaning sound is. That’s the general approach to the song—totally traditional structure, but with something completely weird and unexpected. Here it’s the instrumentation. Also, it’s as old as the hills, but listen to how each repetition of “all the single ladies” gets a new layer of harmony.

Things stay pretty much as expected for a while—here’s a sample of how the verse section runs; we’ve got a nice interaction between rhythm, melody and harmony here. The result is that the end of the line delievrs a lot of visceral satisfaction, even if the music might seem a bit frothy.

Now the big set up. The chorus comes in (“cause if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it”), and we get some nice sweeping bass—totally synthetic, but again, very visceral.

But that chorus is just setting us up for the repetition of the chorus (they’re separated by a kind of chorus prime section), when something seriously, seriously weird happens. Listen here (and it’s worth listening in headphones or over a stereo, because you need to hear the bass fairly clearly):

I first listened to the song because someone called it “irritating and addictive,” which a combination I’ve always found interesting (for the record, I don’t find the song irritating, but it has been hard to get out of my mind). After I hit that first repetition/variation of the chorus I was hooked. Why does that section sound so weird? Well, the song is in E major (a little unusual in itself, by the way, since E major is typically a guitar/bass key, not particularly well suited to piano/synthesizer), and the melody in the chorus is a pretty simple descending melody — B A G# F# E — and most of the verse is E F# G#, E F# G#, E F# G# F# E. But in the chorus repetition, this huge bass comes in underneath in the wrong key. The bass goes B C, B A, and the note of C is not in the key of E major (it should be C#). It makes the bass sound massive, looming, even threatening. It breaks all the rules, and it sounds great—a song that might have been just froth suddenly has a moment that keeps you acoustically pegged.

A couple of other things to note. If you look at the basic melodies for the verse and chorus section, you’ll see that they both stay away from the C/C# question—it’s a melodic space that’s been deliberately left ambiguous, suggesting that the song may have at least partially been crafted just to whack you with that impossible C in the chorus.

The second thing is that the phenomenon at work is called “bitonality,” or playing in two keys at the same time. Here’s the fascinating part about bitonality—check out this post at Cognitive Daily (one of my favorite cognitive science blogs), and listen to the two examples of “Ave Maria.” As the study referenced indicates, non-musicians do not find bitonality unpleasant—indeed, they cannot even recognize it when they hear it. Most musicians react with immediate disgust or begin to laugh, it sounds so deeply and profoundly wrong to them. I do not know offhand who wrote Beyoncé’s song, but this was someone smart enough to (a) know that listeners don’t mind a bit of bitonality and (b) know when to use it.

And finally, here’s a piece that Bill and I wrote a couple of years ago—he emailed me an mp3 file of the bass and drums and then I did crazy things with the guitar on top of that. I asked him what key it was in, and he wouldn’t tell me, so I just played things on top that I thought sounded interesting. There’s at least some bitonality at work in the opening section, but I think it sounds fine—weird, maybe, but deliberately weird. So, I guess it was actually Bill who made me go bi, and not Beyoncé after all.

UPDATE

This blog has a much more detailed analysis of Beyoncé “Single Ladies,” and thinks that the melody might be derived from the Largo section of Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, "From The New World" (Op. 95). You can listen to some of that here while looking at pretty pictures—I’m not convinced that they are “eerily similar,” but perhaps he’s referring to some other part—I don’t have the whole thing here. If only one could… download music somehow (I know, call me crazy) over the internet! Well, maybe someday!