Created: 2022-09-29
Hey producer friends,
Today I want to share something I’ve never shared before.
This is a theory I came up with throughout my career.
I was questioning why some of my tracks performed better than others and came up with my own conclusions that helped me have more consistent results later on.
Disclaimer: this is not science or absolute truth but just my own personal view and theory, hope it will help and give you a different perspective :)
I basically came to the conclusion that there’s 4 main needs humans have that relate to music and if you are able to address all of them you can increase your chances of keeping people glued to their headphones from start to finish of your track.
These are the 4 main needs I was able to find:
1 - Movement; The need to move our body is obvious and innate, it’s necessary for our survival and well being, we release good hormones when we move our body.
2 - Emotion; we are emotional creatures, we love to experience intense emotional states and travel through different ones;
3 - Pleasure; we love sensorial stimulation, we are pleasure seeking machines, we love dopamine.
4 - Variation; We love to be surprised, we love change. Anything that stays the same for too long, gets boring.
And these 4 areas are the ones I keep in mind when making my own music to maximize my returns.
Now how can you use this in your music?
Personally I use these 4 needs as a guideline in each of my tracks.
Because each of these areas directly relates to a specific aspect of music.
Here’s how I address the 4 needs one by one:
1 - To satisfy the need for movement, you must have a compelling rhythm.
Whenever you are composing something, ask yourself: how do I want my listener to move when they’ll be listening to my track?
Imagine them listening to your track, visualize them.
Then do your best to replicate that kind of motion in your track.
To do this I usually close my eyes and imagine I am the listener myself, and let my body move the way it wants based on what I’m making. Then I let them guide me in shaping my track even better (placing elements, creating groove etc.).
Not only that, but you can even think and imagine how you want the listener to move and groove through the different sections of your tracks creating a journey this way (more on that later in the variation part).
2 - To satisfy the need for emotion, you need harmony and melody.
Those are the most powerful tools in music to elicit emotional states in the listener.
Think ahead: what emotion do I want them to experience in this part of the track? And what about this other section?
It might sound complex to convey a specific emotional state through chords and melodies, but a good way you can improve in this is by asking yourself a question each time you play a progression, a melody, or even a single chord: what is this making me feel?
With time, training and practice you’ll learn to master these emotional states and recreate them each time you want to create a full story.
3 - The need for pleasure has more to do with pleasant sounds than with the composition itself. It’s like an extra added layer.
In my opinion, harmony and melody elicit emotions while tymbre and sound placement target our need for pleasure more and the dopamine-releasing areas of the brain.
So how do we give them pleasure? Sound selection, sound design, layering etc.
Some modern songs might not even be that interesting in terms of songwriting or composition, but they have such a great sonic palette and soundscape that they stimulate our hearing to such a degree that when you listen your brain is flooded with dopamine and it becomes way easier to like the song.
4 - To satisfy the need for variation, we need to use one concept in particular: contrast.
That’s probably the most important word for me in music.
We feel variation when something contrasts something else.
We want to constantly be spiking the interest of the listener. This links back to the need for pleasure. Hearing something new happening releases good hormones and then we want more of it.
By using the concept of contrast in any aspect of your music (composition, sound design, arrangement etc.) you can manage to have just enough variation to keep the listener hooked but not enough to overwhelm them. Keeping this subtle balance will increase the possibility they’ll listen to the whole track.
Contrast can be applied to so many different areas, for example: rhythm, pitch, octaves, tymbre, note density, stereo image, vertical arrangement, horizontal arrangement… I mean, basically anything in the music making process really.
And this is pretty much what I think throughout my process, what I ask myself each single time is: am I targeting each of the 4 human needs and to what degree?
And then make adjustments accordingly.
To conclude, try to keep these aspects in mind when producing and it might help you big time, at least it made a big difference for me!
I hope this was helpful and gave you a bit of an overview over my own thought process!
I’m curious to know what you think about it, let me know :)
