Repetition & Surprise

This article explains a principle that is crucial to any creative field, and songwriting is no exception. In fact, it’s even more important and it’s even easier to see it in action. It’s the principle of Repetition & Surprise.

A piece of art is usually deemed “good” if it has a nice mix of repetitive elements and surprising elements

You might also call it Familiar & New or Structure & Variation. This principle applies to a whole song as well as the details within.

What does it mean?

Repetition

Well, listen to any popular song, and you’ll probably notice they all follow some general structure.

• Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, …
• Usually, each verse has the same melody. A chorus often has the same melody and lyrics.
• Within each section, melody lines or phrases might be repeated. They might follow a certain rhyming or rhythmic scheme.

When you look at this, you’ll notice songs are at least 50% repetition and a common structure. But that’s not 100% of the story—that’d mean all songs are just the same sentence over and over! It provides a good foundation on which to build a creative and unique song.

Surprise

The other 50% comes from surprise and new elements. Rhyming is this principle on steroids. You repeat the sound of a word, but vary it slightly so that the two words rhyme. Our brains love that!

• Even though similar, no verse is usually the same. Through new lyrics and perhaps a changed melody here or there, you add variety to the structure.
• Again, even though very similar, no chorus is usually identical. Later choruses often change a few lines or raise the pitch. Again, 99% structure, just that sprinkle of surprise.
• The instrumentation for the whole song is mostly the same, but once in a while an instrument is dropped or added.

Sometimes people call this the “hook”: the surprising melody change that captures listeners. Without a hook, there’s nothing unique or exciting to capture somebody.

Conversely, without structure the song is incoherent and chaotic. The listener will have a hard time “getting into it” or knowing what they’re even listening to. That’s why pop songs focus more on structure (so they’re easy to digest), but therefore all sound similar.

What’s the lesson?

• You can start a song by using a well-known, common structure. But make sure to add enough variety to make it better.
• Alternatively, if your song feels incoherent or like a mess, purposely add structure to it.

The more songs you write, the more you’ll understand the exact balance between these two topics.

This principle will be the common thread in the following chapters. With songwriting, it can be applied in four major ways:

• Rhythm
• Pitch
• Lyrics
• Arrangement ( or Instrumentation)

That’s why I’ll only give a general example here, then continue. See it as a taste of what’s to come.

Example: crafting a melody

Start with structure

We start with a “melody” that is nothing but one repetitive structure. Always the same note, always the same length. Pretty boring, right?

Now we want to break the structure, but only a little bit. We want to change things, but still in a way that is predictable. Still following a pattern of sorts. (Otherwise, starting with structure doesn’t matter. You end up with chaos anyway after one step!)

For example, here’s a “rule”: every second note is split in two. In a way, we’ve now divided our melodic idea into two parts.

Now let’s add a rule about pitch: each part only goes up.

Hmm, those two long notes still feel too repetitive. Too monotonous. Let’s break the second one into some random parts.

Ah, we’re getting somewhere. Notice how the melody is still very structured. It follows some obvious patterns, but it already sounds much better. So let’s finish it by providing one “odd note out”. I just picked one note at random and put it somewhere else.

Start with surprise

This time, we do the opposite. I literally placed random notes with random lengths. (Behind the scenes, I input these examples by just writing an octave, a note, and a number for the length.)

This is completely random. Yet … this already gives us something. The first few notes actually sound fine. The last half is just weird and doesn’t fit with it.

So let’s add structure. Take the first part and duplicate it.

It’s not much better. But at least it’s less chaotic. Now it feels too repetitive: after the first part, it feels like the melody “resets” just to do the same thing again.

So let’s move the second part up (in pitch). Also, change the transition in hopes of making it smoother.

Ah, we’re getting somewhere! If you look at this melody (visually), you can see that we go up two times … but in a different way. This time, I think that does not sound good. So let’s make those quick notes upward follow the same pattern.

Finally, the melody still feels a bit too chaotic. If you look at this melody again, you’ll see that we only have very quick notes and long ones. This suggests we can add our last bit of structure by changing some notes to be of medium length.

There you have it. Something that might provide an uplifting, heroic score to a film.

Obviously, these are extremely simple and quick examples. But they show how these principles turn any starting point into an acceptable melody.