Voice leading: Encyclopedia - Voice leading

Voice leading

In music, voice leading is the continuity between pitches or notes played successively in time. For example, when moving from a root position C triad or chord played C-E-G to an F triad in second inversion, played C-F-A, you might say that the middle "voice" rises from E to F while the top "voice" rises from G to A, this being a way to "lead" those voices. Instead of thinking of the two successive chords vertically as separate, we are concentrating on the "horizontal" (temporal or linear) continuity between notes. Concern for voice-leading often means a predominance of stepwise motion and may assist or replace diatonic functionality.

In traditional western music, voice leading customarily follows the rules of counterpoint.

Voice leading may be described as parsimonious if it follows "the law of the shortest way" (Schoenberg 1911, p.39) moving as few voices as few steps as possible and thus often retaining common tones. Anti-parsimonious or circuitous voice leading is "voice leading between trichords that avoids double common-tone retention, thus requiring at least two instrumental voices to move to different pitches." (Hisama 2001, p.153-154)

An auditory stream is a perceived melodic line and streaming laws attempt to indicate the psychoacoustic basis of contrapuntal music. It is assumed that "several musical dimensions, such as timbre, attack and decay transients, and tempo are often not specified exactly by the composer and are controlled by the performer." An example of one law is that the faster a melodic sequence plays the smaller the pitch interval needed to split the sequence into two streams. Two alternating tones may produce various streaming effects including coherence (perceived as one unit), a roll (one dominates the other), or masking (one tone is no longer perceived).

See also: tonality, chord progression, polyphony.

Voice leading - Source

• Hisama, Ellie M. (2001). Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052164030X.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Voice leading", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki