The Secret Life of Interval Resolution

There's something we almost never talk about as composers, not harmony, not orchestration,

not counterpoint, interval resolution. Welcome back to the Music Interval Theory podcast.

I'm Frank and after years of writing for movies, animation shows and video games,

I can tell you this. The magic is often not in the chords. It's in the movement between two notes.

Open almost any theory book and you'll find pages and pages about chord functions.

Tonic, dominant, sub-dominant, secondary dominance, borrowed chords. It's like a buffet of harmony.

But when it comes to how a single interval behaves, almost silence. And that's strange because

music is not just vertical. It's not just blocks of harmony stacked on top of each other.

Music is energy moving through time. Let's take something simple. The minor second, two notes

a half step apart. It's unstable, it's tight, it's uncomfortable. You can almost feel the friction

in your body when you play it slowly on a piano. There's tension sitting right there between those

two notes and most of the time that minor second wants to expand. It wants to open up into a minor third.

When it does, you feel it. The release, the breath, that shift is not random. It's physical.

It's energy moving from compression to expansion. Now here's where things get interesting.

Imagine you stop thinking in chords for a moment. You stop asking, what's my next harmony?

And instead, you ask, where does this interval want to go?

Minor second, resolving to minor third, then again and again. You can chain these resolutions

together. Suddenly, your music starts to feel like it's breathing on its own.

Tension. Release. Tension. Release. Not because you changed the chord symbol above the staff,

but because you directed the energy inside the interval. This is especially powerful in open

harmony. When you don't hide everything inside thick voicings in a sparse piano queue,

in a soft synth pad with just two voices, there's nowhere to hide. And that's a good thing.

In film scoring, I've used this technique many times during transitions. You're in one emotional

space and you need to move somewhere else without making it feel like a hard cut. Instead of jumping

harmonically, you let intervals expand step by step. A minor second opens to a minor third,

then maybe that minor third shifts and creates another minor second somewhere else in the texture.

You're not announcing a modulation. You're guiding the listener through it. It's like walking someone

through a dark room with a small flashlight instead of flipping on the big overhead light.

The change feels natural, organic. This also works beautifully for building momentum.

Think about a motor like pad on, maybe in low strings or in a rhythmic piano figure.

If you keep chaining interval resolutions, you create for what motion without heavy harmonic

changes, but the internal energy keeps pushing ahead. That's where the life comes from. Most

composers are trained to think vertically. What chord am I on? What's the next function?

But music unfolds horizontally. It moves. It breathes. It leans forward. Great writing is

controlled energy. And intervals are the smallest units of that energy. When you start directing

intervals instead of stacking chords, you gain precision. You're no longer just placing harmonic

blocks next to each other. You're shaping tension at the microscopic level. And here's the beautiful

part. This works in any style. Cinematic scoring, contemporary classical, ambient music,

even hybrid orchestral or minimalist textures. As soon as you become aware of interval behavior,

your writing becomes more intentional. Next time you sit at your piano or open your DAW,

try this. Forget the chord progression for a moment. Write a simple two-note figure, a minor

second. Let it resolve to a minor third. Then create another minor second somewhere else in the

texture. And let that resolve too. Listen to how the energy flows. Listen to how little you actually

need to create motion. You might realize that you don't need more layers. You don't need a

bigger orchestration. You just need clearer interval direction because music doesn't move with

chord symbols. It moves because intervals want to move. So here's the takeaway for today.

Cords are structures. Intervals are energy. Resolution is motion. And motion is life in music.

If you want your writing to feel alive, stop stacking chords and start directing intervals.

And if this idea of interval spells speaks to you, small, powerful movements that create big,

emotional shifts, then I invite you to download my free guide five spells every composer needs.

These spells are interval based composition techniques that work like magic. In the guide,

I break down five of my most used techniques with examples so you can immediately apply them

in your own music. You'll find it at musicintervaltheory.academy slash spells. It's free and it might

completely change how you think about motion in your compositions. Thanks for listening to the

music interval theory podcast. Keep shaping energy. Keep directing motion. And I'll see you in the next

episode.