Estimated reading time 3 minutes
Table of Contents
Introduction
Do you want to know what consonance and dissonance are? Do you need to know how they work in music? If you want to write incredibly cool music, you need to understand how consonance and dissonance function in melodies and harmonies. Keep reading How to Write Music Using Consonance and Dissonance to learn what they are and how they work.
This article uses musical terms. For definitions, see the Glossary at the end of the post.
How to Write Music Using Consonance and Dissonance: What Are They in Music?
What are consonance and dissonance? The New Harvard Dictionary of Music states:
The perceived stability or instability of a complex of two or more sounds. (197)
When two notes are dissonant, they have a roughness that is unpleasant to listen to:
- This roughness makes them unstable, because your ear wants to move on from the unpleasant sound.
- When you move from a dissonant (bad sounding) to a consonant (good sounding) interval, it’s called a resolution.
- Consonance is stable, because your ear likes hearing pleasant sounding intervals.
The back and forth of consonance and dissonance in Western music gives the music forward motion.
How to Write Music Using Consonance and Dissonance: How it Functions in Melodies
Dissonance happens in melodies when scale tones (a.k.a. non-harmonic tones), conflict with the notes in your harmony, which then resolves to a consonance.
- Passing Tone: This is the simplest non-harmonic tone as the scale note passes between chord notes. If you listen closely, you can hear extra tension as the D note (the non-harmonic tone) plays.
- Auxiliary: It starts on a chord note, then goes up or down by a step and back again.
- Appoggiatura: Unlike the last two, this one has the non-harmonic tone land on the beat then resolve to the chord tone. Having the scale tone on the beat really makes the roughness pop out of the texture.
Melodic skips
- Cambiata: This melodic ornament starts on the chord tone, then skips to a non-harmonic tone (either up or down). Finally, it resolves by step in the opposite direction to a chord tone.
- Echappe: An echappee steps into the dissonance then skips into the resolution. You could think of it as being the opposite of the cambiata.
Pulling in notes from other chords.
- Anticipation: The non-harmonic tone played over the first chord is the same as the chord tone in the next harmony.
- Suspension: A suspension is the opposite of an anticipation. A note from the first chord is held over into the next chord, turning that note into a non-harmonic tone.
See the examples below for each type of non-harmonic tone.
- I deliberately made the soundtracks slow, so you can hear the roughness.
- To minimize the roughness, increase the speed when using melodic ornaments.
- Doing this will generally make your melodies less dissonant.
Just be sure not to make your melodies too fast!
Mobile users: for best results reading the music, rotate your screen 90o to the right.
How to Write Music Using Consonance and Dissonance: How it Functions in Harmony
Harmonic consonance and dissonance happen when notes sound simultaneously.
- This means that you need to have at least two notes, such as you find with harmonic intervals.
- However, triads have three notes, and seventh chords have four unique notes per chord.
- Jazz chords can have even more than that.
One of the most common uses of harmonic consonance and dissonance is the resolving tritone.
- You can see in the first example the tense tritone resolving to the calm major third.
- The next example has a V7 to I resolution. In other words, the tritone within the V7 chord resolves when you move to the I triad.
- In addition, resolutions help you change keys.
- The third example below shows how you can use chains of V7 chords to quickly move through six different keys.
- The final example below has a diminished seventh chord, which contains two tritones. It demonstrates the different ways this very tense chord can be effectively resolved.
For more information on Roman numeral analysis:
For more information on changing keys:
Final Thoughts
Takeaway points:
- Dissonant intervals sound bad, and consonant intervals sound good.
- Moving from a dissonant to a consonant interval is called a resolution.
- Dissonance happens in melodies when scale tones (a.k.a. non-harmonic tones), conflict with the notes in your harmony, which then resolves to a consonance.
Have fun writing!
Related Posts
- Changing Keys in Your Songwriting
- How to Effectively Use Music Theory to Transpose Music
- D’you Want Some Music Tips and Tricks I’ve Learned Over the Years?
© 2025 Geoffrey Keith
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