In contemporary popular music, genres go beyond merely musical styles and are developing into an indicator that reflects the trend in music. With a new attempt to combine many different genres away from the stylized method of composition, popular musi...
In contemporary popular music, genres go beyond merely musical styles and are developing into an indicator that reflects the trend in music. With a new attempt to combine many different genres away from the stylized method of composition, popular music has taken a form in which multiple genres coexist. Ballads have also continued to evolve over time, and the attempt through multiple genres is effective in showing new musical expressions. This paper analyzes musical characteristics of Sung Si-kyung's 8th album 《Si-ot》 focusing on genres. This album is not limited to Korean traditional ballads, but it is an album in which Sung si-kyung, a ballad singer, expresses new musical possibilities through various elements of genres. The songs of the album are classified into 7 genres: jazz-pop, synth-pop, folk-pop, dance-pop, pop ballad, rock ballad, and retro pop. And this paper analyzes them in terms of melody, harmony, and arrangement. As a result of the study, "Eternally" is a jazz pop style, has a form structure in which a bridge is added to the AABA format, and forms a complex harmony structure such as altered tension, line cliché, and passing chord. In addition, it is converted from 4 beats to 3 beats, but the change of beats does not last as long as jazz music, and changes temporarily to the tempo of the vocal. "Holding on to You" is a synth pop style, which expresses the changing sweep sound by applying a filter to the intro. In addition, by applying a gate effect through audio editing to the back chorus and various modulation effects, it shows an unique style differentiated from typical ballads. "And we go" is a folk-pop style, with an acoustic guitar as the main, and uses the three-finger arpeggio technique. In addition, the bridge, which is often used in ballads, is omitted and proceeds monotonously in the form of an A-B-C, and the simple feeling of the folk is further emphasized by the harmonic progression centered on the triad chord rather than the 7th chord. "I Love U" is a dance-pop style, which uses all the sounds of electric piano, acoustic piano, drum machine, and acoustic drum. It complementarily combines acoustic and electronic instruments to produce a variety of sounds. In addition, it expresses the medium-tempo groove with a swing feel, and repeats the chorus motif 6 times to emphasize the key message of the lyrics of "I Love U”. "The Time I Loved You" is a pop ballad style, which emphasizes emotional depth by utilizing a wide range of 2 octaves or more, and reveals a high-pitched peak. "No Miracle Was There" is a rock ballad style, which is transformed by a sudden transposition from F Major to Bb Major rather than a gradual chromatic transposition for dynamics, and that gives a strong twist to the flow of the song. In addition, each part is changed in the arrangement to greatly express the breadth of change in the instrument section and reveal its strong presence by using the distortion guitar. "First Winter" is a retro-pop style, which creates the atmosphere of the song through the vintage-textured electric piano, mugh base, and various tones of auxiliary keyboards. In addition, the reverb is excessively used to imitate and express the unique reverberation created by analog equipment at the time or early digital reverb. Through a genre-based approach differentiated from the existing analysis of ballad, this study secures musical diversity in the elements of genre by not looking at ballad as a single genre, and presents new directions in popular music creation.