Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK7riqg2mr4
Song: Agar Tum Saath Ho
Artists: Alka Yagnik and Arjit Singh
Music: AR Rahman
Lyrics: Irshad Kamil
Music Label: T-Series
Genre: Bollywood
Relationship: I grew up watching Indian Movies and listening to Indian Music. It is a part of who I am and my culture. In my opinion, this song, instrumentally and vocally, is very breathtaking, complex, and emotional.
Musical Element #1: Melody
The third verse of this song is something I can’t stop singing or humming. There is so much that is happening instrumentally and vocally, that you are taken aback by what you’re listening to. The melody here follows disjunct (the melody ascends and then descends and then ascends and so forth) [You hear it in the violins especially]. This whole song in general is a combination of music that makes you feel pain/sadness but also love at the same time. Two very contrasting emotions and feelings of music. The singer’s voice, however, in this section, is performing in the conjunct method (gradually ascending and then gradually descending). For every line he sings, he starts off low, and towards the end, you hear the stress of when he’s hitting the high note. This pattern continues into the next line and so on and so forth.
Musical Element #2: Timbre (Tone Color)
Again, I’ll reference the third verse because I feel like it is a good representation of the main elements of music. Timbre refers to the distinctive quality of a voice or an instrument. In the third verse, the male singer’s voice is overlapped. He is singing the same lines but on two different scales (a series of pitches, ordered by the interval between its notes) and pitches (a tone that is composed of an organized sound wave). In one voice, he is singing calmly and in the other, he is singing in agony, very representative of the roller coaster of emotions that the characters experience in the movie. One of which is in a high tone and the other which is in a low tone. It is significant because it portrays the emotions that the people involved in making the song want the audience to feel. They want the viewer to go through the journey with the character.
