Music Analysis. "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" is a special song from Michael Jackson

Western music theory is based on the buildup and release of tension. One of the best ways to create tension is with dissonance. The tritone is considered by European tradition to be a very dissonant interval. Every major key has a tritone in it, between the fourth and seventh notes of the scale, When typical western listener hear a tritone, their ear wants it to resolve to a less dissonant interval.

African-American music treats the tritone very differently. The blues uses tons of unresolved tritones. In blues, chords with tritones can functionally feel stable and resolved, “dissonant” though they may be. The music has lots of other intriguing harmonic grittiness, like microtones, and the simultaneous use of minor and major thirds. The blues passed the unresolved tritone on to its many musical descendants: jazz, rock, funk and so on.

Michael Jackson has his musical tradition that his melody is base on an unresolved tritone. Still, it’s startling to hear it featured so prominently and starkly in a pop song, on the very first two notes of the vocal melody no less. It gives a jolt of intensity to what might otherwise be a harmless piece of disco fluff.

Music is fundamentally all about math. Most of the musical intervals in the western tuning system are based on simple ratios, the kinds of numbers we can count on our fingers. The interval between A and the next A up is an octave, meaning that the ratio between the two notes’ frequencies is one to two. The interval between A and E is a fifth, a ratio of two to three. The interval between A and C# is a major third, a ratio of four to five. The tritone is different. The interval between A and D# is one to the square root of two. we might not identify which specific irrational number it’s hearing, but it knows that something weird and complex is at work.

Though “Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough”, I learn more about the fundamental music and I’m very appreciate how Michael Jackson wrote  his first millstone in his career.