Voice Leading

In traditional western music, voice leading customarily follows the rules of Counterpoint .

Voice leading may be described as parsimonious if it follows "the law of the shortest way" moving as few voices as few steps as possible and thus often retaining Common Tone s. Anti-parsimonious or circuitous voice leading is "voice leading between trichords that avoids double common-tone retention, thus requiring at least two instrumental voices to move to different pitches."

An auditory stream is a perceived Melodic line and streaming laws attempt to indicate the Psychoacoustic basis of Contrapuntal music. It is assumed that "several musical dimensions, such as Timbre , attack and decay transients, and Tempo are often not specified exactly by the composer and are controlled by the performer." An example of one law is that the faster a Melodic sequence plays the smaller the pitch interval needed to split the sequence into two streams. Two alternating tones may produce various streaming effects including coherence (perceived as one unit), a roll (one dominates the other), or masking (one tone is no longer perceived).

''See also'': Tonality , Chord Progression , Polyphony .

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Voice Leading