Chord Tone or Harmonic-Bass Divorce? An Enactive Approach to Hearing Pedals in Popular Music

This article synthesizes concepts from studies of harmony in popular music to create a new theory of pedals as multi-layered sonorities.We explore how pedal sonorities potentially have plural identities and possibilities for perception, shedding new light on several paradoxes or ambiguities that pedals have presented within traditional, triadic ontologies of harmony.Pedals have been historically associated with the bass voice, strictly separate from the chords above them, and usually understood as a harmonic prolongation of the tonic or dominant.But within popular music, pedals may appear in any voice, may participate in every chord, and may not play a clear prolongational role.We present a multiparameter framework for understanding pedals, and observe two new types of pedal in popular music: the sentimental pedal and the cinematic pedal.We also show how pop and jazz theories make it easier to conceptually integrate pedal notes with the surrounding harmonies.Our analyses widen the picture presented by the growing literature on melodicharmonic divorce and harmonic-bass divorce, showing how some pedal passages can be experienced either as a stratification of divorced layers or as an integrated harmony.Finally, our conception of pedal is described from an enactive cognition perspective, foregrounding the potential for listener agency and subjectivity in the perception of these multilayered harmonies.