Musician Steve Cruickshank transformed Simon and Garfunkel’s famous ballad “The Sound of Silence” into something completely eery using a technique called Negative Harmony. With Negative Harmony, a composer flips major chords with minor ones, creating almost a completely new song. Learn what Negative Harmony is and how to use it in your own music.
Negative Harmony is a musical term for when composers flip the major chords of a piece into minor ones and vice versa. Each note or is transformed note by note to their minor equivalents. This creates an eery version of the original music, which with “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel, makes almost a completely new song.
The musical master changing around the notes of this song is Steve Cruickshank, who created this melancholy version of Simon and Garfunkel using Negative Harmony. Cruickshank has created multiple covers using this technique, and they’re all amazing. Curious to learn more about how it works? Here’s a video that explains it in simple terms:
