For most of my life music felt like black magic. Sure, I played the Cello when I was eight, until I tired of galumphing with that clunky wooden whale across the sidewalk each morning. Then I took up the violin, slender and more manageable, but a year later my teacher died. I wish that was a joke. It’s not.

My family biked, ran, and swam—but we didn’t sing often. Not in the kitchen, rarely on road trips, perhaps mostly on birthdays. Music was something that happened to other people.

Even when I tried to break that spell later in life, it didn't go well. In my last year of high school, I decided to audition for our production of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels wanting one role: Inspector Andre Thibault. The French accent. The confidence. The chance to sound sexy and refined in front of a room full of girls. I stood outside the audition room, nerves chewing on my throat, when another student turned to me and asked what role I was hoping for.

“You’ll never get the part,” he said. “I’m auditioning for it too.”

And of course, he did get it. Something in me folded then, and I started seeing music as tantamount to mathematics: alien, hopeless, and requiring talent.

With this mindset, I entered college and wasn't involved in anything musical whatsoever. Before my Sophomore year, I didn't even listen to music. I stuck to audio books, podcasts, and bouts of existential doubt.

That was until a few years ago when my life began to fill—slowly, hesitantly—with musicians. A music school transfer who played the cello. A pianist who also loved poetry. An ex who was obsessed with Taylor Swift. And now, a girlfriend who seems to listen to music in every single genre and language in existence. Finally, a few days ago I came across This Is Your Brain On Music by cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Levitin.

And that's when it finally clicked: he described music like a story.

For the last five years I've been an avid non-fiction/fiction writer and YouTuber. Story is the clay I mold in every single day. Half the books I've read have been in psychology, so if I could combine psychology, story, and music, perhaps I could finally appreciate this thing that everyone loves so much.

So despite by skepticisms, despite my fears, I want to explore with you some of the main breakthroughs this perception of music has taught me. We'll explore how great music is great storytelling, the elements that make up music and how they create story, and ultimately the unexpected insight regarding all art and life which this gave me. Let's boogie.

Great Music Is Great Storytelling; Let Me Show You Why.

I've read The Stormlight Archives four times over. That's over 7,000 pages which is... arguably a cry for help. But I keep coming back. Why? Because the characters are so deep, the themes so tender and earned, the plot so invigorating, that each read feels like I’m excavating another emotional fossil layer. I used to think that kind of depth was only possible in writing or film. But to my surprise, music can do this too—if you listen the right way.

A story is just a subject or group of subjects pursuing a goal while navigating obstacles. Someone wants something and has to suffer for it. In writing, we tell this journey through words, dialogue, description, internal thought, and structure. We mold it into The Hero’s Journey or The Three Act Structure or “Oh god, I didn’t outline and now I'm doomed.”

Reading This Is Your Brain On Music made me realize: music does this too. It doesn’t tell a story. It embodies them. A good song doesn’t say, “Here is a character and here’s what happened to them.” It says, “Feel what they felt.” It whispers straight to the gut. If story is a road, then music is the wind blowing through the trees beside it, making you feel like you’re flying even if you’re standing still.

But of course, music and written stories aren't exactly the same. Written stories are often a slow burn, like cooking a stew over seven hours so the flavors melt into each other. Music doesn’t wait. It can destroy you in 15 seconds flat. One chord change, one breath of vibrato, one unexpected drop—and your heart gets hijacked like a coup d'état.

Music also uses different elements to written stories like pitch, melody, timbre, loudness, vocals, and more. But just like in a story, these things can combine to create stakes, suspense, conflict, and larger story structures.

To mix music and story, all you need is a journey of a subject or subjects pursuing a goal while navigating obstacles. Then, the music becomes a means of accentuating the emotions of the narrative. With this lens, you start seeing musical storytelling everywhere.

Some songs are literally stories like Owl Cities The Tornado.

This song follows our protagonist, as he delivers papers around the neighborhood before a terrible tornado comes. The beginning is soft and quiet with only a piano, but slowly it builds in tension as more instruments like a drum machine join in. Once the tornado comes, everything is frantic, a violin entering with screeching cuts that zip back and forth, and the melody we are used to breaking apart. He barely makes it through the storm by thinking of his family, learning he can survive life one storm at a time as long as he remembers those dearest to him. The ending reflects this insight with the return of the drum machine and piano giving a calm reflective atmosphere.

Other songs are stories in spirit like Alec Benjamin's If We Have Each Other.

This song follows the three act structure, with three different sections all telling the story of a different person(s) navigating a hard life. It’s a mini novel in three acts.

• A 19-year-old girl, pregnant and struggling.
• Two 90-year-olds, proving love can weather anything.
• A 23-year-old guy—lonely, lost, but clinging to his sister.

Every story ends with a chorus section stating if the people just have each other they can make it through anything. Through each section Benjamin weaves acoustic guitar, soft strings, and light percussion with bass to build emotion.

The third act is the true genius when Benjamin breaks the fourth wall by repeating the verse, "I wrote this verse to tell her that I'm always by her side, I wrote this verse to tell her that I'm always by her side." It's this second line, where the audience realizes, oh my goodness he's talking about himself and his own sister, bringing the song full circle and making the last chorus hit that much harder.

Some songs, represent universal feelings which allude to stories through context.

AJR's Maybe Man is a great example of this. It follows the protagonist as they wonder through everything they might be able to be or do, weighing the positives and negatives. The song is a story in the sense that it calls to the universal narrative of struggling to find a stable sense of self in a chaotic world. But you don't need vocals to create a good story. The song, Gustave, from Expedition 33 has no vocals instead using the violin, cello, and piano to carry us through who Gustave is as a character. We feel his optimism, his courage, and at the same time his melancholy, and tragedy. So while we don't get a literal structured story, we get a narrative of what he represents as a character which accentuates his story in the video game.

Once I saw music through the lens of story, everything changed. Just like learning about sentence structure makes you a better writer, learning the elements of music makes you a better listener. It lets you stop hearing just sound and start hearing meaning. So let’s dive into the most important element of storytelling, and then the elements that make up music.

The Fundamental Element of Great Music Storytelling...

One of my favorite books a friend ever recommended to me was The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. I mean if I had a nickel for every time I swore in surprise while reading that book, well, I'd have enough nickels to fill a sock and beat someone to death with it.

The premise? Our protagonist wakes up in the body of a different mansion guest each day, with the same mission every time: solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle. Oh, and he can interact with past and future versions of himself. It's as crazy as it sounds.

The reason this book gripped me so hard is because of its masterful use of surprise. Multiple times the author surprised me with how they closed loose ends, or made the protagonist interact with a past or future version of themselves. Great storytelling is in large part an art of of surprise. Of course, there are other aspects we will go into, but if you wanted a one sentence billboard for becoming a better storyteller it would be "master the art of surprise."

Unfortunately, this brings me to a dreary soul crushing truth I've learned over the past few weeks: most of the pop songs people love, suck, they suck hard.

Listen to them with any modicum of analysis and you'll see they use the same melody without variation for most of the song. Sure, they might sound pleasant to there ear, but they're missing the fundamental surprise spice of great stories.

The Question Than Becomes, How Do We Build Surprise In Music?

The same way we do in written stories: knowing your audiences expectations.

How do people's expectations for music form?

Some of it comes from the womb depending on the music you heard while floating in amnionic fluid. Fetuses can hear sound by the third trimester, so if your mom was bumping Mozart or Mumford & Sons, congrats—you’ve got prenatal genre bias.

But the real juicy part? Our teenage and young adult years. That’s when music glues itself to our identity as we're trying to find ourselves. The more you hear a genre or artist, the more you internalize their “rules”—how they sound, how they shift, what they don’t do.

Now, these rules are rarely rigid. Musical genres and artists aren’t logic trees; they’re Wittgenstein categories. Think family resemblances. Rock music might usually have a shirtless frontman screaming into a mic while the bass shakes your molars—but you could strip that away, give the guy a turtleneck and a flute, and if the vibe is still there, it’s probably still rock.

The expectations we build for music affect not only the music we like but the music we don't like as well. I would struggle to fully appreciate Mozart because I haven't listened to enough of his music or any classical music for that matter, to have expectations. There's probably tons of subversions, therefore, which I don't even notice.

While culture does shape a ton of our musical preferences, some expectations are so universal they seem baked into our biology.

• Big pitch jump? We expect it to return.
  Like tossing a ball into the air—we don’t expect it to just hover. We’re waiting for it to fall. That “return to baseline” feels like closure, and when it doesn’t come, we get a little musically motion-sick.
• We expect repetition with variation.
  Too much sameness? We get bored. Too much chaos? We get overwhelmed. But give us a pattern, then twist it slightly, and our brains go: Ooooh, clever. It’s why choruses work, why motifs evolve, why your brain sings the hook of a song even after you forgot the verses.
• We expect tension to resolve.
  Ever hear a song end on a weird note and feel itchy inside? That’s your brain begging for musical gravity. When songs don’t resolve, it’s often intentional, like ending a sentence mid—
• We expect downbeats to feel like "home base."
  Even infants tend to move or clap on the beat, not in-between. Our bodies latch onto rhythmic pulses like roots into soil. Disrupt the pulse, and we feel it instantly.

These expectations aren't taught—they’re felt. And the best songs don’t just follow them. They play with them. Like a great storyteller who knows exactly when to pause, when to surprise, and when to deliver that final, satisfying payoff.

Thankfully, through learning the elements of what makes up music, we can build up our expectations, and therefore our ability to appreciate music storytelling, much faster than just listening to it unconsciously. We might even be able to make some fire music ourselves.

The Elements Of Music: Pitch, Melody, Timbre, Voice...

I still remember reading The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth. He broke down the principles of how some of the most famous writers, poets, leaders, and more were so eloquent. Beforehand, eloquence was something extraordinary, ephemeral, mystic. After reading the book, I felt I had the cheat code to writing in my hands. Suddenly I could make statements like "the most invisible form of containment, is freedom without constraint" and sound incredibly profound without putting that much effort into it.

Of course, eloquence isn’t just formulas and figures of speech. Some of the most eloquent lines ever written break all the rules. But that's the trick, isn’t it? Once you learn the elements of a medium, you can play with its expectations.

Music has become no different for me. Where once it felt like sorcery—just beautiful sounds tied to emotions I didn’t understand—it now feels like something I can touch. Let me teach you.

The First Major Way To Create Musical Storytelling: Changing Pitch.

The fundamental element of all music is pitch. Pitch is one of those strange psychological phenomena that rides a physical bicycle. Technically, it refers to the frequency of sound waves—how fast the air molecules are vibrating and smacking your eardrums. The faster they wiggle, the higher you hear the sound. The slower they jiggle, the lower.

For some mysterious reason—possibly to annoy future music students—the human mind evolved to perceive twelve distinct notes in a repeating cycle called the chromatic scale:
C, C♯, D, D♯, E, F, F♯, G, G♯, A, A♯, B. No matter where you go—India, Ireland, inner-city Cleveland—nearly every culture organizes music around this 12-note system. The names and vibes may change, but the pitches don’t. (with some exceptions I point out later). Just like stories are universal across culture, so too are the elements of music.

Each of those twelve notes is separated by a semitone, a tiny step, like moving one key over on a piano. And if you climb twelve of those semitone stairs, congrats! You’ve arrived at the same note again, just higher. This loop is called an octave, and your brain registers it as “the same, but taller.” We label octaves with Scientific Pitch Notation so middle C becomes C4 (don’t worry, I won’t detonate you... yet).

Most songs don’t use all twelve notes at once. Instead, they pick a subset, like C major or A minor, which each use seven notes from the full twelve, arranged to evoke different emotional flavors.

Even more bizarrely, these pitches have a mathematical relationship with each other, because apparently mathematics feels a need to always infiltrate where it's not welcome. A note one octave up always has twice the frequency of its lower counterpart. So C3 = 130.8 Hz, and C4 = 261.6 Hz. Exactly double.

Pitches don’t—and often aren’t—played in isolation. Instead, they’re bundled together into chords, usually three or more notes played simultaneously, like the emotional DNA of a song. A single pitch might whisper a feeling, but a chord declares it.

Most people can't name exact pitches like an A or a C♯—which is known as having perfect pitch—but they are very good at hearing pitches relative to other pitches. We're incredible at it in fact. So good, that in many neuroscience studies people can tell what popular song they're listening to even if it's played in a different key, at a different tempo, and with a different instrument.

This makes sense because our minds are incredible at noticing changes between stimuli, rather than stimuli themselves. Noticing changes is better because changes are what kill you. So we evolved to spot them. Knowing this:

How Can We Keep Pitch In Mind For Musical Storytelling?

To grossly generalize, higher pitches tend to make us feel happy, excited, bubbly, whereas lower pitches tend to make us feel dreary and melancholic. Think of Darth Vader's theme in star wars. It's low and terrifying with a stark clashing of the cymbals (the metal disk things on a drum) to build tension.

This makes sense evolutionary. Fast, low, loud pitches are the most dangerous. A tree falling down. An earthquake. High, slow, soft pitches, tend to be less dangerous. Like grasshoppers singing their song. Of course, this isn't always the case. Thunder is fast and high and yet incredibly dangerous if it hits you, especially while in water. And I have a higher than typical male voice, and yet, am incredibly dangerous, in video games at least.

Different jumps in pitch make us feel differently. For example, seven semitones of difference or what could be a jump from C to an F is called a perfect fifth. It’s called that because it sounds especially pleasing to the ear compared to other jumps. You’ll find this jump in iconic themes like Star Wars or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. In contrast, the augmented forth which spans six semitones, sounds to many as unresolved, tense, disorienting. It’s so bad, it used to be considered the devils note in Medieval Europe.

The jumps used in music are all about the feeling someone wants to get across. The perfect fifth feels, certain and powerful. The augmented forth could be great for a more uneasy, horror like vibe.

Different feelings are also created through using different scales.

The C major scale, comprises: - C – D – E – F – G – A – B – (C), with semitone steps that go Whole, Whole, Half, Whole, Whole, Whole, Half. The A minor scale comprises: - A – B – C – D – E – F – G – (A) with steps that go Whole, Half, Whole, Whole, Half, Whole, Whole.

Despite the scales having the same notes, the variation in how they are ordered and jumped to makes C major generally have a more bright, open, and uplifting tone compared to A minor which has a more sad, introspective, and melancholic tone. I don't know why this would be for certain, but it probably has to do with C major making more consistent whole steps signaling certainty and power compared to A minor which makes many half steps between whole signaling uncertainty.

Not all scales have seven notes. Pentatonic has guess what? Five, I know groundbreaking naming. The pentatonic scale avoids tension by skipping more “unstable” notes, making everything you play sound good, even if you’re just messing around.

You’ve probably heard it without realizing it. It’s in African folk traditions, East Asian melodies, Scottish bagpipes, gospel, blues, rock, and basically any time a child touches a xylophone and accidentally composes a banger.

Apart from scales, pitch contour also has a large part to play in musical story.

Contour describes the shape of the music from high to low, how its moving between pitches. Again, to grossly generalize, contour that moves up generally signals excitement, growth, positivity whereas contour that moves down generally signals melancholy, spookiness, or lethargy.

It can get deeper than this. Contour which goes all over the place can make us feel scatterbrained, without a foundation to sit on. Contour that very slowly rises or falls can make us feel careful, steady, sneaky, like the Pink Panther Theme song.

Music Isn’t Universal—But Story Is.

Before I go any further, I should confess something: I have a Western music bias.
It’s not malicious—I wasn’t raised in a Beethoven cult or anything—but simply a product of my environment. Like most people born in the U.S., my ears were bathed in Western musical structure: 12-note chromatic scales, major and minor chords, four-bar phrases, 4/4 time, and the belief that resolving tension is morally correct.

But that’s not the only way music works. Take Indian classical music, which we just explored a little above.

Instead of chords and fixed keys, Indian music revolves around ragas—fluid, expressive frameworks that combine melodic rules, emotional moods, and even time-of-day associations. You don’t just play a raga. You inhabit it. A raga performed at dawn sounds completely different from one meant for midnight, and listeners can often feel that difference viscerally, like sensing the air change before a thunderstorm.

Where Western music often moves from tension to resolution like a neat arc, Indian music explores nuance, subtlety, and microtones—those in-between notes that Western pianos can’t even play. Notes aren’t always struck cleanly. They slide. They bend. They ache. They breathe.

Listening to it with a Western-trained ear is like reading poetry in another language—you get the rhythm, but you miss the soul. Still, I’m trying. Just because I grew up in one musical language doesn’t mean I can’t learn to speak another.

Indian classical music isn't it. In West African drumming traditions, rhythm isn’t just rhythm—it’s conversation. Instruments like the djembe or talking drum mimic human speech patterns to create a call-and-response structure. You’re not just playing to an audience—you’re playing with them. The line between performer and participant melts.

In Japanese gagaku court music, the melodies stretch and swell like incense smoke. The aim isn’t to pump your blood with adrenaline—it’s to stretch your soul across time. A single note might take seconds to bloom, because it’s not about going somewhere. It’s about being somewhere.

The beautiful part is: while the structures of music vary wildly across cultures, story is the thread that runs through them all.

Whether it’s a sitar unfolding a centuries-old raga or a synth-pop banger dropping the beat, we’re all searching for the same thing: A feeling that says, “This is what it’s like to be alive.”

So, with that being said, we've explored the basics of pitch as an element of music. But it's really in the product of many pitches that musical story evolves to the next level: melody.

This Leads To The Second Main Way To Create Musical Storytelling: Playing With Melody.

Melody is hard to define concretely but you can think of it a sequence of musical notes, arranged in time, that forms a recognizable and expressive musical line. In essence, pitch change + timing. It's what you hum, whistle, or sing along to in a song. Melody, like with many great things, is simple to define but endlessly complex. We know about pitch, what about timing?

There are three aspects to timing in music: rhythm, tempo, and meter.

Rhythm is the pattern of long and short sounds and silences, placed in time over the beat. For example, in the tune dun-dun, dah-nah, dun-dun, dah-nah, dun-dun, da-naaah. Bet you recognized it as The Mission Impossible theme and its largely to do with the rhythm of the notes, and perhaps Tom Cruise on a motorcycle.

Tempo is the overall speed of music. Slower tempo songs like Dos Oruguitas from Encanta might have around 60-80 beats per minute (BPM) whereas faster tempo songs like Uptown Funk get closer to 120 BPM.

Finally, meter refers to the pattern of strong and weak beats, usually grouped in sets of two, three, or four. Most pop music uses 4/4 meter—four beats per measure, with the first beat feeling like a confident step forward. Contrast that with something like a 3/4 waltz, where the rhythm lilts in a “ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three” flow, like dancing gently with someone you love—see “Que Sera Sera” or the instrumental parts of La La Land.

With an understanding of pitch and timing let's explore how we can play with melody.

Firstly we can play with the pitch of the song.

Take Hasta la Vista by Vitaa, Slimane, and GIMS. They recycle the melody, just one octave up, and suddenly it’s not “hmm this is nice” but “OH MY GOD I’M FEELING EVERYTHING.” Other songs change key to elevate emotion while keeping the melody exactly the same—like saying the same sentence, but this time with your chest out. A classic example is Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror,” which shifts up a whole step near the end on the word "Change." The notes are the same, but the new key makes it feel more powerful, like the protagonist has grown.

We can also change melody by altering the timing.

Rät by Penelope Scott, plays the same melody but at a different rhythm and tempo throughout the song. The beginning has a faster rhythm and tempo and when building up to each musical climax it gets slower to build suspense. The song itself is about Penelope's realization that her father is a rat, using her as a pawn in his game of elitism rather than to help those who need it most. The slow build up to the climax of her stating this realization supports the story of the song.

Silence can also be a valuable part of timing. Indeed, some musicians believe it's the silence between music which really brings out the emotion. Let Her Go by Passenger uses this to devastating effect at the very end of the song. The whole song is about how we know our lovers the most when we let them go. For the entire time, we don't know if the song is a warning or a regret. That is until a few seconds of silence at the end of the song is broken by Passenger saying, "And you let her go." Oooooooof. Goosebumps.

Some songs switch meters mid-track, like how Bohemian Rhapsody barrels between 4/4, 3/4, and 6/8, creating that feeling of theatrical chaos. Meter is story structure in rhythm—whether it’s steady footsteps, a skipping child, or a spiraling descent.

So we can play with melody by altering pitch and timing for musical storytelling. But there's clearly something missing. Like when I sing Happy Birthday (truly sensational) versus when your grandfather sings it. Melody can't account for this difference? But clearly it impacts emotion and therefore story: what is it?

This Brings Us To The Third Way To Create Musical Storytelling: Changing Timbre.

Timbre describes the quality or color of a sound which makes it distinct from other sounds outside of pitch and loudness. In other words, it's what gives a piano its pianoiness, or a trumpet its trumpiness, even if they are playing at the same pitch and loudness. Think of it kind of like what makes an author's voice theirs.

Now, the easy way to play with timbre? Add or remove instruments.

But come on. We’re better than easy. Let’s get weirder.

A fascinating example is in AJR's The Worlds Smallest Violin. This song explores the singer as they reflect on how much others like their grandpa have done in their lives, and how the heck they're going to create meaning in theirs's. He believes the way he will create meaning is through playing his violin—which I believe represents music as a whole for him—and yet the whole song accentuates his uncertainty of this path.

One particular way the timbre of this song shows this is in a violin solo at around the minute mark which through incredible musical skill and auditory manipulation slowly changes into a french horn, into a piano, and then back into a violin. The pitch and loudness flow so seamlessly together it never feels like your jumping all over the place. The main thing which gives the melody its new quality is the difference in timbre. This melody change supports the uncertainty the singer feels because even the violin he believes he should play can't stay as a violin. This melody change not only surprises us, but enhances the story. That's music.

Timbre change doesn't have to be from actual instruments—it can come from non-musical things too.

Jack Harris in his song Careful What You Wish For (the doctor said to), explores his journey into anti-depressants. They got rid of his endless sadness, but made him feel empty inside instead. During one line, he says "how can they sell you on something to help you, then tell you it might make you wish you were—."

And then, CRUNCH. It's the sound of someone biting on a carrot. The carrot isn't a traditional instrument but because of its timbre we can recognize it as such. The surprise built from the carrot, as well as the satisfaction of replacing the word you knew would be there yourself, accentuates the story. It's as if the audience, like Jack, is scared to think the only way out might be death. It's a mic drop made of beta-carotene.

You can also change timbre through the contextual quality of where the music is coming from.

Ever sing in the shower and suddenly feel like Adelle? That’s not because you are Adelle (sorry)—it’s reverberation: how sound bounces off surfaces. A tile bathroom has echoes galore. A closet? Not so much. Now imagine singing in a massive cathedral—vaulted ceilings, stone walls, nothing to absorb your sound. Your voice doesn’t just echo—it floats.

That’s why Gregorian chants sound so ghostly. The notes themselves are simple, often just a single melodic line. But the space gives them wings. The timbre changes not with a new instrument, but with new architecture.

So, we've covered pitch, melody, and timbre, but there's one last obvious musical element which can completely change our storytelling: vocals.

The Fourth Main Way You Can Create Musical Storytelling Is Through Vocals.

Out of all the musical elements, vocals are closest to my heart, and of course they are! I started this whole article because of my background in writing getting me excited about music. So, it might surprise you, this will be the shortest section of the article.

That's because while vocals hold so much sway over musical storytelling, I've written so much about writing in other places, I couldn't do it justice here. If you want to see some articles on that check out, What I've Learned About The Art AND Business Of Online Writing After 3 Years Of Writing Everyday, 20% Of Storytelling Tips, 80% Of Outcome, In 16 Minutes, and So, I Learned Poetry In 30 Days.

Instead, in this section, we're going to focus on the elements of vocals that are specific to music. The main differences between sung vocals and written ones are in how they are sung, as well as the structure of the vocals themselves.

In music, vocals aren’t just carriers of words—they’re emotional amplifiers.

They stretch syllables into sobs, break lines with breaths, and twist vowels into ache. It’s not just what is being said—it’s how it’s sung.

Take Adele’s “Easy on Me.” The lyrics are heartfelt, yes, but what makes the song hurt so good is how she delivers them. Her voice cracks ever so slightly on the word “change,” like she’s trying to convince herself more than anyone else. That little crack? That’s not in the lyrics. That’s storytelling only vocals can do.

Or listen to Frank Ocean’s “Self Control.” Toward the end, his layered falsettos overlap like thoughts you can’t silence. He doesn’t just say he’s not over someone—he sounds like someone trying not to fall apart mid-thought. The rawness isn’t in the melody or production. It’s in his voice unraveling in real time.

Vocals can also be influenced through post-production techniques to sound certain ways. Some songs even layer vocals over each other to create emotion. Take Bon Iver’s “Woods.” The entire song is just one lyric—“I’m up in the woods, I’m down on my mind, I'm building a still, to slow down the time.”—repeated and layered with heavy autotune and harmonization. But those layers don’t feel robotic. They feel haunted, like one person reliving the same thought from different emotional angles. The result is stunning: a chorus of selves, all stuck in the same loop.

Vocals can also influence musical storytelling through their structure.

In musical storytelling, verses are the scenes, but choruses are the heartbeat. They return again and again, like a character repeating a mantra they’re trying to believe. Whether it’s the soaring catharsis of “I will always love you” or the grounded resignation of “Hello from the other side,” choruses take a single emotional truth and echo it across time—each repetition deepening its weight.

Then comes the bridge—the twist in the narrative. It’s the breakdown, the turn, the part where something shifts. Musically, it often uses a different chord progression or key. Vocally, it’s where a singer might soften into vulnerability or unleash something primal. Think of the bridge as the emotional turning point, the storm before the final chorus hits even harder. In Adele’s “Someone Like You,” the bridge drops to near silence—just her and the piano—before the final chorus returns, now sounding less like grief and more like acceptance.

Keeping this all in mind, pitch, melody, timbre, and vocals, we can finally return to the insight which I came to from this article.

The Insight Underlying All Art

It turns out, what got me into music was never music. It was story. Writing gave me the lens. Psychology gave me the structure. Music gave me the feeling.

But the more I’ve learned, the more I’ve realized—everything is story.

Watch a dancer’s body twist with the beat and you’re seeing a narrative told through movement. Watch a movie with no dialogue—just swelling strings and trembling piano—and you’ll still walk away with a story in your bones. And then there’s video games: the ultimate symphony of art forms. They combine music, visuals, writing, gameplay, emotion—every tool at our disposal—all bent toward the same question: What is the journey here? What is it trying to say?

When you zoom out far enough, the divisions between disciplines disappear.

Even after writing this article, I still see music as a little alien. But alongside mathematics, I hope one day to overcome all of the negative biases I have against it. I did it with poetry. Now it's time to do it for another art.

So the next time you hear a song that gives you chills—or makes you cry, or makes you want to dance—ask yourself: what’s the story underneath this?

Because when you start seeing things as story, everything becomes a little more alive.