The Music Interval Theory Podcast

The Music Interval Theory Podcast

Interval Composition Based on Bernard Herrmann

Aug 7, 2026 · 20 min · 8 segments

https://www.skool.com/circle-of-interval-magicians/about I teach you interval-based composition in 30 days (or less)! From the basics to advanced concepts, I'll guide you step by step. Start your free…

https://www.skool.com/circle-of-interval-magicians/about I teach you interval-based composition in 30 days (or less)! From the basics to advanced concepts, I'll guide you step by step. Start your free 7-day trial today, and after that, it's less than one coffee per week! If you're new here, my name is Frank, and I'm the co-founder of the Music Interval Theory Academy (MITA), which I've been running since 2015. I teach composers how to stop guessing and start creating music with real intention, using intervals as the foundation instead of chords. How I got here... ** 1993: Heard the Jurassic Park score in the theater and was blown away. ** 2000: Started to compose and learned traditional theory. Quickly, I hit the same wall most composers hit: the music I wrote was technically correct but forgettable. ** 2005 onwards: Started scoring professionally for animation, film, documentaries, and video games (Disney, Mattel, theme parks, and many others). Built a library of 700+ tracks for production and sync. ** 2015: Everything changed. A workshop with Thomas Chase Jones (TC) flipped the way I think about music. It was all about intervals, and composition got cleaner, faster, and more original. That shift became a system. The system became MITA. ** Since then: hundreds of composers have gone through the Academy. My business partner TC has credits on approximately 1,800 TV shows (Scooby-Doo, Batman, Dexter's Lab, Tom and Jerry — look him up). Together, we teach what most music schools don't. On this channel, I share the exact methods I use to help composers find their voice, work faster, and stop feeling stuck. If you've ever felt like your music sounds too generic, or like you understand theory but still can't quite control what you're creating, you're in the right place. Never stop composing, Frank

https://www.skool.com/circle-of-interval-magicians/about I teach you interval-based composition in 30 days (or less)! From the basics to advanced concepts, I'll guide you step by step. Start your free…

Speakers: FrankHost

Building Music from Intervals0:00 – 2:53

FrankHost

0:00

So what I took is I took the horizontal formula from Bernard Herrmann, which was first this guy.

FrankHost

0:10

Right, and then that guy.

FrankHost

0:16

Here I translated those into a vertical structure.

FrankHost

0:21

So just using these three guys, which results in a one plus five.

FrankHost

0:26

this is really a five because that right is a c flat that's a b flat so that is this starting structure and then i'm just performing different positions of this guy so you take the top note put it down an octave right and then it equals the next structure and i'm analyzing distances I'm doing the same thing you take the top note put it down an octave then I analyze it and that is how I get to these structures now just by listening to that obviously it will sound dissonant the reason for that is the one interval of course but we will use this to our advantage Okay.

FrankHost

1:22

Well, this on its own, it's already musical to me at least.

FrankHost

1:26

Now let's pick two alternating structures.

FrankHost

1:29

Just the first guy here, the first guy there.

FrankHost

1:33

And then, you know, I go through them.

FrankHost

1:35

Here I picked the next guy, the second, and the second from here.

FrankHost

1:39

And then I picked the third one.

FrankHost

1:40

And then I just wanted to repeat this whole thing because that is enough material to work with.

FrankHost

1:46

Now, let's just listen to that.

FrankHost

1:48

And obviously, we're not talking about a scale or a key or a tonal center.

FrankHost

1:52

Even this is just pure intervallic thinking.

FrankHost

1:55

And let's just listen to that thing two times and imagine if you could tell a story with that material already.

FrankHost

2:23

Well, to me, that actually sounds like underscore music already.

FrankHost

2:26

could definitely serve a scene, right? And so I gave myself the assignment now to sketch a little idea, just using those structures and the position changes, always color coded so that you can see immediately where things came from, right? And for whatever reason, to me, this sounded like a countdown ticking down.

FrankHost

2:50

This already gave me this idea for a story.

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