I'd trouble settling on which song to analyze as certain criteria (e.g. common-tone modulations) should preferably be met. Had wanted to do another Final Fantasy piece, Liberi Fatali, but I couldn't make sense of the harmony.
And so began the rummaging through of scores my sister and I have at home. After a quick-analysis of a few scores, a certain algorithm'd been formulated mentally:
1. Look out for unexpected accidentals. If there's a change in key signature, good. If new key is in the Neapolitan key, even better.
2. Analyse the chords used for the modulation.
3. If unable to explain, go on to next score.
This went on to no avail until I happened to hear 那英 - 相见不如怀念 played on the radio while I was driving home one night. The underlying harmony sounded "promising" but upon closer inspection, it wasn't what I was looking for. I then decided to go through some of my Chinese songs. Was about to settle on 孙燕姿 - 我要的幸福 as it'd a quintuple meter in general. I'd the score too but it didn't have the harmonic interests which I was looking out for.
I decided to listen through even more Chinese songs and realized that many of them feature a modulation to the Neapolitan key at the last reprise of the chorus. Then I settled on 2 songs:
1. 成龙, 李宗盛, 周华健 & 黄耀明 - 真心英雄
2. 张惠妹 - 我无所谓
Both'd the Neapolitan modulation that I was looking for. The first song's pretty straightforward but it's the second one with more harmonic intricacies.
The next problem was the score. It's really tough to find scores for Chinese pop songs! (Or at least I was incredibly bad at doing so.) Stumbled upon PoPiano in the midst of searching but the scores were full of errors! The score I'd downloaded actually had the Neapolitan modulation transcribed as a supertonic modulation. Hence began the tedious job of transcribing.
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