Daughters of St Cecilia...help me out here please! Major/minor chords and why they make us feel like they do

[Flightattendant7]

I was wondering on way to school this afternoon. You hear a minor chord, the music instantly sounds rather sombre or sad or even scary.
A major chord and you feel all is well again.

Why is this? Has anyone done their thesis on this sort of thing ans can explain? Is it purely cultural conditioning, or do we have an inner recognition of the vibrations it creates or soemthing that goes much deeper than just what we're used to?

Would be really interested to know.

This is a really interesting OP.

I await my enlightenment.

I think it must be something innate as my DD 3 will instinctively ask if something on the radio is a sad song if it's in a minor key, or a happy one if in a major key.

I knew this once
[scratches head, beetle fall out]

I think it is cultural - Eatsern music that uses the petatonic scale is hard for Westerners to work out
ditto Indian raga

flight, just saw this

that's true MrsB.

Bundle, that's really interesting. I wish I could read the whole article!

flight, cat me and I'll see if i can get hold of it for you

thanks Bundle, that's very kind, can you access that kind of thing? I don;t have CAT at the mo but I will have a look round and see if it is cited by anything else. Sometimes can sneak in that way!

lol

yes I work in the meeja and have just requested a login (thought I had one, but it didn't seem to work) so it's not a problem at all

will cat you

Thankyou that would be brilliant!

oooh Bundle, I'm interested in that too! I sing in a choir and am not musically trained so all of this is a fascinating mystery to me.. I used to have an Athens log on - wonder if it still works....

I remember at university looking into perfect pitch too. Why do I find E flat major so very different from E major? There seems to be a genetic factor in whether you have it and it certainly doesn't necessarily relate to music ability at all. My children's father who is a brilliant organist doesn't haev it although his grandfather did, whereas my mother, brother and I do.

it's those minor 3rds you see, they penetrate into your soul

I find it interesting - and also that DD (3) seems to be able to tell whether a piece of music is in a major or minor key.

I don't have perfect pitch by any means, but can tell when a piece played on the recorder is in a key with flats in (although DH, whose main instrument at university was the recorder says that lots of recorder pieces are in "flat" keys anyway).

What did you study at university Xenia? Was the perfect pitch study part of music or something like physics?

Hadn't read your message properly SycamoreTree, but see our DDs appear to be similar.

DS (5) on the other hand seems to be inheriting his tonedeaf grandfather's annoying out of tune whistle. DH and I are hoping this won't last for ever...

Ruby, what's a MN anorak?

Ta. And thanks for posting that link, btw.

You don't have to have perfect pitch to feel differences in keys, though lots of people will dispute that there is any real difference--citing well-tempered instruments.

There was a very interesting book I read as an undergrad when studying aesthectics as part of a philsophy paper, and have been tryin to to hunt down ever since - i think the author's name was somethinglike Fisher????, but it is going to haunt me now till I remember. Lots of othe stuiff, like the 'resolution' we need as the tune finshes on its key note. There was a short story by ??Thomas Mann?? along these lines, where a guy visits a prostitute, she is picking out 'fur elise' on the piano when he arrives, but stops in mid-phrase. They do the stuff, but as he is leaving he has to bring the tune back to its concluding notes before he is satisfied and can leave - does anyone recollect this???

its all to do w tih associations

Very interesting OP. It's definitely connected or associated with sad music but it must that composers utilise or exploit the 'sadness' that we all feel on hearing minor keys, rather than the other way round (iyswim). ie composers think "i want to write some sad music so I'll use a minor key as it'll have that effect".

Must be instinctive too, surely, if very young children pick up on it too.

I would love to know more about this too. My feeling is that you could probably trace it back to speech patterns and the way that we convey emotion and intention through the inflections of our voices.

On the most basic level, our voices tend to rise in pitch when we are happy/energised/excited and to drop when sad/tired/depressed. When someone is speaking, you gain a great deal of information about both their meaning and their state of mind from the pitch variations in their speech. The major and minor third have perhaps gained their "meaning" from these roots.

I'd love to read more about how much is cultural conditioning and how much innate. Before having dd I was fairly convinced that we had innate responses to the harmonic series, so that an octave would always sound the most "right", followed by a perfect fifth, then perfect fourth etc, until you get to the diminished fifth (known formerly as the "diabolus in musica" or the devil in music). However, she has been rather heavily exposed between the ages of 1 and 3 to large amounts of very tonal baroque music and very atonal modernism, and, if anything, prefers the difficult modern stuff.

Would love to read that article.

True. I cannot easily when singing transpose down half a semitone. Everyone without perfect pitch usually doesn't have too much trouble but I have to transpose each note so if something is a semi tone out it sounds very different. If it's just a bit out of tune I cannot really tell although my mother and brother could better than I could. But as A 440 or whatever is presumably arbitrary I suppose we get used to the pitch we're used to hearing. Then every day of the week I transpose to help my sons with their brass instruments. I don't think I could have played a transposing instrument. Must be very confusing.

Perfect/absolute pitch is a slightly different issue I think to the one the OP is addressing, but I agree that it is very interesting. It is apparently more prevalent in people with autistic spectrum disorders. There is an interesting theory too that absolute pitch is innate in all infants, but is "unlearnt" in most people, either through of lack of use or because it is supplanted by the development of relative pitch sense.

I love this thread, can someone CAT me the hard to access piece please. I used to beg my violin teacher to let me practise the harmonic minor scale, because I innately found it more beautiful, interesting, "Eastern" I think I used to call it. But no, the old dear said it was too far to stretch my fingers (it isn't much further!) and so she insisted on me practising the boring old melodic minor. I have always loved minor keys more, I suppose I was quite melancholic as a child and they resonated more in my soul. My daughter calls major tunes "Daddy music" as they are the kind she mainly hears him playing on his melodeon, jolly stuff. I haven't asked her what she thinks about minor ones yet, but I know she likes them. I sang "Vent frais, vent du matin" to her for the first time about a year ago for a bedtime song (she was one and a half then) and she stared at me for a few seconds and then burst into tears. It is a very plaintive beautiful minor tune. I thought I had traumatised her. I started something else and she just shouted "Again, again!" It was the first time I realised how deeply she could be moved by music. She then demanded it as a bedtime song for about 6 months, and started trying to join in. It is a very powerful part of music.