Music can express many different feelings and the chords supporting melodies are an integral component. Some chords elicit sadness such as minor chords.
Western ears often interpret Ionian music mode-based major chord progressions as sounding happy; but can they sound sad as well? Yes they can; in this article we will look at five ways major chords progressions can convey sadness.
Major Triads
How a chord progression sounds sad depends on many elements of music like tempo, timbre, rhythm and melody – but one key reason people associate minor chords with sadness and major chords with happy music may lie within how major chords (consisting of root note, major third and perfect fifth notes) sound when lowered by half-step on piano keyboard keyboard.
Lowering the middle note makes the chord sound dissonant and sadder, something most major triads in music utilize to produce discordant chords. But major chords can also sound discordant when built using an inverted form with its low root note lowered an octave; this produces what is known as a major open-voiced chord with C, E and G as its constituent parts.
Major Triad Extensions
When playing a major chord, its lowest note is known as the root; middle note major third; and highest note perfect fifth are used to identify it. A major triad can also be inverted so as to change its order and create new sounds – flipping one note can alter how it sounds as well as making its composition unique.
Enhance the sound of major triads with chord extensions by stacking notes an octave higher. Common extensions include adding 9th, 11th, or 13th notes by stacking three notes stacked an octave higher.
Low playing volume of these chords creates a sad or melancholic sound to your music, or use a progression such as i-ii-VI-V from blues and country songs for an emotive effect that works well in slow or upbeat songs.
Major Seventh Extensions
The major seventh chord is an effective progression for creating emotive music that conveys feelings of sadness. Paired with minor chords, its combination creates an agitated and dissonant sound which conveys its intended message of sorrow through clashing notes in both chords’ overtone series.
Dissonance can be further increased by adding another note to the chord, creating an ever more discordant sound and making listeners anxious or tense as additional notes clash and create tension within the chord, rendering its sound even more discordant and discordant.
However, chord selection alone doesn’t determine emotion – other factors like tempo, melody, lyrics and instrumentation all influence how we experience music. Even so, being familiar with common chord progressions will provide you with a good starting point when writing original music of your own; understanding chord extensions will broaden your harmonic palette even further.
Major Scales
Music’s impact on emotion is highly subjective, yet most agree that major keys tend to sound happy while minor keys tend to sound sad. Why is this?
At its core, sad songs often owe their sadness to chord progressions. Chord progressions that feature minor triads and diminished chords tend to create this effect as the intervals used to build both major scales (W-H-W-H) and minor scales (W-H-W-H) vary slightly; meaning each note distance varies by an octave and a half.
As such, closer together notes feel happier while farther apart notes appear sadder. This contrast can create tension that can be used in music to convey sadness or emotion, using slower tempos, wider melodies, or minor chord progressions; such techniques are seen in songs by Lonnie Donegan such as House of the Rising Sun and Titanic’s My Heart Will Go On.