As a child, your music teacher likely taught you that songs in major keys make us happy while those written for minor keys make us sad. Why is that?
Major chords in music theory consist of three notes that form what’s known as a triad. For instance, C major chords contain three notes – root note, major third and perfect fifth.
Emotional Coloration
Major chords tend to elicit positive emotions such as happiness and excitement because their brighter sounds elicit these responses.
This is due to how whole and half steps combine together to form a major scale; for example, the C major scale consists of C (root note), E (third), and G (fifth note).
This same pattern can be applied to any chord progression and create a specific atmosphere or emotion, which explains why many songs feature an assortment of chords.
Chords don’t exist as standalone entities; rather, they form part of a greater musical structure that determines a song’s emotional impact. Understanding chord progressions is vital in order to accurately gauge musical emotion response – but chords alone shouldn’t be taken into consideration when analyzing emotional responses – other elements like tempo, timbre and melody also play a part. Furthermore, not everyone responds similarly to musical elements.
Relative Pitch
As soon as a group of musical notes is played or sung together, it expresses some form of identifiable emotion. This has long fascinated musicians, psychologists, physicists, and mathematicians alike.
Researchers have revealed that Western adults and children consistently perceive major chord progressions as being “bright and cheerful”, while minor chords tend to be perceived as dark and melancholic. This phenomenon could be explained by several factors including how harmonies are constructed or the natural harmonic overtone series present in each piece of music.
Relative pitch, the ability to perceive intervals between musical tones, is vitally important when learning music or playing by ear. Understanding relative pitch allows you to understand how different tones relate and gives you control of all musical languages. Possessing perfect pitch can also be useful, provided you know how best to utilize it – most useful tools include the TE Tuner or Pitch Pipe for perfect pitch practice.
Sonantometry
While our musical associations may have cultural roots, they also have physical underpinnings in how notes combine together physically. This process, known as perceptual fusion, helps explain why certain chords such as C major with an Em on top seem more harmonious to us than others (such as D minor with an A on top).
Example: These two chords share similar notes, yet one of them (minor) features a semitone lower — the smallest interval possible in music. Due to this sound difference between them, this creates a clash in critical bands, making it harder for our brains to interpret it as major chord.
Milne and his colleagues conducted tests of this by performing major and minor scales and chords to participants from five remote communities in Papua New Guinea as well as musicians in Sydney. Their investigation showed that participants did not associate major scales and chords with happiness as is seen in Western cultures.
Cultural Perception
Major chords have long been associated with joyful music while minor chords tend to connote sadness; however, researchers have recently discovered that it may not be genetic. Our responses to musical intervals and chords may depend on which culture they come from.
Milne and his team conducted experiments to test this effect by asking people in remote communities of Papua New Guinea with limited exposure to Western music to listen to major and minor chord progressions, finding that participants did not correlate these chords with emotional states in the same way they would in Sydney.
Researchers attribute this finding to how cultures use music to convey emotion. Excited speech often sounds similar to major-key music while subdued speech resembles minor chord notes – perhaps accounting for why different cultures perceive chord progressions as happy or sad.