The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts
I’m pretty sure that it isn’t learned behaviour. That would get obvious, wouldn’t it? We would be neutral about minor or major keys until at age 10 in music class the teacher tells us we should hear these chords as bright and sunny, and these other chords as sad and melancholy . In that case the uneducated in music wouldn’t hear any difference.My younger son could certainly identify different moods to music such as happy, sad, angry by the time he was three.
I think it is fairer to say that major chordal centres and tunes tend to present more straightforward emotional worlds, which can be happy or sad, or other things, including bold and stirring or quiet and gentle, but always quite simple and direct. Minor ones I would think of as more complex, indirect and serious, rather than sad.
You could perhaps hear God Rest Ye Merry as quite serious about its merrymaking, and Silent Night more of a simple and direct lullaby.Intervals create vibrations that affect a neurological response in the listener. The most pleasing interval is the fifth , followed by a fourth , then a major third , followed by a minor third . As the span of the intervals become smaller, the vibrations become move complex, the brain interprets the complexity as almost a dangerous event.
So when a fundamental is played, and then a minor third is harmonised separately on top of it, the ear is still sensing the major third caused by the overtone series – because that overtone is still vibrating. But they are also hearing that minor third, which is a semitone below it, and that is a somewhat disturbing sound.
If you have a piano or keyboard handy, and you play any semitone interval – such as a B and a C together – you can hear that dissonance, a kind of “rubbing” sound.That makes sense as far as intervals are concerned, but what if you add a fifth too? If you play a major triad, there’s a minor third interval within it. And similarly a major third within a minor triad. So they both contain the harmonic dissonance you refer to, albeit with a different relation to the fundamental.
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