Is there any scientific explanation for minor chords sounding sad and major chords sounding happy?

Is there any scientific explanation for minor chords sounding sad and major chords sounding happy?

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No because they don't sound sad and happy. Minor can sound happy and major can sound sad.

*** of course I'm aware they don't sound "happy"/"sad", it's more complicated, but it's the simplest way to put it

Nope. A lot of the "meaning" derived from functional harmony is subjective. Rhythms and timbre/texture do a far better job then harmony based on psychological results, but even that isn't objective either.

I think it's cultural. There is no objective sad chords.

God flipped a coin

It relates to the cadences of peoples voices when they sound sad or happy. All music is transformed voices.

Harmonic series will get you to the major third much earlier than the minor third. It's why the perfect fourth is considered a dissonance and a consonance - it's consonant because it shares a lot of characteristics with a fifth, but it's dissonant the frequency in which, say, a C contains the F is stupidly high.

this
everyone else itt is communicating rectally

> Harmonic series will get you to the major third much earlier than the minor third.

could you elaborate? I'm too much of a noob

Dissonance and consonance are subjective terms though. Sure there's tonal and atonal, but they aren't necessarily consonance and dissonance

Harmonic series is basically the fact that when a note is played you hear other notes on top at a much lower volume in a higher octave. This also includes two separate notes played simultaneously, you hear their sum. Anyhow, one of the first frequencies that shows up is the major third. You can really notice this in barbershop quartets and gregorian chants because those still use the old tuning technique (pythagorean tuning versus equal temperament).

I rarely find that minor sounds happy. It's a context thing, if you're playing a major (ionian) progression and you put in one predictable minor chord it's not going to make the progression less happy necessarily. But on their own minor chords either tend to sound pretty dark and gloomy, often too much so.

Major can definitely sound sad though. Maj7s, maj6/7's and majadd9s give a much sadder feel to typically happy chords. Using sus2 in place of major chords often sounds kinda sad too.

somewhat but the tritone interval sounds dissonant to all but the most pretentious jazz and classical musicians.

Not true either though. Intervals like tritones were used very widely in the medieval ages in the pre-Common Practice days. It only sounds unpleasant because of the foundation for doing music that Common Practice Period has set for so long in all our ears as while classical music kindda left that stuff behind, it can still be heard in pop music.

I mean, when most that major sounds happy and minor sounds sad is because that's a quick way of explaining consonance and dissonance to a kid that might be wondering what's the difference between E and Em without explaining intervals and music theory.

It's all cultural. These associations didn't come about until the classical era.

You can't possibly provide credible proof of this.

Define sad sound and happy sound
Bet you think atonal music is scary too

so it's basically because of the fourth overtone?

The 'emotional' sound of a chord completely depends on the context of which it's in.

no, dissonance and consonance in harmony refer to the phase relationship of two frequencies/pitches, it's as scientific as music gets.

Yeah, that's referring to tonal/atonal, not necessarily consonant/dissonant.
Sure, but we are hopefully trying to go beyond that, yes?

objectively wrong, you've never studied music a day in your life

not really, there's not a one-to-one correspondence between objectively consonant intervals (i.e. just intonation) and what's perceived and used as consonance in Western music theory.

You can say harmonic concordance is a measure of consonance, but perceived consonance is mediated by cultural factors. And it's contextual as well...

The first few notes of the harmonic series imply major, which makes major more ingrained in what we hear and probably makes is sound more comfortable, but there are other factors that make something happy, such as context and timbre, look into the spectral centroid for its application in analyzing brightness of timbre

obligatory neely youtube.com/watch?v=9rEqrPwVITY

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Not him, but his reply makes the most sense to me. I don't know much about psychology but I've found out a lot of our perceptions about other things have similar explanations.

source?

One is expressive and the other is introspective, sounds that way at least.

Am I correct in assuming you are all democrats/labour? So I guess you can all find me a piece of music that sounds sad to me but is meant to sound happy in its own (((cultural context)))? I'll wait.

no, it's just gibberish with no justification

Am I correct in assuming you are retarded?

>chords are social construct

i think there is. i don't have enough time right now to compile some data, but i would calculate addition of sin waves for major and minor chord.
Chords sound good because of low least common multiple of frequencies of respective tones.
Here the guesswork comes in: i would predict that sinwave of minor chord is somewhat uneven, causing psychological "sadness".
I have to look into this later.
sorry for my post

Yes but aren't sus chords neither major nor minor?

You're using the cultural relativist card too early there, champ. They're not wrong, but it's also due to the harmonic series and complex ratios sounding more dissonent. I'm doing going to spoonfeed you, but you can google to find it easily look for asian music, there's also the fact that dufferent cultures use different scales which we consider sad sounding for example japanese scale, There's also the fact that tempo largly dictates mood. Neely has done a video on tempo and why minor sounds sad too.

Maybe not sad, but what about gamelan music, or in general, the east and southeast asian folk musics? Quite of bit of that is extremely dissonant to western ears but takes on many emotional expressions for the people that play it.

Also, fuck off back to Sup Forums, just because the answers take more complex thought doesn't mean you get to create your own hierarchies and values with, shocker, you on top. You clearly thirst for a simple explanation that your pea brain can handle.

The world is becoming more homogeneous these days so we forget that other cultures evolved separate from Europe and didn't go through an enlightenment or romantic era. Now a days everyone uses western musical harmony. and just sprinkles a little bit of their culture in with the rhythm and instrumentation. I'm sure there are songs we might consider sad but which are meant to be happy since we consider anything that doesn't conform to our system to be weird sounding.

I do think there is a reverse to this - people are getting interested in "micro"tonal music (kind of a dumb term imo) because everything on the twelve-tone scale gets boring after some time.

At least in my experience, the band I play with are starting to experiment with microtones via pitch gear or fretless instruments.

The literal definition of consonance and dissonance? You can find tons of research papers as well that judge response to tonal/atonal intervals by people of different cultures.
>chords are social construct
They literally are as even goddamn medieval times didn't use common practice western harmony along with the rest of the world until about the last 60 or so years.
>guesswork
>thinking that has any place in a discussion about objective truths
Fuck off dude.
>blames others for cultural relativism
>asks the most vague question with the most relative different possible answers to it
Lmao, here's your (You), dumbfuck

>chords are social construct
yeah but they are

>Chords sound good because of low least common multiple of frequencies of respective tones.
if it were that simple we'd be exclusively using just intonation, and never use anything weird like a diminished chord.

>Here the guesswork comes in: i would predict that sinwave of minor chord is somewhat uneven, causing psychological "sadness".
Major chords are 4:5:6, suggesting a common fundamental. Minor chords are subharmonics that don't suggest a common fundamental, hence they're less consonant despite containing the same intervals. This doesn't imply some objective correspondence to happy/sad, though.

But don't use sine waves.

most of musical history hasn't been 12 equal anyway

sunbather would like a word with you

why does this need to be fucking politicised you cunt

Democrat fuck your girlfriend?

It's dependent on wavelength and relationship between two sounds

this. nobody here will believe you though.

>Intervals like tritones were used very widely in the medieval ages in the pre-Common Practice days

>Yeah, that's referring to tonal/atonal, not necessarily consonant/dissonant.
No it's not. Some notes create a more stable harmony together than others. This is consonance and dissonace.

Just leave them be. People here don't believe in physics.

>hey I think it might be possible tha--
>SOURCE!?!??1'1'
the thread

Yeah, that's atonal, not consonant and dissonant. Those two words are often used to describe that, but they aren't technically the correct words. Consonant and Dissonant are based on how the person that listens to them responds, which we have already gone over the fact that it's not the same.
True.
No, for the millionth fucking time that's what being tonal or atonal means in an objective manner. You kids really need to go beyond the first year music theory class you took. People who listen to more atonal stuff won't find any stability from what you consider stable harmony.

>In acoustics or psychophysiology, the distinction may be objective. In modern times, it usually is based on the perception of harmonic partials of the sounds considered, to such an extent that the distinction really holds only in the case of harmonic sounds (i.e. sounds with harmonic partials).

>You kids really need to go beyond the first year music theory class you took
so you are in year two? it shows.

It can mean both things, apparently. Both the objective disturbance in a harmonic relationship and the subjective relation to two or more notes. Now stop fighting.

>only right answer
>no reply

I...agree? It kinda supports what I said in terms of modern context.
I am where you stop dickriding common practice as the end all be all of music. Which is after you cover all the common practice stuff to begin with.
Because that only means we find it more comfortable, doesn't inherently make it happy.

>Because that only means we find it more comfortable, doesn't inherently make it happy.
that's kinda dumb.
you may like the edgiest music on the world and it may make you happy. still a major chord sounds happier than a minor chord if you put them next to each other and a tritone will have more tension that a quint. it's common in all cultures.

Retarded. Harmony having contextually based emotional effects has nothing to do with post modernist value relativism. The occurrence of happy sounding minor chords is extremely commonplace and it has nothing to do with philosophical issues about whether values are objectively real or not. You're conflating completely unrelated issues. youtube.com/watch?v=kxQ4I6bZJDg

>context dependent perceptual phenomena don't exist because Cultural Marxism
Cultural-Marxism is a horrible cancer on the world. So are you. Stop being a retard.

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>still a major chord sounds happier than a minor chord if you put them next to each other and a tritone will have more tension that a quint. it's common in all cultures.
This changes depending on what you end up exposing yourself to for extended durations. Just like you said:
>you may like the edgiest music on the world and it may make you happy.

>it's common in all cultures.
[citation needed]
all cultures don't even use major and minor chords

the waiting room is this way

sigh.

Do you fuckers realise you're playing a tritone every time you play a fucking dominant 7th chord?

Based

This but unironically.

In that context it's a bad approximation of 7:4.

er, actually that would make the tritone a bad approximation of 7:5; it's the minor seventh that's a bad approximation of 7:4, sorry

youtube.com/watch?v=d0YZyAXvxKs

The transition at 23:17 is relevant

What to do about the Sup Forumsyp Question?

Came here to say this. Everyone else in this thread is retarded

Overtone series and dissonance.

5ths vs 4ths overtone thing.