GOD DISCUSSION WITH A MUSICIAN

The chords sound tense and dissonant to my ear. I'm not a music major and I have only a passable knowledge of theory, so for a good write-up, you'll have to wait for somebody like OZ to chime in! However, I suspect the sadness you're hearing has got to do with the drone, and with those distinctive "ringing" notes at the end of each phrase, which sound like they're shifting between C and D from measure to measure. That would make the basic chord progression... what? Cmaj to Cadd9, over and over again? Hypnotic and other-worldly, despite being in a major scale.

The whole major/minor/happy/sad thing (and even the existence of major/minor or keys in general) is 100% culturally constructed. There are acoustic phenomena that happen when certain intervals are played together that probably appeal to humans on some physiological level (i.e. the perfect fifth, octave etch - the overtone series) but A) they don't exist in all cultures and B) one of those cultures is the whole of Western music since around the 17th century when we abandoned equal temperament.


But yeah, the cultural associations of major and minor corresponding to "happy" and "sad" are no different than, say, how wrong it would sound to play a specific raga at the wrong time of day or in the wrong season - it's a conditioned response.

OZ - I won't dispute the statement that scales are cultural constructs, but are the emotional properties of scales really "100% culturally constructed"? How do we know? Have there been any scientific studies about this?

Long history of (varying quality) research on happy/major sad/minor distinction. Hard to suss out what the consensus is, but it seems that there is a significant exposure component (at the very least).

This summer... Rob Schneider is... GOIN' PROFESSIONAL!

Yeah, like a cheap ripoff of Chariots of Fire.

Even in a major key, there are still a lot of minor seconds (between mi and fa) that give it a slightly dissonant foreboding kind of sound. that might be the sad quality that some people are hearing.

Indeed.

Holy shit, it does