Why do minor chords (in Western music) sound “sad” while major chords sound “happy”? Is it a purely learned interpretation, or is there something intrinsic to those intervals that makes them sound sad / happy?
In: Other
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/30/what-makes-a-song-sound-happy-it-depends-on-your-culture-study-finds
This is culturally determined, some cultures have it the other way round.
There’s a previous thread on this that covers all the key points already:
ELI5: Why does a major chord sound happy, while a minor chord sounds sad?
byu/vaus2 inexplainlikeimfive
Interesting phrasing. My music teacher described minor chords as sounding “wrong”. Happy and sad seem to describe them much better.
Because a minor chord is a half step behind in the middle of the full chord. Doesn’t everything sound a little sad when its not full?
100% culture.
A wonderfully good example is the Indonesian gamelan, which to our Western ears sounds completely discordant, while to them culturally it represents something more harmonious.
[https://youtu.be/UEWCCSuHsuQ?si=bd7ADBLWh-vTRAS1](https://youtu.be/UEWCCSuHsuQ?si=bd7ADBLWh-vTRAS1)
It even sounds ominous at times I guess to some listeners from the West, even though to Indonesians these are associated with either some kind of joyous and busy tone or more formal/ceremonial/sacred tone (depending on the exact tuning/notation). It’s very much culture and it seems sounds themselves are just… sounds and don’t have innate meanings.
Middle school band director here. I teach my kiddos to think in terms of brighter and darker, rather than happy or sad. The first movement of Mozart’s 40th symphony is minor, but it’s drive and energy are not sad at all. Conversely, the second movement of his clarinet concerto is in major, but definitely has some melancholy aspects to it. Chicago’s Make Me Smile starts in C minor and transitions to Eb major, but is undeniably happy throughout (maybe not the whole Ballet, but just Make Me Smile). But the brighter/darker analogy does click for them, and once I describe it thusly, I can play various triads for them, and they get very accurate at calling qualities with little else to describe them.
My non-scientific take – music is all about our brain interpreting sound frequency interactions. The difference in frequency between a full octave of a root note is doubling or halving the frequency. Divide that frequency difference by 2 and you almost get the fifth, divide by 2 again, and you almost get the major 3rd. So divide by 2 the fifth, and divide by 4 the major 3rd – the cleanest way to divide the frequency shift between octaves into a chord. To get the minor 3rd, dividing by 5 gets you close, so it’s more complex for our brains to dwell on the frequency interactions.
Latest Answers