Whether it is polytonal or microtonal as long as it is "contained" within a logarithmic scale than you always get a limitation on the emotional potential of the music. In fact the empirical truth of harmonics is infinite noncommutative phase as natural octave, Perfect Fifth/Perfect fourth - and so for example the modal music of India is still based on the oldest philosophy of India - the "three gunas" as the Octave, Perfect Fifth (raja) and Perfect Fourth (tamas). And so it is universally true that major is happy, minor is sad and diminished is scary but this is from the approximate to the natural harmonics when in fact noncommutative phase is being in two places at the same time - this transcends the "lower emotions" into a deep bliss via the heart as the deep kundalini healing energy of "unconditional love" energy from the right side vagus nerve. So a deeper listening turns sound into light as a reverse time phonon energy called "yuan qi" or prana - shakti via light turning around when time goes to zero, there is then reverse time from the future as precognitive visions. So there is experienced as the loud OHM of the universe or proto-consciousness that fuses the lower emotions via the heart - and so for example Tibetan throat singing by monks is only due to meditation has an ultrasonic subharmonic of the vagus nerve for deep throat relaxation that then ionizes the serotonin energy into reverse time energy of the Universe as consciousness. So natural harmonics sound is from internal listening - I call it the Sigh-Lense as the secret of Silence. There is no "zero time" due to listening being faster than Fourier Uncertainty - and so this discussion of brightness as major and sadness as minor - is still limited by the lower emotions of the logarithmic tuning, whereas real natural harmonics accesses the deeper vagus nerve holographic heart OHM sound-current energy as true listening and real music - sonoluminescence as sonofusion energy.
My master's degree is in "sound-current nondualism" so my blog has tons of free research articles - one on the training secrets is "idiot's guide to taoist alchemy neidan neigong qigong" - it goes into the music theory with lots of images just google it - or my blog is ecoechoinvasives.blogspot.com - articles and pdfs on the side bar.
Somewhere in a drawer, I've got an old composition sketchbook from my college days in which I wrote the basic framework to an aleatoric piece using that exact same scale 'brightness gradation' system you outlined. Each player works through the cycle in their own time using a selection of preset fragments and because of the overall brightness tension of one sharp/flat difference, it makes for a cool kind of progressive effect. Tried it out with a small group of people and it worked out quite nicely in a Philip Glass/Steve Reich kind of way. Great lesson Adam.
Notes / chords are of course only one element of music, albeit a usually integral element. Rhythm, tempo, flow, texture, non melodic set pieces or riffs of distinct different sounds, punctuation, accentuation, etc etc and on and on - are very much primary elements of music too. I know it may have been just a kind of lighthearted comment, but felt I should show the love for percussion and all other non melodic / non "note" elements of music, and how they are all very much 'MUSIC".
I could grab a beer and watch this music-nerd stuff all day long, man. Friggin love it. I thought I knew a LITTLE about theory, too. I took the Berklee placement test yesterday and, well would ya look at that? I don't. It was perfectly humbling, exactly as I had hoped. Keep up the vids...they feed my need for theory until class starts in a few weeks. Also, I buy every book you mention. Keep 'em comin'.
When I first discovered modes I found them hard to memorize in the order of the major scale, so I tried putting them in order by fifths (F C G D A E B) and it was eye opening. It was so cool to discover that in this order they are also in brightness order, that at each step only one note is changed (flattened if going in the order I said, and viceversa), and that scales are symmetrical with the respect to the scale symmetrical with itself, Dorian. Honestly it made it easier for me to understand and memorize modes and use the fretboard (I'm a bass player). It's a shame that I haven't seen this shown anywhere else, and I was just lucky to find it out by myself..
This is what have always fascinated me about music. How the hell can we just instinctively understand it? Why is it when we put different sound frequencies together it can evoke emotion in us?
I'd say music is a natural form of human expression. People always have sung and made beats. I think it's like wolves howling. It's intense expression and certain sounds imply different emotions to us. I've always found a true mournful cry is kind of like singing in a way
Suttree Lowery Talking is instinctive, but vocabulary is not. You're not born with the knowledge of what every word means. Similarly, the ability to process music is instinctive, but the significance of a particular sound is learned. This is why different cultures perceive scales in vastly different ways. The notion that minor scales are "sad" is exclusively found in modern Western music. It is not found in Turkish, Arabic, Indian, Chinese, ancient Greek, medieval European etc., cultures. Conversely, there are cultures that perceive major scales to be harsh (medieval Europe), sad (ancient Greece), or even primitive (Turkey).
It’s cultural. It’s opposite in other cultures. I find this video full of BS as it tries to argue that there are some properties of the cords that make them happy or sad.
Who are "other cultures"? The terms 'happy' and 'sad' are indeed intrinsic to the way humans perceive sound, and not only humans. Many animals will cheer up upon hearing 'happy' or songs in a major key. Birds often chirp in major when they are happy, i.e. when there's no sign of danger.
great question! unfortunately still a relatively open question in cognitive science (for now at least), here's an interesting article from earlier this year: www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/music-to-our-western-ears/491081/
Love what you said at @6:33! As an academic and an engineer that's how I feel about sciences too. As far as music goes, I got stuck at the theory in the past and gave up lol - but this channel is super eye opening for me - and thank you for sharing your hard-earned intuitions into digestible videos.
Love the conclusion! My old music teacher tried to teach us all the different modes and how to hop around them - when we were about 13-14 years old. Needless to say it wasn't that popular at the time. Now as a growing musician I fondly come back to those theachings yet still it tends to get too theoretical quite fast. Suddenly we enter a realm of Math. Therefore I love your conclusion so immensly: Don't forget to make Music with it! The theory is a tool :-)
I think the "brightness" explanation is only part of the explanation. The relative higher or lower of pitch *is* related to emotion, see research on that by David Huron. Internally to the limited 12-note tempered system you have lived in entirely, the musical stuff here does make sense, but the much simpler explanation of why major is happy connects to the fact that it's harmonically simple, e.g. 4:5:6 harmonic ratios, right in the harmonic series. Minor isn't so simple.
I never really spent a lot of time with theory. Like i know what key, and what scale I'm playing. But I don't really know much about modes. I do a lot of improvisation, and I jam with many types of musicians on different instruments. So I've always found my ear training to be more important than understanding theory. I've always liked the idea of hearing something someone is playing and being able to follow along in your own way, without playing exactly what they are playing. I have always favored practicality over theory. But I'm glad you have this channel, so I can finally learn it. :)
The reason major chords sound "happy" has much less to do with brightness than it does with the fact that the perfect third interval is concordant with the fifth overtone and discordant with the sixth overtone for any given tonic, while the minor interval sounds "sad" mostly because it is discordant with the louder fifth overtone and concordant with the half as loud sixth overtone of the tonic. It is this interplay to which must be attributed the physical, emotional effects of music--not some abstract concept. This information I gathered from The Great Courses' "How Mathematics and Music Relate"--an excellent series you should watch that gives a very rich mathematical texture to music theory. I may or may not have pirated it on The Pirate Bay in lieu of paying the ridiculous university-level price for the series...
I came to the comments to say just this. Thanks for saying it for me. I was also going to recommend Bernstein's Harvard lectures, which are incredible, and provide real insight into this. Adam may be well-spoken, talented, and entertaining, but within 5 seconds he lost all credibility for me at least. Brightness and darkness are, like you said, abstract constructs, and extremely subjective as well. My favorite answer would be "Because you grew up in a westernized world and have simply been conditioned to think they're simply "sad" and "happy."" Although, Bernstein leads me to think there really is some deeper universal consonance and dissonance perceived by all humans due to the actual physics of sound. Not hating though, I love anyone that makes music learning more accessible and spreads a love for music, but it did bother me and people ought to be aware that there's something deeper going on here than just "Because it's bright and bright means this."
Personally I had the impression that the whole video is about brightness and the question about the "mood" was just a starting point, it served to explain the concept of brightness, not the other way round, as if the title was misleading.
If that one ever shows up on The Great Courses Plus, $15/month isn't too bad. I enjoyed the linguistics lecture series on there as well although it covered some pretty basic ground.
While I and most people are familiar with a lot of stuff you upload I have to say the way you present and explain it makes me take another look at what I already know from a different perspective. Your stream of consciousness and staccato editing is really quite intriguing and engaging. Great stuff Adam. Hi from London UK.
Adam, I have just found your channel and I'm extremely happy. I've never seen a UA-camr talk about music on such a high level as you do. Thank you for existing, or something.
Dude, your videos are awesome. I'm a huge theory nerd (working on my music degree), and these lessons are a great supplement to what I'm learning in school.
Why do you need an intro to a YT video? First people say what are they going to talk about, than they play the video, and than start the topic which I don't get at all.
The technique you're using by constructing your chords with the circle of fifths, adding one sharp per change is quite clever. It does create unity and makes for a beautiful progression.
True! I talk about some of that in the bonus video (linked in the description). I ruled out the double harmonic because of the consecutive half steps between 7, 1 and b2.
William Compitello if you ask me, the harmonic minor and the dominant phrygian, altho they are similar to the double harmonic, are much harder to use meaningfully
ive just been innocuously binging your content and this was the video that i really needed to see/hear. i've been in a tiny bit of a writing rut, because i've been learning and filling all of these new gaps. which reveals brand spanking new; smaller gaps!! but as the smaller gaps start to arise, i find myself bogged down by trying to keep filling them, and not have time to just make music. and the awareness of this line we have to walk i think, is very important to address. so instead, i'll learn another new song, which works wonders for sure, but it all comes back to wanting to make my next favorite piece of music that makes me want to plug in and lose myself in it. felt nice to have that reminder. thanks adam!!
Hey Adam, I've been binge watching your videos for the last couple of days and I'm so glad I came across this particular one from two years ago. Absolutely fascinating content! I've always been searching for my own "sound", with regards to my own guitar playing and songwriting, and this study/concept of brightness and darkness is absolutely intriguing! I love the examples you played in this video. It shows your level of understanding of advanced contemporary harmony and music in general, and being able to elegantly "simplify" them such that it feels approachable yet fascinating. Then again, my opinion is kinda biased considering that I'm passionate about music and I do have a decent amount of contemporary music knowledge. However, I believe non-music playing folks will be able to comprehend this concept of brightness and darkness, perhaps not the theoretical terminology used but in the way you played the progression. Love the videos man! Keep up the excellent work on your channel, and I wish you good health and good fortune in your life! Sincerely, Khairul aka Kai for short
I believe that the overtone series, and the fact that a major chord is built up of the first notes, is the correct answer. "Brightness" really doesn't explain anything, when it's something you want "just enough" of. Then you have to explain why exactly this amount is right. And besides, it is the other way around if you invert the chord...
Adam, I'm a recent subscriber, been playing music for 37 years, 13 as a living, self-taught (read: no one could tell me what to do for the first few years). I love your approach to teaching theory. Filling in a lot of gaps for me in a very insightful and entertaining way, so T H A N K Y O U!
so I've been getting into bass lately so I can play in my choir next year, and your videos are so useful. it's been helping me learn theory, and just generally get into the instrument. stay awesome!
I don't really understand why any key would be brighter than another key if brightness is defined in terms of intervalic relations because the key signatures all have the same intervalic relations.
In relation to each other I guess. Not on their own but within a certain context. But there really are people who still teach that major is happy, and minor is sad.
It's basically the same thing as when he lists the modes in order of brightest to darkest. Lydian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian, Locrian - If we think of these as all being modes of a C major scale, then our starting notes for each mode would be F, C, G, D, A, E, B -or the cycle of fifths. The next note would be Gb which doesn't exist in a C major scale, so that's as far as we can go if thinking about it that way, but you get the idea.
SimbosanYT But they are not that.they are different scales entirely. That's just the easiest way to learn them by playing the same scale from a different position. If you play music which is in a certain mode, but think the way you describe, you won't have music which sounds like it's being played in that particular mode, but from another scale. That's why one should spend time in getting used to the way each mode sounds so the music will actually be from that mode.
But saying a major chord should be brighter than a minor one is becaise it's third is a half-step wider is only half truth. That only regards its first third. The second third of the minor chord is wider than that of the major, and ultimately they amount to the same distance across. Therefore it should be crucial to note that, as I understand it, it's not necessaeilly the actual width of the chord's intervals that determines ita brightness, rather the *order* of wide and narrow intervals. Those chords that have their wider intervals come first are precoeves as brighter, even though they're ulrimately not larger or wider,interval-wise, than their minor counterparts.
I think so too, that's why inversions of complex chords can sound so different ! Take the same notes but change the order of the intervals and you get a really different sound !
i have learned more from your channel than i have ever learned from high school theory. since i discovered your channel about a week or so ago, your stuff has made me a better composer and musician in almost every aspect, and i dont even play strings! youre amazing man, keep up the good work
Hi Adam! I'm a singersongwriter from Milan, and I appreciate your videos a lot: very deep cool stuff with a very curious approach. Watching this I got caught by the feeling of ascending and descending brightness of the circle of fifths and of chords progressions that use progressively brighter or darker scales, and found it a very fascinating compositional tool; but since as you said this would be a non-functional approach to harmony I was wandering how should I approach the melody writing on top of such a chord progression thank you so much for the time you spend on spreading your musical knowledge!
Does this hold across different cultures? Has any research been done to see if people that weren't raised on Western music have the same emotional reactions to the different modes and chords? BTW, have you encountered the Lydian Chromatic Concept? If so, any thought on it? - Neill
You can find the answer to this with a simple Google search. I've looked it up several times. The classical example is that Russian music makes immense use of minor chords and scales in music that Russians will gladly tell you is happy music, so there is certainly a cultural aspect to it, but there are some other theories about why certain chords seem happy or sad as well, different from the one presented here.
AFAIK there isn't a conclusive answer to this question, with opposite claims and researches made on occasion. Here's a recent one that apparently proves that non-Westerners have no inherent idea minor is "sad", major is "happy", etc. arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/the-jaws-theme-might-not-be-scary-for-tsimane-people/
I'm skeptical on the above study for a number of reasons, I'd be interested in hearing what audio clips were used. One thing is, with people with no music education background, if you play major and minor triads next to each other they don't particularly pick up on major and minor as happy/sad. Now, play people from any culture a chopin nocturne then mozart k333 allegro and and I'd find it very hard to believe they'd have trouble picking out which is happy and which is sad. It really depends on how "minorness" is used. It just so happens that western classical music has often gravitated to the sadder aspects of minor harmony. It's pretty hard to write a piece based on minor 1 4 chords and a major/dominant 5 chord that doesn't sound at least a bit sad for example, but that's been unjustly generalised to "minor is sad" in music theory classrooms for a while.
Adam, I thought modes were hard until I stumbled across this video. I can't thank you enough for putting everything in a context that actually makes sense.
As a beginner in music, I can definitely say that the display of the way in which chords relate to the different scales. And how different chords pitches are built upon the different scale modes has been of great help to me. Thank you for posting this video. Cheers.
The intervals in a major and a minor chord are the same. A major third and a minor third or a minor third and a major third. This only makes sense if you consider only the interval between the root and the third but not the one between the third and the fifth. Plus, most will agree that a major seventh doesn't sound very happy despite being a wide interval. I think it's all a matter of consonance and dissonance. If I remember correctly, the major third happens a lot sooner in the harmonic sequence than the minor third (if it happens at all). Therefore, the major third sounds more stable and the minor sounds more tense.
tasfa10 Yeah... This was an interesting example of unusual harmonic progressions, but I think that while it is artistic, the theoretical approach he used here doesn't give an actual answer - which should rather be found through physical analysis of sound waves combined with the study of psychoacoustics. And I believe terming the chromatic modulations he showed here either "brighter" or "darker" disregards the fact that his point of reference is the Western chromatic scale. Use a different framework and it won't work that way.
Yes, you're right. But that's not really a problem. I mean, if you make music with a different theoretical basis, where you don't use the western twelve tone scale, you're also probably not using chords, at least the same way. Our twelve tone scale is as Western as our idea of chords and harmony. Traditional japanese musicians, for example, probably wouldn't care if the major chord sounds happy or not because it's not part of their vocabulary.
Indeed, the major triad appears on the harmonic series on the 4th, 5th and 6th degrees. The thing is: why is the 7th absent from the diatonic scale? Why does the western music tradition pretend that interval doesn't exist, or that it's "rounded" into either a minor third or a minor third? If we were truly following the harmonic scale, our music should be microtonal.
I was rewatching your videos and came back to this for the first time since I started trying to create original music - a profoundly humbling experience that made me realize I knew far, far less music theory than I thought - and the idea of using these very close relationships of scales caught my attention. I don't know what I'm doing, but I've mostly been not knowing what I'm doing in the modes of C-major and having some success there - this makes me want to play with the effects created by sliding to adjacent-in-brightness scales and see what feelings I can make with that. Thanks!
A lot of misconceptions regarding major/minor chords and tonal color. As it so happens, modern music theory has more to say on this than concepts of "happy" or "sad", such as otonality/utonality, tenney height, and harmonic entropy.
Adam, I dig your videos, by the way. Very thoughtful. You can browse info on all 4 of those terms here: xenharmonic.wikispaces.com/ I also recommend checking out the Xenharmonic Alliance II on Facebook. There are, of course, various pieces of music that have either been reexamined using these tools or been inspired by them I'd recommend checking out, too, and I think other people with this interest will have their own listening lists distinct from mine . . . mine includes: The Harp Of New Albion by Terry Riley, String Quartet No. 7 by Ben Johnston, and since you're a guitarist, some recordings by guitarist John Schneider.
Fascinating stuff, but I didn't feel the question in the title was really answered. I've been thinking a lot about whether a person growing up without ever hearing music could hear a minor chord for the first time as an adult and say whether it was happy or sad.
Wow, I’ve already learned a lot from your videos, but the fact Dorian has the same intervals up and down is very much a *emoji of exploding head* moment - thank you for all your videos and insight and keep up the great work!
The answer is simply that the minor 3rd is not one of the close partials of the harmonic series . It's actually pretty distant. So we hear minor tonal structures as sad or oblique really. Also kids around the world all sing the exact same taunting song because of the universal influence of the harmonic series on the human neural net. The minor 3rd sung is part of an implied omission a phonic trick. It's a major triad minus the tonic note. Like G,E na na, skipping the root C. Leonard Bernstein using Chomskiean linguistics as a model calls this a monogenetic phoneme. The nearly universal pentatonic scale is also a monogenetic phoneme like Ma= mother or a close derivation in every human language. IF anyone is curious then listen to lecture (1) of the "Unanswered Question" circa 1973. Can be found on You Tube on "cagin or Shawn Bay " channels.
Well, yes.... as for all the speculation and deep theories about culture and such... No one who understands the fundamental simple inescapable truth that the more simple a ratio is the more sound it's going to sound would be engaging in any of that nonsense. I like what u said about a minor third interval. Though they are not closley related to each other, there is an imaginary note that one of the notes has the simplest possible relationship to, and the other note has the next simplest. So, like an overtone in reverse... play the overtones and the bass note is conjured up.
Wow, rare insights here. This is definitely a ground-breaking lesson to those of us who want to understand why some music leaves us feeling extremely fulfilled while other music is like consuming candy -- empty calories -- no tension or resolution, or rather, too much of the same old typical tension -- release predictability. GREAT post.
I'm confused. What you are saying makes intuitive sense. Yet A major triad has a maj 3rd and a mi 3rd. A minor triad has a mi 3rd and a maj third (e.g., Eb to G in a Cmi triad). Curious why only the first interval seems to create brightness...
This has caused a lot of confusion, and it's because my definition was missing a teeeensy bit of information. It's the relative size as related BACK TO THE ROOT. I hadn't even realized that I didn't include that information in the video, but it's pretty damn important in understanding the whole thing. Sorry for the confusion! So yeah, technically its the same sizes, but the distance between the third to the fifth doesn't matter. Only the third to the root and then the fifth to the root. Cheers!
I'm glad you're officially acknowledging it here. Perhaps an annotation in the video would help. I spent a good deal of time reading comments, searching online, reviewing the video trying to ascertain the missing implied rules and checking them for consistency. On that note, did you invent this concept? I see blog posts from Anton Schwartz and Frank Jargstorff on similar concepts, but not much beyond that. People you know? I can't find mention of this idea in more established music theory writing.
Your channel is phenomenal. It'll never get the attention that it's due; it should be at the absolute apex of music education UA-cam discussion. Clever and creative as well as delivering the fundamental message of furthering music knowledge, every video you post is an absolute pleasure. Man, for real, thank you so much. Oh, and your use of vocabulary and grammar is more than pleasing to an English major. Thanks for that too.
Not really. Can't think of a single song actually. 99% of Thrash is based on the Minor or Phrygian scales, or their Harmonic/Dominant counterparts, usually borrowing tones from eachother.
I'd say that without that very subtle melodic thread you throw in those, these non-functional progressions would clash somewhat. It's in the melody that everything comes together, and that is where the hardship lies. Making these progressions become a solid, evolving and resolving whole is the tricky part.
The script makes a clever move in instantly jumping from the concept of "happiness" to that of "brightness". Because, major is not really "happy" in itself, apart from the fact that we learn to interpret it that way in Western music culture. So the video title asks an impossible question. There is nothing happy about a e.g. major scale in itself, just as there is nothing happy about, say, a flower or a sunrise. Any scale is only a set of sound waves, which we culturally learn to associate with a certain mood. So, a different musical culture will have learned to associate an entirely different mood, than happy, to a Western major scale.
Jon Sebastian I think what we interpret as "happy" harmonious chords vs. "sad" dissonant chords, it also biologically wired into us a little bit, and maybe in nature too. The way a harmonious chord is spaced "evenly" resembles balance to me, and the fractals and "even" patterns found in nature resemble the same idea-- structure, balance, etc. Dissonant chords seems to represent uneven structure or maybe some kind of entropy. But, this is just my opinion. Idk.
Tyler Breeden So, speaking as a philosophy scholar, the view you set forth here is much akin to what the ancient Greeks, especially Plato, believed in - as Michael H is probably referring to - namely, that order, balance, logic, etc. were qualities of nature itself. That is called "realist idealism". Hence, mathematicians could uncover absolute truths about numbers, in much the same fashion as priests could uncover absolute truths about God. And it did have a religious-like reasoning to it. This sort of reasoning, however, aren't really taken seriously by anyone within philosophy or science for 2 reasons, at least: 1) Sociology taught us how cleverly we humans can deceive ourselves in projecting our own concepts (such as "order" and "balance") out into nature, as if they were really part of the surrounding world itself. But, if someone claims that nature is inherently "balanced" etc., that says more about the speaker than about nature. Like when different religions have different notions about the characteristics of God, that obviously says more about each differing religion that about God. (I am not claiming that you are religious; just that theology deals with similar questions and so gets itself into the same kinds of philosophical problems, hence the comparison.) 2) These kinds of questions and claims about the characteristics of nature are from a dated branch of so-called "metaphysics", which modern philosophy has mostly given up on, for many reasons. Primarily, because we developed our attentiveness towards how we argue, and so realized that we can rarely give any well-founded arguments about these ultimate questions that are better to un-founded opinion. The post-metaphysical stance is rather to accept that we can ask why more questions than we could ever hope to answer; e.g. questions about the nature of reality itself. I know, that escalated quickly. Best regards, Jon
I had a feeling this discussion would go in this direction - or escalate quickly, as you put it.. Personally, I consider metaphysical questions speculative (I was hoping to indicate my lack of belief in the realness of number in my previous response by adding that _LOL_) but I've always found the problem of universals and other pursuits of the "pure intellect" to be very intriguing. Perhaps this is why I was drawn to George Santayana who was both an unflinching apologist for mechanism while adhering to the old classical categories. (His critics, of course, accused him of being double-minded). Best of luck, Mike.
This was awesome! I never really thought about how the circle of fifths and the different scales are brighter or darker than one another! This is something I will definitely look out for while composing my pieces from now on! Awesome job, man! Keep it up!
You didn't actually explain WHY any of this is true How does it ACTUALLY work? I can hear that it's true, noticing a nice pattern in it is relevant... how?
Actually, the sky is blue due to the Rayleigh scattering of the sunlight in the atmosphere. Question is not useless and I'm sure, neuroscientists can also figure out why it is that major chords are perceived as "brighter"
Maybe the knowledge of why some chords sound brighter than others can lead to new theories on developing chord progressions to evoke moods...if musicians never stopped to ask "why", then there would never be progression in the field of music.
Augmented chords are inherently less stable than major chords because of their minor 6th/raised 5th which isn't consonant with the root. They aren't really worth comparing with major and minor chords.
Actually I contrasted them. Comparing has a few meanings, one meaning to say something is similar to another thing. Point out the resemblances to; liken to. "her novel was compared to the work of Daniel Defoe"
DUDE!!! What an incredible brand of humor you have!! @1:55 I'm nowhere near the expert you are, but I'm imagining the notes you played here were VERY specific ones. LOL
Personally, I may agree with this to a certain degree....but seriously, I think whether Major/Minor keys/chord sound happy or sad depend on the arrangement and the way it is play. Does minor swing sound sad to u? I think attribute mood to the major minor chord/key is a lazy way to teach music.
I agree, but in order to memorize the sounds, you have to put some tags on them. In the video he said that augmented chords sound sour to him. I tag major pentatonic scales as sounding 'Chinese' (however politically incorrect that may be). I think that major being happy and minor being sad is just a convenient tag for learning the sound. And I also get that there are lots of teachers who don't really make that clear when teaching and that frustrates me too.
Prejudice is so hard to overcome and this guy has no shortage of them. Look up his video on classical musician. Though he may not be totally wrong, but it is so prejudice and bias in many ways and he is not alone.
I would strongly disagree with purely "sonic" arguments for emotion in music. We have to remember that our associations are cultural, not natural. Other musical cultures do not all hear the same "emotions", which themselves were not agreed upon until recently (old modes were associated with emotions different from what we now hear them as).
Another great video though, great channel you have. I just tend to disagree in the same way raised seven doesn't "want" to go to the tonic, we just hear it go there 99.9% of the time, we learned to expect/want it.
Also, I don't fully understand how someone hears any major key as brighter or darker than any other major key in isolation, though upward modulation is very effective for giving a rising sense of direction.
Fantastic video! The relationships among the modes was glossed over in my harmony class, and, except for finding the Myxolydian mode the most interesting one, that was the extent of it. Thank you for pointing out the inversion of the scales! Really swept away the cobwebs! Subded and I watch all your stuff.
I know this video is primarily about the concept of brightness - however I have to disagree on you on the premise of the video - why major chords are 'happy' vs minor chords being 'sad'. It has everything to do with the harmonic series and how major triads slot into their fundamentals and minor ones do not. After all, you can voice a major triad to sound less bright (1st inversion) and a minor chord to sound brighter (also 1st inversion - although then there is the danger of sounding like a maj6 chord). TL;DR: the harmonic series is happiness, brightness is a separate concept.
What you, and a lot of other people are talking about, is similar to the idea of what Persichetti calls "resonance" - and it raises a lot of questions beyond simple major/minor chords. Sure, it answers the question of major/minor, but it also would seem to imply that a dominant seventh chord is "brighter" or more "resonant" than a major seventh chord, since the b7 occurs WAY before the major 7 in the harmonic series. The minor 6th occurs significantly before the major 6th as well.
Yes - but then we need to take into account tuning. The 7 chord that we use almost universally is not the 7 chord we get from the partials of the harmonic series. the 7 (and indeed the 3 and 5) are so far away from their natural resonating pitches, they come out dissonant and emphasise the tritone. On the other hand, the maj7 chord is two stacked 5ths - 5ths being the second most in tune interval after octaves in the well tempered system. So the chord just 'sits' and our 7 chords don't.
Sorry, I must disagree. Major chords are "happier" than minor chords because they are more consonant, not because the first third is bigger. By your reasoning, a minor sixth would be a "happier" interval than a fifth, because it's bigger.
He wasn't clear about the fact that he was using "bigger" as more consonant, thus happy, when it was actually consonant. A flawed video because of what you've highlighted, indeed
I don't actually think his conclusion was that bigger intervals = happiness. He hinted at that at the start of the video, but quickly rejected it e.g. with the augmented chord
I've been binge-watching your videos for two days now, and I must say this has to be one of my favorites so far! I wish you still had that blog though :/ Keep it up!
Actually, as far as I know, there are correlations between minor/major sound wave progressions and human voice pitch variation when in a certain mood. As a result, minors sound more 'depressed', whereas majors sound more 'enthusiastic'.
Adam, great video. Although, I disagree that keys have any associated brightness or darkness. A melody played in C will sound just as bright as one played in the key of A etc. The only exception is when you change keys mid song. Thanks again, these videos are great.
The ratios of frequencies cause the consonance or dissonance. The fifth sounds nice because the ratio of frequencies is 2:3. An octave has a ratio of 1:2. A major third is 4:5. A minor third is 5:6 A major chord has ratios of 4:5:6. A minor chord has ratios of 10:12:15. Ratios that are easier to recognize sound more consonant to us. That's why.
You described an augmented chord as being sour. You've got my sub.
It's not sour, you plebs just can't hear it right. I bet you people don't even listen to microtonal harmonically-negative polyatonal math deathjazz.
Whether it is polytonal or microtonal as long as it is "contained" within a logarithmic scale than you always get a limitation on the emotional potential of the music. In fact the empirical truth of harmonics is infinite noncommutative phase as natural octave, Perfect Fifth/Perfect fourth - and so for example the modal music of India is still based on the oldest philosophy of India - the "three gunas" as the Octave, Perfect Fifth (raja) and Perfect Fourth (tamas). And so it is universally true that major is happy, minor is sad and diminished is scary but this is from the approximate to the natural harmonics when in fact noncommutative phase is being in two places at the same time - this transcends the "lower emotions" into a deep bliss via the heart as the deep kundalini healing energy of "unconditional love" energy from the right side vagus nerve. So a deeper listening turns sound into light as a reverse time phonon energy called "yuan qi" or prana - shakti via light turning around when time goes to zero, there is then reverse time from the future as precognitive visions. So there is experienced as the loud OHM of the universe or proto-consciousness that fuses the lower emotions via the heart - and so for example Tibetan throat singing by monks is only due to meditation has an ultrasonic subharmonic of the vagus nerve for deep throat relaxation that then ionizes the serotonin energy into reverse time energy of the Universe as consciousness. So natural harmonics sound is from internal listening - I call it the Sigh-Lense as the secret of Silence. There is no "zero time" due to listening being faster than Fourier Uncertainty - and so this discussion of brightness as major and sadness as minor - is still limited by the lower emotions of the logarithmic tuning, whereas real natural harmonics accesses the deeper vagus nerve holographic heart OHM sound-current energy as true listening and real music - sonoluminescence as sonofusion energy.
voidisyinyang voidisyinyang And you sir, have got my sub.
My master's degree is in "sound-current nondualism" so my blog has tons of free research articles - one on the training secrets is "idiot's guide to taoist alchemy neidan neigong qigong" - it goes into the music theory with lots of images just google it - or my blog is ecoechoinvasives.blogspot.com - articles and pdfs on the side bar.
I'd really appreciate a rick and morty copypasta parody of someone defending the augmented chord right here
So if Dorian is in the middle of light and dark, does that make it... Dorian gray?
SuburbanDisposal nice lol
^^, nicely done
ayyyyy
Maybe u can come up with a piece called 50 shades of Dorian~ ba dum tsk
Picture that....
That whole "Inverting the modes" part blew my mind!
Clancy Staunton I know, right?
Plagal, plagal, plagal, plagal, plagal, plagal!
same
Same!
Can someone explain what he means by inverting
Somewhere in a drawer, I've got an old composition sketchbook from my college days in which I wrote the basic framework to an aleatoric piece using that exact same scale 'brightness gradation' system you outlined. Each player works through the cycle in their own time using a selection of preset fragments and because of the overall brightness tension of one sharp/flat difference, it makes for a cool kind of progressive effect. Tried it out with a small group of people and it worked out quite nicely in a Philip Glass/Steve Reich kind of way. Great lesson Adam.
1:54
I love the synths when you say ''Dorian Brightness Quotient." It gives it a super cool effect.
I keep rewinding to hear it. :P
SAME!!!!
Bill wurtz does that all the time on his videos, check "history of the world, I guess"
Turn it into a song!!
hah
and there i was thinking I knew the slightest little bit about music
"Dorian invert to... itself" Mind = blown
same
Your Mom, dad, and racecar would agree. Oops, I spelled racecar backward!
Also double harmonic
that's a line that feels like it should at some point be preceded by "heyyyy, vsauce; michael here"
That line was gold 😂🔥
"if you cant make music with it, it's useless"
I'm a percussionist *shrugs*
I'm a xylophone player *shrugs to show that percussion can play notes too*
Lapis Carrot
I’m imagining you shrugging with a mallet in each hand and hitting some sexy chord on the xylophone “incidentally.”
@@MyoticTesseract
*Sexy chord*
Yes
what about a xylophone
Notes / chords are of course only one element of music, albeit a usually integral element.
Rhythm, tempo, flow, texture, non melodic set pieces or riffs of distinct different sounds, punctuation, accentuation, etc etc and on and on - are very much primary elements of music too. I know it may have been just a kind of lighthearted comment, but felt I should show the love for percussion and all other non melodic / non "note" elements of music, and how they are all very much 'MUSIC".
I could grab a beer and watch this music-nerd stuff all day long, man. Friggin love it. I thought I knew a LITTLE about theory, too. I took the Berklee placement test yesterday and, well would ya look at that? I don't. It was perfectly humbling, exactly as I had hoped. Keep up the vids...they feed my need for theory until class starts in a few weeks.
Also, I buy every book you mention. Keep 'em comin'.
When I first discovered modes I found them hard to memorize in the order of the major scale, so I tried putting them in order by fifths (F C G D A E B) and it was eye opening. It was so cool to discover that in this order they are also in brightness order, that at each step only one note is changed (flattened if going in the order I said, and viceversa), and that scales are symmetrical with the respect to the scale symmetrical with itself, Dorian. Honestly it made it easier for me to understand and memorize modes and use the fretboard (I'm a bass player). It's a shame that I haven't seen this shown anywhere else, and I was just lucky to find it out by myself..
This is what have always fascinated me about music. How the hell can we just instinctively understand it? Why is it when we put different sound frequencies together it can evoke emotion in us?
I'd say music is a natural form of human expression. People always have sung and made beats. I think it's like wolves howling. It's intense expression and certain sounds imply different emotions to us. I've always found a true mournful cry is kind of like singing in a way
It hasn't yet been established that we do that "instinctively". It might be learned, rather than inborn.
Timrath id argue that music is an actual part of the brain, just like visual patterns. its at least as instinctive as talking
Suttree Lowery Talking is instinctive, but vocabulary is not. You're not born with the knowledge of what every word means.
Similarly, the ability to process music is instinctive, but the significance of a particular sound is learned. This is why different cultures perceive scales in vastly different ways. The notion that minor scales are "sad" is exclusively found in modern Western music. It is not found in Turkish, Arabic, Indian, Chinese, ancient Greek, medieval European etc., cultures. Conversely, there are cultures that perceive major scales to be harsh (medieval Europe), sad (ancient Greece), or even primitive (Turkey).
YES thank god I'm not the only one here who knows this. Props to you mate
Is the "happy" and "sad" sound something that is culturally "learned" or is it somehow intrinsic to the way humans perceive sound?
It’s cultural. It’s opposite in other cultures. I find this video full of BS as it tries to argue that there are some properties of the cords that make them happy or sad.
Who are "other cultures"? The terms 'happy' and 'sad' are indeed intrinsic to the way humans perceive sound, and not only humans. Many animals will cheer up upon hearing 'happy' or songs in a major key. Birds often chirp in major when they are happy, i.e. when there's no sign of danger.
Alkosept, other than western.
But in Indian raga, I thought raga that were closer to bright modes were used to imply happiness?
great question! unfortunately still a relatively open question in cognitive science (for now at least), here's an interesting article from earlier this year: www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/music-to-our-western-ears/491081/
THIS IS WAY OVER MY HEAD BUT I LOVE IT
Absolutely love your videos!!! You have sparked an interest in this type of study that I haven't had for a couple of years now. Thank you!
You are like a Vsauce of music :D
Zdrowy9966 yeah whatever happened to vsauce,michael here
The audience got bigger, thus money, and extra channels, and extra Michaels, and not many topics left to discuss, and as always, thanks for watching
I thought exactly the same! :D
Holy shit, I was literaly just gonna say that
Zdrowy9966 yessss
Love what you said at @6:33! As an academic and an engineer that's how I feel about sciences too. As far as music goes, I got stuck at the theory in the past and gave up lol - but this channel is super eye opening for me - and thank you for sharing your hard-earned intuitions into digestible videos.
i love these theory videos, they give me new insights every time i watch one
I feel you bro
I don’t know anything about music or a thing of what you are talking about yet I still watch every video
Love the conclusion!
My old music teacher tried to teach us all the different modes and how to hop around them - when we were about 13-14 years old. Needless to say it wasn't that popular at the time. Now as a growing musician I fondly come back to those theachings yet still it tends to get too theoretical quite fast. Suddenly we enter a realm of Math.
Therefore I love your conclusion so immensly: Don't forget to make Music with it! The theory is a tool :-)
I always loved your videos. You start to explain something, I catch up, I get a step ahead, you get two steps ahead; rinse and repeat.
I think the "brightness" explanation is only part of the explanation. The relative higher or lower of pitch *is* related to emotion, see research on that by David Huron. Internally to the limited 12-note tempered system you have lived in entirely, the musical stuff here does make sense, but the much simpler explanation of why major is happy connects to the fact that it's harmonically simple, e.g. 4:5:6 harmonic ratios, right in the harmonic series. Minor isn't so simple.
I never really spent a lot of time with theory. Like i know what key, and what scale I'm playing. But I don't really know much about modes.
I do a lot of improvisation, and I jam with many types of musicians on different instruments. So I've always found my ear training to be more important than understanding theory.
I've always liked the idea of hearing something someone is playing and being able to follow along in your own way, without playing exactly what they are playing.
I have always favored practicality over theory. But I'm glad you have this channel, so I can finally learn it. :)
The reason major chords sound "happy" has much less to do with brightness than it does with the fact that the perfect third interval is concordant with the fifth overtone and discordant with the sixth overtone for any given tonic, while the minor interval sounds "sad" mostly because it is discordant with the louder fifth overtone and concordant with the half as loud sixth overtone of the tonic. It is this interplay to which must be attributed the physical, emotional effects of music--not some abstract concept.
This information I gathered from The Great Courses' "How Mathematics and Music Relate"--an excellent series you should watch that gives a very rich mathematical texture to music theory. I may or may not have pirated it on The Pirate Bay in lieu of paying the ridiculous university-level price for the series...
yes, I heard about that in one video about a lecture by Leonard Bernstein at Berkeley named "the unanswered question" we can find in UA-cam
I came to the comments to say just this. Thanks for saying it for me. I was also going to recommend Bernstein's Harvard lectures, which are incredible, and provide real insight into this. Adam may be well-spoken, talented, and entertaining, but within 5 seconds he lost all credibility for me at least. Brightness and darkness are, like you said, abstract constructs, and extremely subjective as well. My favorite answer would be "Because you grew up in a westernized world and have simply been conditioned to think they're simply "sad" and "happy."" Although, Bernstein leads me to think there really is some deeper universal consonance and dissonance perceived by all humans due to the actual physics of sound. Not hating though, I love anyone that makes music learning more accessible and spreads a love for music, but it did bother me and people ought to be aware that there's something deeper going on here than just "Because it's bright and bright means this."
Personally I had the impression that the whole video is about brightness and the question about the "mood" was just a starting point, it served to explain the concept of brightness, not the other way round, as if the title was misleading.
This!
If that one ever shows up on The Great Courses Plus, $15/month isn't too bad. I enjoyed the linguistics lecture series on there as well although it covered some pretty basic ground.
While I and most people are familiar with a lot of stuff you upload I have to say the way you present and explain it makes me take another look at what I already know from a different perspective. Your stream of consciousness and staccato editing is really quite intriguing and engaging. Great stuff Adam. Hi from London UK.
"EACH CHORD IS ITS OWN ISLAND IN A SEA OF HARMONY"- Adam Neely, 2016
Just discovered your channel and it might be one of the best music theory-related channels on UA-cam. You killin' it mang
1:55 im in love with this chord arrangement and idk why
Adam, I have just found your channel and I'm extremely happy. I've never seen a UA-camr talk about music on such a high level as you do. Thank you for existing, or something.
this is the best music content ive found damn
Dude, your videos are awesome. I'm a huge theory nerd (working on my music degree), and these lessons are a great supplement to what I'm learning in school.
This is great. But please bring back the intro with the cartoon bass player. This is like watching Gilligan's Island without the theme song.
This wasn't a bass lesson by any stretch of the word!
Adam Neely Well, okay as long as you're not ditching that sweet intro, that's good news, then.
No way!
Why do you need an intro to a YT video? First people say what are they going to talk about, than they play the video, and than start the topic which I don't get at all.
A-DAM NEE-LY'S BASS LESS-SUH-OOOOOOOOOONS
The technique you're using by constructing your chords with the circle of fifths, adding one sharp per change is quite clever. It does create unity and makes for a beautiful progression.
The double harmonic/Byzantine scale and Aeolian Dominant (Mixolydian b6) also invert to itself. But they're super hard to use.
True! I talk about some of that in the bonus video (linked in the description). I ruled out the double harmonic because of the consecutive half steps between 7, 1 and b2.
and that scale is a mode of melodic minor and lydian-mixolydian
William Compitello double harmonic isnt hard to use, its the most spammable scale cuz it just sounds THAT good
William Compitello if you ask me, the harmonic minor and the dominant phrygian, altho they are similar to the double harmonic, are much harder to use meaningfully
ive just been innocuously binging your content and this was the video that i really needed to see/hear.
i've been in a tiny bit of a writing rut, because i've been learning and filling all of these new gaps. which reveals brand spanking new; smaller gaps!! but as the smaller gaps start to arise, i find myself bogged down by trying to keep filling them, and not have time to just make music. and the awareness of this line we have to walk i think, is very important to address.
so instead, i'll learn another new song, which works wonders for sure, but it all comes back to wanting to make my next favorite piece of music that makes me want to plug in and lose myself in it. felt nice to have that reminder. thanks adam!!
Next can you make a video on why I’m so sad?
Hey Adam,
I've been binge watching your videos for the last couple of days and I'm so glad I came across this particular one from two years ago. Absolutely fascinating content! I've always been searching for my own "sound", with regards to my own guitar playing and songwriting, and this study/concept of brightness and darkness is absolutely intriguing!
I love the examples you played in this video. It shows your level of understanding of advanced contemporary harmony and music in general, and being able to elegantly "simplify" them such that it feels approachable yet fascinating.
Then again, my opinion is kinda biased considering that I'm passionate about music and I do have a decent amount of contemporary music knowledge. However, I believe non-music playing folks will be able to comprehend this concept of brightness and darkness, perhaps not the theoretical terminology used but in the way you played the progression.
Love the videos man! Keep up the excellent work on your channel, and I wish you good health and good fortune in your life!
Sincerely,
Khairul aka Kai for short
I believe that the overtone series, and the fact that a major chord is built up of the first notes, is the correct answer. "Brightness" really doesn't explain anything, when it's something you want "just enough" of. Then you have to explain why exactly this amount is right. And besides, it is the other way around if you invert the chord...
Adam, I'm a recent subscriber, been playing music for 37 years, 13 as a living, self-taught (read: no one could tell me what to do for the first few years). I love your approach to teaching theory. Filling in a lot of gaps for me in a very insightful and entertaining way, so T H A N K Y O U!
BRILLIANT! You're awesome Adam.
so I've been getting into bass lately so I can play in my choir next year, and your videos are so useful. it's been helping me learn theory, and just generally get into the instrument. stay awesome!
I don't really understand why any key would be brighter than another key if brightness is defined in terms of intervalic relations because the key signatures all have the same intervalic relations.
In relation to each other I guess. Not on their own but within a certain context. But there really are people who still teach that major is happy, and minor is sad.
It's basically the same thing as when he lists the modes in order of brightest to darkest.
Lydian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian, Locrian - If we think of these as all being modes of a C major scale, then our starting notes for each mode would be F, C, G, D, A, E, B -or the cycle of fifths. The next note would be Gb which doesn't exist in a C major scale, so that's as far as we can go if thinking about it that way, but you get the idea.
Given that modes are all the same scale, just starting at a different point. How can they be brighter or darker...
SimbosanYT But they are not that.they are different scales entirely. That's just the easiest way to learn them by playing the same scale from a different position. If you play music which is in a certain mode, but think the way you describe, you won't have music which sounds like it's being played in that particular mode, but from another scale. That's why one should spend time in getting used to the way each mode sounds so the music will actually be from that mode.
oh absolutely, believe me I've been through that interesting phase =)
Just recently discovered your videos. I have to say I really enjoy your talks. They're not convulated or saturated. Thank you for the content
But saying a major chord should be brighter than a minor one is becaise it's third is a half-step wider is only half truth. That only regards its first third. The second third of the minor chord is wider than that of the major, and ultimately they amount to the same distance across.
Therefore it should be crucial to note that, as I understand it, it's not necessaeilly the actual width of the chord's intervals that determines ita brightness, rather the *order* of wide and narrow intervals.
Those chords that have their wider intervals come first are precoeves as brighter, even though they're ulrimately not larger or wider,interval-wise, than their minor counterparts.
I suppose that what matters here is that we look at intervals from the root.
I think so too, that's why inversions of complex chords can sound so different ! Take the same notes but change the order of the intervals and you get a really different sound !
Yes, the root note is absolutely crucial; it's how we perceive the chord.
Aviel The fifth is unnecessary.
What if I play the second inversion of a major chord?
i have learned more from your channel than i have ever learned from high school theory. since i discovered your channel about a week or so ago, your stuff has made me a better composer and musician in almost every aspect, and i dont even play strings! youre amazing man, keep up the good work
Hey Adam, could you please do an in depth lesson on non-functional harmony? Thanks man.
Hi Adam!
I'm a singersongwriter from Milan, and I appreciate your videos a lot: very deep cool stuff with a very curious approach.
Watching this I got caught by the feeling of ascending and descending brightness of the circle of fifths and of chords progressions that use progressively brighter or darker scales, and found it a very fascinating compositional tool; but since as you said this would be a non-functional approach to harmony I was wandering how should I approach the melody writing on top of such a chord progression
thank you so much for the time you spend on spreading your musical knowledge!
Does this hold across different cultures? Has any research been done to see if people that weren't raised on Western music have the same emotional reactions to the different modes and chords? BTW, have you encountered the Lydian Chromatic Concept? If so, any thought on it? - Neill
You can find the answer to this with a simple Google search. I've looked it up several times. The classical example is that Russian music makes immense use of minor chords and scales in music that Russians will gladly tell you is happy music, so there is certainly a cultural aspect to it, but there are some other theories about why certain chords seem happy or sad as well, different from the one presented here.
AFAIK there isn't a conclusive answer to this question, with opposite claims and researches made on occasion. Here's a recent one that apparently proves that non-Westerners have no inherent idea minor is "sad", major is "happy", etc.
arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/the-jaws-theme-might-not-be-scary-for-tsimane-people/
I'm skeptical on the above study for a number of reasons, I'd be interested in hearing what audio clips were used. One thing is, with people with no music education background, if you play major and minor triads next to each other they don't particularly pick up on major and minor as happy/sad. Now, play people from any culture a chopin nocturne then mozart k333 allegro and and I'd find it very hard to believe they'd have trouble picking out which is happy and which is sad. It really depends on how "minorness" is used. It just so happens that western classical music has often gravitated to the sadder aspects of minor harmony. It's pretty hard to write a piece based on minor 1 4 chords and a major/dominant 5 chord that doesn't sound at least a bit sad for example, but that's been unjustly generalised to "minor is sad" in music theory classrooms for a while.
Nice question.
Adam, I thought modes were hard until I stumbled across this video. I can't thank you enough for putting everything in a context that actually makes sense.
5:27 that is so damn tasty! Did you write that one?
Sounds jazzy
It reminds me of legend of Zelda breath of the wild
@Asian Caillou i know that's the joke
@Asian Caillou 👖
@Asian Caillou 👖
As a beginner in music, I can definitely say that the display of the way in which chords relate to the different scales. And how different chords pitches are built upon the different scale modes has been of great help to me. Thank you for posting this video. Cheers.
The intervals in a major and a minor chord are the same. A major third and a minor third or a minor third and a major third. This only makes sense if you consider only the interval between the root and the third but not the one between the third and the fifth. Plus, most will agree that a major seventh doesn't sound very happy despite being a wide interval. I think it's all a matter of consonance and dissonance. If I remember correctly, the major third happens a lot sooner in the harmonic sequence than the minor third (if it happens at all). Therefore, the major third sounds more stable and the minor sounds more tense.
tasfa10 Yeah... This was an interesting example of unusual harmonic progressions, but I think that while it is artistic, the theoretical approach he used here doesn't give an actual answer - which should rather be found through physical analysis of sound waves combined with the study of psychoacoustics.
And I believe terming the chromatic modulations he showed here either "brighter" or "darker" disregards the fact that his point of reference is the Western chromatic scale. Use a different framework and it won't work that way.
Yes, you're right. But that's not really a problem. I mean, if you make music with a different theoretical basis, where you don't use the western twelve tone scale, you're also probably not using chords, at least the same way. Our twelve tone scale is as Western as our idea of chords and harmony. Traditional japanese musicians, for example, probably wouldn't care if the major chord sounds happy or not because it's not part of their vocabulary.
Indeed, the major triad appears on the harmonic series on the 4th, 5th and 6th degrees. The thing is: why is the 7th absent from the diatonic scale? Why does the western music tradition pretend that interval doesn't exist, or that it's "rounded" into either a minor third or a minor third? If we were truly following the harmonic scale, our music should be microtonal.
I was rewatching your videos and came back to this for the first time since I started trying to create original music - a profoundly humbling experience that made me realize I knew far, far less music theory than I thought - and the idea of using these very close relationships of scales caught my attention. I don't know what I'm doing, but I've mostly been not knowing what I'm doing in the modes of C-major and having some success there - this makes me want to play with the effects created by sliding to adjacent-in-brightness scales and see what feelings I can make with that. Thanks!
A lot of misconceptions regarding major/minor chords and tonal color. As it so happens, modern music theory has more to say on this than concepts of "happy" or "sad", such as otonality/utonality, tenney height, and harmonic entropy.
+Andrew Meronek please enlighten me! What are some good resources?
Adam, I dig your videos, by the way. Very thoughtful. You can browse info on all 4 of those terms here: xenharmonic.wikispaces.com/ I also recommend checking out the Xenharmonic Alliance II on Facebook. There are, of course, various pieces of music that have either been reexamined using these tools or been inspired by them I'd recommend checking out, too, and I think other people with this interest will have their own listening lists distinct from mine . . . mine includes: The Harp Of New Albion by Terry Riley, String Quartet No. 7 by Ben Johnston, and since you're a guitarist, some recordings by guitarist John Schneider.
Fascinating stuff, but I didn't feel the question in the title was really answered. I've been thinking a lot about whether a person growing up without ever hearing music could hear a minor chord for the first time as an adult and say whether it was happy or sad.
Started out thinking "I'm disagreeing," 2/3 the way through "shit, I'm running low on popcorn"
Wow, I’ve already learned a lot from your videos, but the fact Dorian has the same intervals up and down is very much a *emoji of exploding head* moment - thank you for all your videos and insight and keep up the great work!
The answer is simply that the minor 3rd is not one of the close partials of the harmonic series . It's actually pretty distant. So we hear minor tonal structures as sad or oblique really. Also kids around the world all sing the exact same taunting song because of the universal influence of the harmonic series on the human neural net. The minor 3rd sung is part of an implied omission a phonic trick. It's a major triad minus the tonic note. Like G,E na na, skipping the root C. Leonard Bernstein using Chomskiean linguistics as a model calls this a monogenetic phoneme. The nearly universal pentatonic scale is also a monogenetic phoneme like Ma= mother or a close derivation in every human language. IF anyone is curious then listen to lecture (1) of the "Unanswered Question" circa 1973. Can be found on You Tube on "cagin or Shawn Bay " channels.
Well, yes.... as for all the speculation and deep theories about culture and such... No one who understands the fundamental simple inescapable truth that the more simple a ratio is the more sound it's going to sound would be engaging in any of that nonsense. I like what u said about a minor third interval. Though they are not closley related to each other, there is an imaginary note that one of the notes has the simplest possible relationship to, and the other note has the next simplest. So, like an overtone in reverse... play the overtones and the bass note is conjured up.
Wow, rare insights here. This is definitely a ground-breaking lesson to those of us who want to understand why some music leaves us feeling extremely fulfilled while other music is like consuming candy -- empty calories -- no tension or resolution, or rather, too much of the same old typical tension -- release predictability. GREAT post.
I'm confused. What you are saying makes intuitive sense. Yet A major triad has a maj 3rd and a mi 3rd. A minor triad has a mi 3rd and a maj third (e.g., Eb to G in a Cmi triad). Curious why only the first interval seems to create brightness...
This has caused a lot of confusion, and it's because my definition was missing a teeeensy bit of information. It's the relative size as related BACK TO THE ROOT. I hadn't even realized that I didn't include that information in the video, but it's pretty damn important in understanding the whole thing. Sorry for the confusion!
So yeah, technically its the same sizes, but the distance between the third to the fifth doesn't matter. Only the third to the root and then the fifth to the root.
Cheers!
I'm glad you're officially acknowledging it here. Perhaps an annotation in the video would help. I spent a good deal of time reading comments, searching online, reviewing the video trying to ascertain the missing implied rules and checking them for consistency.
On that note, did you invent this concept? I see blog posts from Anton Schwartz and Frank Jargstorff on similar concepts, but not much beyond that. People you know? I can't find mention of this idea in more established music theory writing.
Adam Neely ahhh!! See now it makes a lot more sense😊. So the whole tone scale would be the ultimate brightness?
1:17 You just changed my life! I never heard of modal "brightness" and the concept opens up so many new possibilities for me. Awesome, thank you!
Damn this guy is straight to the point much better than Rick Beato. So concise and informative
and also sometimes plain wrong.
Your channel is phenomenal. It'll never get the attention that it's due; it should be at the absolute apex of music education UA-cam discussion.
Clever and creative as well as delivering the fundamental message of furthering music knowledge, every video you post is an absolute pleasure.
Man, for real, thank you so much.
Oh, and your use of vocabulary and grammar is more than pleasing to an English major.
Thanks for that too.
It happened that thrash metal's based on Locrian mode. Now this relation has explanation.
Not really. Can't think of a single song actually. 99% of Thrash is based on the Minor or Phrygian scales, or their Harmonic/Dominant counterparts, usually borrowing tones from eachother.
Melodeath00 I meant in general. Minor second and tritone - they make the dark sound for me. Even dropping all rhythm specifics of the genre
Wrong
Yeah locrian just kinda sucks as a scale, it’s very hard to write music with it that makes sense, so I disagree as well
Locrian makes no sense except in metal really.
This is EXACTLY the kind of content i look forward to, amazing as always!
Where do you think a whole tone scale is on the Dorian brightness quotient is haha
You'd need to make up a note - I'll count #4 and b5 as being identical.
Then there's a #3, a #4, a b5 and a b6, so the brightness is zero.
Just realised this was from 3 years ago!
This is one of the best advanced harmony videos I've ever seen, bravo sir!
You are like, the vsauce of music :D
and by the way, you look like Micheal Schofield from prison break
just sayin
don't reply to yourself
Rayene Boussetta why not? im just adding to what i said
Rayene Boussetta fuck you I do what I want
This is so fascinating! Thank you for explaining this in an engaging and articulate way.
I'd say that without that very subtle melodic thread you throw in those, these non-functional progressions would clash somewhat. It's in the melody that everything comes together, and that is where the hardship lies. Making these progressions become a solid, evolving and resolving whole is the tricky part.
The melody definitely is important!
1:00 The C dim. chord creates such a big sense of motion that I automatically resolved it in my head to a Dbm chord.
The script makes a clever move in instantly jumping from the concept of "happiness" to that of "brightness".
Because, major is not really "happy" in itself, apart from the fact that we learn to interpret it that way in Western music culture. So the video title asks an impossible question.
There is nothing happy about a e.g. major scale in itself, just as there is nothing happy about, say, a flower or a sunrise. Any scale is only a set of sound waves, which we culturally learn to associate with a certain mood. So, a different musical culture will have learned to associate an entirely different mood, than happy, to a Western major scale.
Indeed. Using one metaphor to explain another is silly.
Jon Sebastian I think what we interpret as "happy" harmonious chords vs. "sad" dissonant chords, it also biologically wired into us a little bit, and maybe in nature too. The way a harmonious chord is spaced "evenly" resembles balance to me, and the fractals and "even" patterns found in nature resemble the same idea-- structure, balance, etc. Dissonant chords seems to represent uneven structure or maybe some kind of entropy. But, this is just my opinion. Idk.
Are these merely descriptive patterns or...were the ancients right and number is _real_.? LOL
Tyler Breeden So, speaking as a philosophy scholar, the view you set forth here is much akin to what the ancient Greeks, especially Plato, believed in - as Michael H is probably referring to - namely, that order, balance, logic, etc. were qualities of nature itself. That is called "realist idealism". Hence, mathematicians could uncover absolute truths about numbers, in much the same fashion as priests could uncover absolute truths about God. And it did have a religious-like reasoning to it. This sort of reasoning, however, aren't really taken seriously by anyone within philosophy or science for 2 reasons, at least:
1) Sociology taught us how cleverly we humans can deceive ourselves in projecting our own concepts (such as "order" and "balance") out into nature, as if they were really part of the surrounding world itself. But, if someone claims that nature is inherently "balanced" etc., that says more about the speaker than about nature. Like when different religions have different notions about the characteristics of God, that obviously says more about each differing religion that about God. (I am not claiming that you are religious; just that theology deals with similar questions and so gets itself into the same kinds of philosophical problems, hence the comparison.)
2) These kinds of questions and claims about the characteristics of nature are from a dated branch of so-called "metaphysics", which modern philosophy has mostly given up on, for many reasons. Primarily, because we developed our attentiveness towards how we argue, and so realized that we can rarely give any well-founded arguments about these ultimate questions that are better to un-founded opinion. The post-metaphysical stance is rather to accept that we can ask why more questions than we could ever hope to answer; e.g. questions about the nature of reality itself.
I know, that escalated quickly.
Best regards,
Jon
I had a feeling this discussion would go in this direction - or escalate quickly, as you put it.. Personally, I consider metaphysical questions speculative (I was hoping to indicate my lack of belief in the realness of number in my previous response by adding that _LOL_) but I've always found the problem of universals and other pursuits of the "pure intellect" to be very intriguing. Perhaps this is why I was drawn to George Santayana who was both an unflinching apologist for mechanism while adhering to the old classical categories. (His critics, of course, accused him of being double-minded).
Best of luck, Mike.
I really enjoy your approach of theorie. Its a fresh and different point of view.
Thankyou, Music Vsauce.
This was awesome! I never really thought about how the circle of fifths and the different scales are brighter or darker than one another! This is something I will definitely look out for while composing my pieces from now on!
Awesome job, man! Keep it up!
All I got from this is that Adam really likes sevenths (3:39)
who doesnt?
Sevenths make everything better!
linguaphile Hmm. I didn't even get that much. But, I did get, "I don't know shit about music" loud and clear. :)
Really loving watching all your old videos Adam.
You didn't actually explain WHY any of this is true
How does it ACTUALLY work? I can hear that it's true, noticing a nice pattern in it is relevant... how?
That's because there is no answer, just like asking why is the sky blue? It just IS and you'd be better off not asking such inane, useless questions.
Actually, the sky is blue due to the Rayleigh scattering of the sunlight in the atmosphere. Question is not useless and I'm sure, neuroscientists can also figure out why it is that major chords are perceived as "brighter"
IM00by Right, right. And I'm sure that knowledge will serve you well in your life.
Maybe the knowledge of why some chords sound brighter than others can lead to new theories on developing chord progressions to evoke moods...if musicians never stopped to ask "why", then there would never be progression in the field of music.
Ublind Everything that can be done in music has been done. EVERYTHING.
All your videos are so rich in content. Incredible!
Augmented chords are inherently less stable than major chords because of their minor 6th/raised 5th which isn't consonant with the root. They aren't really worth comparing with major and minor chords.
But you just compared them.
Actually I contrasted them. Comparing has a few meanings, one meaning to say something is similar to another thing.
Point out the resemblances to; liken to.
"her novel was compared to the work of Daniel Defoe"
DUDE!!! What an incredible brand of humor you have!! @1:55
I'm nowhere near the expert you are, but I'm imagining the notes you played here were VERY specific ones. LOL
Personally, I may agree with this to a certain degree....but seriously, I think whether Major/Minor keys/chord sound happy or sad depend on the arrangement and the way it is play. Does minor swing sound sad to u?
I think attribute mood to the major minor chord/key is a lazy way to teach music.
I agree, but in order to memorize the sounds, you have to put some tags on them. In the video he said that augmented chords sound sour to him. I tag major pentatonic scales as sounding 'Chinese' (however politically incorrect that may be). I think that major being happy and minor being sad is just a convenient tag for learning the sound.
And I also get that there are lots of teachers who don't really make that clear when teaching and that frustrates me too.
Prejudice is so hard to overcome and this guy has no shortage of them. Look up his video on classical musician. Though he may not be totally wrong, but it is so prejudice and bias in many ways and he is not alone.
this and functional harmony smashed me in the face. Adam please keep smashing me.
ty
Why does a sus 2 sound happier than a minor 3rd?
😱😱😱😱Is ☝️🤞✋🤜💪🤙that 😱😱an 👋🤚🤜🤘👍👊🖐Among 😱 Us 🙇♀️🙇♀️🙇♀️🙇♀️Reference??? 😱😱😱
Let's all take a moment to appreciate the top notch overall production on Adam's latest vids. Absolute quality content.
I would strongly disagree with purely "sonic" arguments for emotion in music. We have to remember that our associations are cultural, not natural. Other musical cultures do not all hear the same "emotions", which themselves were not agreed upon until recently (old modes were associated with emotions different from what we now hear them as).
Another great video though, great channel you have. I just tend to disagree in the same way raised seven doesn't "want" to go to the tonic, we just hear it go there 99.9% of the time, we learned to expect/want it.
Also, I don't fully understand how someone hears any major key as brighter or darker than any other major key in isolation, though upward modulation is very effective for giving a rising sense of direction.
Fantastic video! The relationships among the modes was glossed over in my harmony class, and, except for finding the Myxolydian mode the most interesting one, that was the extent of it. Thank you for pointing out the inversion of the scales! Really swept away the cobwebs! Subded and I watch all your stuff.
I know this video is primarily about the concept of brightness - however I have to disagree on you on the premise of the video - why major chords are 'happy' vs minor chords being 'sad'. It has everything to do with the harmonic series and how major triads slot into their fundamentals and minor ones do not. After all, you can voice a major triad to sound less bright (1st inversion) and a minor chord to sound brighter (also 1st inversion - although then there is the danger of sounding like a maj6 chord).
TL;DR: the harmonic series is happiness, brightness is a separate concept.
Also Adam, in the gtr/pno round the 5ths example, the 7th bar is missing an Eb and a Db - although I kinda like the written mistakes ;)
What you, and a lot of other people are talking about, is similar to the idea of what Persichetti calls "resonance" - and it raises a lot of questions beyond simple major/minor chords. Sure, it answers the question of major/minor, but it also would seem to imply that a dominant seventh chord is "brighter" or more "resonant" than a major seventh chord, since the b7 occurs WAY before the major 7 in the harmonic series. The minor 6th occurs significantly before the major 6th as well.
Yes - but then we need to take into account tuning. The 7 chord that we use almost universally is not the 7 chord we get from the partials of the harmonic series. the 7 (and indeed the 3 and 5) are so far away from their natural resonating pitches, they come out dissonant and emphasise the tritone. On the other hand, the maj7 chord is two stacked 5ths - 5ths being the second most in tune interval after octaves in the well tempered system. So the chord just 'sits' and our 7 chords don't.
you must hear this all the time but I just discovered your channel and it's pure gold. Thank you so much.
Sorry, I must disagree. Major chords are "happier" than minor chords because they are more consonant, not because the first third is bigger. By your reasoning, a minor sixth would be a "happier" interval than a fifth, because it's bigger.
He wasn't clear about the fact that he was using "bigger" as more consonant, thus happy, when it was actually consonant. A flawed video because of what you've highlighted, indeed
Scott Wallace We meet again Scott, and you've got my like(:
Ori Samsonov
Hey, Ori, how's it going?
I don't actually think his conclusion was that bigger intervals = happiness. He hinted at that at the start of the video, but quickly rejected it e.g. with the augmented chord
Scott Wallace I'm good man, how are you?
I've been binge-watching your videos for two days now, and I must say this has to be one of my favorites so far! I wish you still had that blog though :/ Keep it up!
I feel like you have just replaced the word happy with bright and went nowhere from that
This video just made me realize how much I love this channel and music in general..
Not true, it's hundreds of years of conditioning. Minor and major could have easily been reversed.
Actually, as far as I know, there are correlations between minor/major sound wave progressions and human voice pitch variation when in a certain mood. As a result, minors sound more 'depressed', whereas majors sound more 'enthusiastic'.
One of the best music theory videos I've ever seen. Cool channel man.
Major chords are teenage breasts. While minor chords are mature breasts.
wtf
wtf
wtf
wtf
hahahha
I never noticed that inverting the modes create a completely different one. Blew my mind!
Adam, great video. Although, I disagree that keys have any associated brightness or darkness. A melody played in C will sound just as bright as one played in the key of A etc. The only exception is when you change keys mid song. Thanks again, these videos are great.
he means that playing a series of chords in 5ths sound more uplifting than playing it backwards in fourths
So far the only videos of yours that I've seen are this and the Vaporwave video. Subscribed.
The ratios of frequencies cause the consonance or dissonance. The fifth sounds nice because the ratio of frequencies is 2:3. An octave has a ratio of 1:2. A major third is 4:5. A minor third is 5:6 A major chord has ratios of 4:5:6. A minor chord has ratios of 10:12:15. Ratios that are easier to recognize sound more consonant to us. That's why.
So nerdy I love it! Keep making videos like these please, Adam!