The course will explore the tone combinations that humans consider consonant or dissonant, the scales we use, and the emotions music elicits, all of which provide a rich set of data for exploring music and auditory aesthetics in a biological framework. Analyses of speech and musical databases are consistent with the idea that the chromatic scale (the set of tones used by humans to create music), consonance and dissonance, worldwide preferences for a few dozen scales from the billions that are possible, and the emotions elicited by music in different cultures all stem from the relative similarity of musical tonalities and the characteristics of voiced (tonal) speech. Like the phenomenology of visual perception, these aspects of auditory perception appear to have arisen from the need to contend with sensory stimuli that are inherently unable to specify their physical sources, leading to the evolution of a common strategy to deal with this fundamental challenge.
Emotions Elicited by Major versus Minor Scales
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Del curso dictado por Duke University
Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why
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De la lección
Music, Emotion, and Cultural Differences
How emotion is conveyed by vocal similarity in music across cultures, and how the speech of a culture and its music are related. A summing up of the major points in the course follows.
Conoce a los instructores
- Dale PurvesM.D.
Duke Institute for Brain Sciences
In Lesson 2 then,
we're gonna be talking about the emotions that are elicited by different scales.
And the scales that we're gonna focus on, and
indeed it's the scales that people have focused on for centuries, and
I'll explain why, are the major versus the minor scales.
So let me begin by showing you again something that we talked about before.
These are examples of scales that we talked about in the module on that topic.
And you will remember that the scales are pentatonic
six note five interval scales that are common in folk and very simple music.
And then the heptatonic eight note seven interval scales that are used
in more complex music, be it classical music or more complex popular music.
And we discussed some of the origins of these terms,
the difference between scales and modes.
And the reason for showing you this again is that in the last several centuries
this detailed terminology, which is of course important and
familiar to music theorists and courses on music appreciation,
has really boiled down to the widespread use
of major versus minor scales whether it's pentatonic or heptatonic.
And these modes,
the ionian and aeolian in the heptatonic,
diatonic scale category are just referred to as major and
minor scales because they are used in such a wide variety of music, be it classical,
popular, or any other form of music that that terminology has come to be current.
People don't talk so much about this nomenclature outside of the classroom or
the context of music theory.
But major and minor scales are really
essential in thinking about music and its emotional conveyance.
Why is that?
It's because, as I said, for the last few centuries,
major scales have been generally regarded as conveying,
and they do, we'll demonstrate this in a minute, but it's not really a matter for
discussion people have accepted this for a very long time.
Major scales are considered to convey a sense of
brightness, excitement,
martial causes, happiness,
joy, whereas minor scales are generally regarded as conveying
quite the opposite valence of emotion and a different sense of arousal.
You remember we just talked about that.
So, minor music is subdued, conveys a darker mood,
a sense of sadness, a sense of despair, again depending on
the context in which it's played, the lyrics of the music, and so on.
But, in general, you can think of a major scale as being excited and
bright and a minor scale as being unexcited and subdued.
And the question of course is well, why should that be?
What is it about major and
minor scales that convey that different emotional sense?
So let's talk about the differences between major and minor scales and
their tonality.
So these are the modes that we talked about, again the ionian and
the aeolian being just referred to as major and minor scales.
These other modes are, as I said in an earlier module,
they're used, with the exception of the Locrian,
they're used in different genres of music and different traditions.
But the major and
minor scales are the preeminent ones and what are the difference?
What make the difference between a major and a minor scale?
So here are the scales drawn on a piano keyboard.
Here are the intervals of the two scales and whether you look at the keyboard or
this listing of the intervals, you can readily see what the differences are.
Just in a nutshell, the differences are that the major scale entails larger
intervals, and the minor scale smaller intervals, smaller tonal intervals.
Again, remember that the interval is with regard to the tonic.
So we're always talking about the two note combination when we're talking about
an interval.
The tonic note and the unison, the same note played
with it an octave the same note played an octave higher.
A major fifth, excuse me.
Perfect fifth, perfect fourth.
Again, the interval is always the note
above a tonic played or considered a dyad.
So what's the difference?
Or what specifically is the difference?
And you can see it here, that in the case of the major scale,
three major intervals are replaced by minor intervals.
So in the Aeolian minor scale mode,
the major third is replaced by a minor third.
The major sixth has been replaced by minor sixth.
Again, remember these are one semitone, the interval is one semitone less and
the major seventh has been replaced by minor seventh.
So you've attained the most constant intervals.
In the major scale and the minor scale, you retained unison, you retained
the perfect fifth and the perfect fourth, and the octave.
But you've replaced three intervals with a smaller,
one semi-toned less, large interval.
So basically the difference between these two scales is in the size
of the intervals that they use.
And here you can see the illustration of the same thing on the piano keyboard.
So here are, this is a C Major scale here and
this is the corresponding minor scale, and
you can see that the major third has been replaced by the minor third.
The major sixth here has been replaced by a minor six in the minor scale,
and the major seventh by a minor seven.
So, bottom line, the difference between the major and
minor scale really is in the size of the intervals maintaining for
reasons I think that will become clearer,
maintaining the most consonant intervals, the octave.
The unison, the octave, the perfect fifth and perfect fourth,
by changing the size of the intervals that are in some sense more expendable
because they don't convey consonance to the same degree.
So let's hear Ruby play the major and
minor scales just so
that you have a concrete sense
of what they sound like.
[MUSIC]
So, having heard what these scales sound like,
the other issue that I want to drive home is an empirical
analysis of music that's actually written in major or minor keys.
So this is an empirical analysis of a large number of
major melodies here in a,
and minor melodies in b that are by virtue of their key signature,
intended by the composer as either a major scale composition or a minor.
Scale proposition, and the empirical analysis is simply taking
the notes in the melodic lines of those two categories and
asking what's the frequency of occurrence of the intervals in these two scales?
Again, remember I said before that for any scale the dictum of the scale, the mandate
the composer in using that scale was not to prevent any note from occurring.
Because it's in a major scale, it doesn't mean that a minor note can't occur.
It's a question of emphasis and the empirical question is, okay,
well given what I've just told you about the difference between major and
minor scales, what really is the difference in emphasis?
So, here, going down this list for
major melodies and minor melodies, are other chromatic intervals.
And the question is, well, how often in these two categories do major and
minor intervals actually occur?
What's really the difference empirically between composers' intention when they
write something in a major key or using a major scale
versus a minor key with the intention of writing something in a minor scale.
And you can see by the color coding here that the big difference and
the analysis includes classical and folk music in both categories, but
you can see that the big difference is that in major melodies,
major thirds are common and
Minor Thirds are extremely uncommon, practically never used.
Or as if you look at Minor melodies, the Minor Thirds are common
and the Major Thirds are very rarely used, again it's a matter of emphasis.
It's not that they're totally forbidden, they sometimes occur.
But this difference between the thirds is the distinguishing characteristic
of major, or minor melodies in western music, and this applies as we'll.
See a bit later on when we talk about cross-cultural things that the same thing
applies in other cultural traditions as well.
What about empirically these other distinctions between
major and minor scales?
Well again, the color coding is lighter here because although
the same thing applies the differences are just not as great.
The big differences are, in the major third, the differences for
the sixth and seventh, again,
in major music, a lot of major sixth, very rarely, minor sixth.
In minor music, a lot of minor sixth,
less major six, and so on for the seventh.
Same deal for the seventh but the big difference is in the third and
the sixth and seventh variations are just less obvious, but
they're there in the same way.
Again, the bottom line is that the differences are in
the size of the intervals used,
bigger intervals in major music, smaller intervals in minor music.
I wanna mention one other thing before we leave this topic and that is because it's
gonna become important later as we go along that what I've been talking about so
far is the difference in the Intervals
that are used in the sense of a tonic dyad.
What's the frequency of occurrence of the dyadic
intervals that are used in major and minor music?
You can also ask another question which is not a tonic analysis but
a melodic analysis of major and minor music, and
you get exactly the same answer, but I just wanna mention this more briefly.
So you can take this, again, as few bars of music and
you can ask not what
the note intervals are but what the intervals are between
going from one note to another in a melody, what's the melodic line?
What are the jumps in the melodic line as you go from one note to the next
as demonstrated or, as illustrated here in this diagram?
So these are melodic intervals, these are the notes,
these yellow bars are the notes that we've been talking about.
These jumps are the melodic intervals, does it go to a higher note,
a lower note, what's the size of that notational jump.
And again the answer is the same, that in major music the jumps are larger,
in minor music they're smaller.
So whether you look at it from the point of view of a tonic analysis or
a melodic analysis, the answer is the same.
That major music is using larger intervals in those two senses,
than minor music which is using smaller ones.
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