Triads are three-note chords made up of the lowest note (known as the root note), a middle note, (the third), and the top note (the fifth). But when you play a set of diatonic chords like this, built ...

Daniel Levitin, in his popular bestseller entitled This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession from 2006, characterizes the perception of the minor chord, which lowers the third of a ...

If viewed within the bewildering context of the history of western music, the triad is one of the absolute bedrocks of all the harmony that we hear, and despite its roots back to classical music, it's ...

Much of our music, from classical to contemporary, is written in either a major or minor key (with exceptions, such as jazz, which uses neither). For most, a major key conjures up feelings of ...

A lot of the elements that make pop music successful relate to it being catchy and familiar. As a songwriter, there are many ways to engender this feeling in listeners, to do with song structure, ...

To begin our investigation into the hidden cause of our peculiar perception of minor chords and keys, we will listen to a trombone quartet playing a C minor chord. We might describe the sound as "rich ...