Modern science has no idea! I've researched a fair bit. We don't know how the brain intreprets frequency combinations or why different ones sound good or bad together or evoke certain moods. Math can explain harmonics and the circle of fifths and how to assemble keys and modes, sure, but no one knows the Why or How of the internals between the ears. It is just cultural bias and repetition that we intrepret some note and chord combinations a certain way or is there something more fundamental going on with the hardware? Good question! Nobody knows.
All we have is anecdotal evidence and the trial and error of the musicians and composers who make it. Music is still a mystery.
The song begins (with note names and relative major scale numbers):
Now here you go again
A C D E D C
6 1 2 3 2 1
(low)
If you have an instrument where you can play either the straight notes or the notes with that slide, play it both ways and you will hear the difference.
This song is fun and easy to play on harmonica, including the pitch bends, if you get or make the right harp. You need a High C Melody Maker, which you can order from Seydel or you can take a Lee Oskar F Major and retune it into a C Melody Maker: raise the blow 3 from C to D, and raise the draw 5 and draw 9 from Bb to B.
How do you retune a harmonica? You file the reeds! Take off some weight near the free end of a reed and it will vibrate faster, giving it a higher pitch. More strangely, you can also lower the pitch a little by thinning the reed near the fixed end.
I usually compose with a Major or Minor key in mind, but it's kind of a reference and not a be all end all. I like sharp 4's which work great usually and don't fit in either key. A flat 7 sounds great in a major key too, usually. I agree with you mostly, and i am annoyed by people who are adamant about the rules of a key, but it helps me to have a key in mind to both play and compose, even if i break the rules of it.
I find improvising on piano / guitar is nearly impossible if you don't know the key, even after many years of playing both.
Major but with a flat 7 is mixolydian (the fifth mode of major). It is everywhere in popular music.
My favourite thing at the moment is major 7 sharp 5 chords (or an augmented triad with also a major 7th). These chords arise in harmonic and melodic minor (in both cases chord 3), and in harmonic major (chord 6). But they also sound great as substitutions for what is 'supposed' to be a major 7 chord.
So yes, you ask a good question, but in fact there is some knowledge of the hardware which supports the empirical observations of musicians and composers.
and yes, music is still a mystery. There is a lot more going on than scale, pitch, and harmonics.
Yeah, exactly my first thought, pick any Beatles, Pink Floyd or Radiohead album for the most mainstream, off-the-top-of-my head examples.
(Spoiler: lots of historical context about tuning systems, but also raising the issue of timbre of specific instruments)
Leave My Girl Alone by Stevie Ray Vaughan is pretty much a master class for a guitar player that wants to mess around with 3rds and 7ths. At 3:19 is the best example of slightly messing with the 3rd and resolving to the 1 that I can remember hearing. The solos center around bent 3rds, 4ths, b5ths and 7ths.
This dissonance is related to why a composer like Bach has many, many compositions in minor (and massive ones like the B-minor mass), but not much later, you see composers using minor less and less as they moved towards more consonance (along with modulation of course).
For instance, in all of Mozart's violin sonatas there's only one minor. And it's freaking awesome ... but he didn't want to write more than that.
I think that while dissonance was interesting to Bach, it was less so through the rest of the common period, so that favors major.
I would also add that Salsa as a genre uses minor keys for happy tunes all the time.
Even though many people would describe certain songs as sounding sad, I don't think that it usually makes them feel sad. Can a song be sad if it doesn't make you feel sad? Heavy metal wouldn't be popular if it actually made you unhappy. Personally, it can improve my mood if I feel sad. Conversely, a really "bubblegummy" pop song would get on my nerves, but I would still describe it as sounding happy.
I'm not even sure that we could come up with better labels using common words. The emotions caused by music are pretty unique (at least for me).
This is false. Any person with a functioning auditory system can hear the beating when you play two very close notes. It is also trivial to model mathematically, using elementary trigonometry. And the beating of periodic waves of very close frequency is precisely the dissonance (especially when the partials of the two notes are close, but do not coincide exactly).
Whether this audible beating or dissonance is "good" or "bad", and what is its place in music, is an entirely cultural phenomenon. But the phenomenon itself is not a cultural construction, it is a physical thing. Western music uses dissonance as a tension before a final resolution, and this is of course an arbitrary choice for our musical language.
But it's lowered by a half step...
I think talking in semitones helps clear up any misunderstanding over the explicit intervals present in a chord (and I've found that very useful when talking to guitar pupils who only know guitar and want to understand theory, particularly because the guitar neck is made of semitones), but if someone knows more scale theory (or plays piano), then talking in scale steps makes more sense.
'Step' has a specific meaning in music and it doesn't mean 'semitone'. Why not just use semitone seeing as that precisely describes what's intended? Conflating meanings seems like it could be confusing. "The tritone of this note is 6 steps up" "Gotcha, so the tritone of C is B" "No no, by step I currently mean tones, not semitones" "Ah, so 3 scale tones, ok" "No just 3 tones, or 6 steps" "Ok, I'll count 6 steps, 1,2,3,4..."...just use the correct word.
Your entire hypothetical dialogue is confusing as well, since your hypothetical person isn't using correct words either. The situation where C + 6 of something = B is with scale degrees (C moved 6 scale degrees up is B). And then you say "I currently mean tones", when 6 "tones" has the exact same grouping problem you are criticizing (because 'whole tone' and 'semitone' have the exact same meaning as 'whole step' and 'half step', only now 'scale tone' is in the group too). This artificially lengthens the example.
"The tritone of this note is 6 steps up" "Gotcha, so the tritone of C is B" "No, that's scale degrees, by 'step' I mean 'half step'." "Oh, so it's F# then." Done.
Right, but it does not mean 'half step'. It means one or other depending on the harmonic context, not the language context as said above. In the case in the article, a "step" down from the third is the second, not the minor third as the article says.
> I would be quite open to a definition where '1 step' is always '1 half step'
I don't understand this, sorry. Why not just use semitone?
> Since both 'semitone' and 'half step' imply a less useful fundamental value of 2 half steps
Western music isn't fundamentally chromatic either, so talking in semitones isn't particularly useful.
As you imply with reference to wholetones and dissonance, the words tone/semitone also give useful melodic information that we've all already learned. E.g. raising the 5th a tone is consonant, raising the major 3rd a tone is dissonant. Of course you could teach students that not all steps/two steps are the same, depending on scale degree, but then you're back to square one, just with different words for semitone/tone.
> Your entire hypothetical dialogue is confusing as well, since your hypothetical person isn't using correct words either.
Yeah it's meant to be confusing, my point is that overloading terms gets confusing quickly, at least for me.
And - I personally analyze music in semitones, not scale degrees. I find it much more useful. Even though that's not considered "standard" there are some things even standard theory has to use chromatic language to describe, like the tritone (you could get into "#4 or b5" but that would require a lot more than just saying 6 semitones).
What? I'm lost. How can a step possibly mean a half step? A step is a whole step. Anything else is madness.
I'd love to hear more on "some reason." In a way, it's so arbitrary, and maybe it's a cultural bias, but so sad. And the minor iv chord, so sad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQFtvAfHndE, right when he sings "when September ends," but there's are so many other examples.