Major and Minor

Music majors spend a long time learning about intervals, or what space between notes sound like. We take entire classes on them, but they're not actually hard.

True fact: you can hear intervals and tell them apart just by their "feel"! Try this out. Both of these intervals, are thirds, but one is major and one is minor. Here's the first one:

First sample!

And the second:

Second sample!

If you had to assign an emotion to either of those intervals, what would you pick? Don't think too hard about it.

If you called the first 'happy' and the second 'sad', good news: you would agree with the vast majority of people on this earth. We associate major intervals with 'happy' feelings and minor intervals with 'sad' feelings.

You know more than you think you know. Listen to the sound sample below, and on a scrap piece of paper, figure out what intervals are major and which are minor. If you have a hard time, try not to overthink it.

Here's your test!

Here's the answers, highlight them to view. But don't cheat! Major, minor, minor, major, major.

You likely got them all right, or at least most of them. See? It's not so tough.

You can apply "happy" and "sad" sounds to songs, too. If it sounds happy, it's major. If it sounds sad, it's minor. This is called finding a song's tonality. I've linked two YouTube videos below, one major and one minor. See if you can tell which is which.



and



I know, I couldn't have picked two songs that were more different. I tried to grab two songs that wouldn't give it away in their lyrics!