Music, Major, Minor

Continuing a bit on from our work yesterday, let's pretend I've got this melody. You've never heard it before, because I just made it up. Here's two versions of it:

Version 1

Version 2

Listen to one version, then jot some notes down about how it "feels". Ascribe an emotion to it if you can. Then, do the same for the other.

If you came up with something akin to "happy" for Version 1, and "sad" for Version 2, good news! You agree with the vast majority of the population!

Version 1 uses a major scale, with major intervals, and most humans associate that with happiness. Version 2 does the opposite -- it uses a minor scale and minor intervals, making us think 'sad'.

Researchers have to be careful when they do these tests, because they have to pick performers that will keep everything else the same: tempo, expression, so on. But we have the computer, so we have better control.

Let's pretend that you had trouble coming up with words to describe the audio above, which could have happened if you were very young, or if I had made much more complicated examples. Music researchers and therapists will use Hevner's adjective circle to help people pick out words that describe what they hear. Opposite words are opposite of each other, to help people out if they can only think of something like "not sad" or "not angry".

One of the neatest things about Hevner's adjective circle is that the eight adjective lists match up to a musical trait. If many people are writing down "happy" or "bright", for example, you could guess that the music is happy, fast, and simple. "Vigorous" or "majestic" would likely be low, firm and complex.

This is a really interesting article on marrying music with animation, considering the emotion of the music. It goes into a detailed explanation of the adjective circle, just in case that above paragraph sparked your curiosity. It also shows how they match up what's going on in the music to what's going on in the cartoon. Check it out, it's a good look into film technique as well as music.