Related papers: Relativity of musical mood
In classical music and in any genre of contemporary music, the tonal elements or notes used for playing are the same. The numerous possibilities of chords for a given instance in a piece make the playing, in general, very intricate, and…
We develop aspects of music theory related to harmony, such as scales, chord formation and improvisation from a combinatorial perspective. The goal is to provide a foundation for this subject by deriving the basic structure from a few…
The paper offers a solution to the centuries-old puzzle - why the major chords are perceived as happy and the minor chords as sad - based on the information theory of emotions. A theory and a formula of musical emotions were created. They…
We classify three-tone and four-tone chords based on subgroups of the symmetric group acting on chords contained within a twelve-tone scale. The actions are inversion, major-minor duality, and augmented-diminished duality. These actions…
The mathematics of musical intervals and scales has been extensively studied. Vastly simplified, our ears seem to prefer intervals whose frequency ratios have small numerator and denominator, such as 2:1 (octave), 3:2 (perfect fifth), 4:3…
The dichotic method of hearing sound adapts in the region of musical harmony. The algorithm of the separation of the being dissonant voices into several separate groups is proposed. For an increase in the pleasantness of chords the…
Most music theory books are like medieval medical textbooks: they contain unjustified superstition, non-reasoning, and funny symbols glorified by Latin phrases. How does music, in particular harmony, actually work, presented as a real,…
Consonance is related to the perception of pleasantness arising from a combination of sounds and has been approached quantitatively using mathematical relations, physics, information theory, and psychoacoustics. Tonal consonance is present…
The new formulas, which determine sign and amplitude of utilitarian emotions, are proposed on the basis of the information theory of emotions. In area of perception of musical chords the force of emotions depends on the relative pitch of…
We investigate the association between musical chords and lyrics by analyzing a large dataset of user-contributed guitar tablatures. Motivated by the idea that the emotional content of chords is reflected in the words used in corresponding…
After briefly revising the concepts of consonance/dissonance, a respective mathematic-computational model is described, based on Helmholtz's consonance theory and also considering the partials intensity. It is then applied to characterize…
In this paper we present a mathematical way of defining musical modes and we define the musicality of a mode as a product of three different factors. We conclude by classifying the modes which are most musical according to our definition.
The perception of consonance/dissonance of musical harmonies is strongly correlated with their periodicity. This is shown in this article by consistently applying recent results from psychophysics and neuroacoustics, namely that the just…
In physics, timbre is a complex phenomenon, like color. Musical timbres are given by the superposition of sinusoidal signals, corresponding to longitudinal acoustic waves. Colors are produced by the superposition of transverse…
Understanding the structural characteristics of harmony is essential for an effective use of music as a communication medium. Of the three expressive axes of music (melody, rhythm, harmony), harmony is the foundation on which the emotional…
Musical chords, harmonies or melodies in Just Intonation have note frequencies which are described by a base frequency multiplied by rational numbers. For any local section, these notes can be converted to some base frequency multiplied by…
In the Pythagorean tuning system, the fifth is used to generate a scale of 12 notes per octave. In this paper, we use the octave to generate a scale of 19 notes per tritave; one can play this scale on a traditional piano. In this system,…
We make some general observations about partial orders on quotient spaces, and explore their use in music theory, in two different contexts. In the first, we show that many of the most familiar chord and scale types in Western music appear…
Here we report the observation of the inverse Doppler effects in a flute. It is experimentally verified that, when there is a relative movement between the source and the observer, the inverse Doppler effect could be detected for all seven…
Western tonality provides a hierarchy of stability among melodic scale-degrees, from the maximally stable tonic to unstable chromatic notes. Tonal stability has been linked to emotion, yet systematic investigations of the associations…