I read through a lot of this article and it does a good job explaining the ratios and math behind harmonics and how that makes chords, but ideas like lower ratios are more pleasant and minor chords feel like something is missing (from the article "I do not hear the Harmonic Series itself -- something is missing") is just wrong - if it was right, then the happiest music would be entirely octaves. Though it's built on harmonics and overtones which can be explained objectively, you cannot make a fully scientific theory of harmony since cultural expectations factor in just as much (and maybe even more) than the expectations around harmonics. Music is pleasurable when it mostly meets expectations but surprises you as well, IE it sits just outside of what we expect. It then becomes part of what you expect in the future and music evolves.

Ultimately minor sounds sad because it's been used that way for a long time and it's what we expect. I was listening to Trout Mask Replica and my wife said it sounded like her home town funeral music (I later heard some myself and yeah she was right) - Captain Beefheart doesn't sound sad to me, but it does to her. The funeral music uses major 5 note scale.

And on "But I've Been a Musician All My Life / Studied Music In College and I've Never Heard Any of This Before!" - ratios and how chords derive from that was absolutely part of my education at Berklee. This article is good for the objective parts, but really self-congratulating for the subjective/experiential part of it.

I studied harmony and music analysis many years ago as a piano performance major in school. One thing I will say is that harmony really is not an abstract set of symbols on a page representing chords, but rather is a taxonomy of common specific sequences of simultaneously sounding pitches, abstracting away instruments or larger structural considerations and providing a dictionary that defines the most common patterns. Here's an example: Perhaps you're familiar with the idea of major and minor, but you might be unfamiliar with a Picardy third, where a composition is in a minor ("sad") key throughout but ends in that same pitch but on a major ("happy") chord. J.S. Bach used Picardy thirds regularly to end his compositions, but the Picardy third became rarer after Bach's death. Still, it's a beautiful and striking harmonic progression that continues to appear now and then. And now you know EXACTLY why that 1967 song by the Turtles, "Happy Together", has that really nice and memorable ending; that's a modern pop example of a Picardy third. Again, harmony is not abstract; it's the names musicians have given for specific sequential combinations, many of which have been named centuries ago. It's not about nicer or worse; sounds are sounds, but some are combined more often than others and those combined most frequently have well-known names that can be used to explain concisely the "harmonic" aspect of a piece of music.

There are much better overviews of this from Sethares and Tymoczko.

Consonance is somewhat frequency-dependent. For more, Google Critical Band and ERB.

The happy/sad idea is pretty much a high-school oversimplification. It's true for beginners, not at all true beyond that.\

It's quite rare to find music with straight major and/or minor triads with no other colours.

I personally consider this to be a better intro, albeit in video form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCsl6ZcY9ag

This is a more recent paper (2019) that I think is better constructed and more aware of the in-field work than TFA:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7006947/

The logic that something sounds worse simply by combining dissonant notes is questionable, because music constantly combines elements—notes, chords, even different rhythms—without that necessarily implying displeasure for the listener. Convincing.

I agree that there's a lot to be desired in the pedagogy of music theory, but this is pretty bad. There are so many little things wrong with it that if I started trying to address them all I'd be here forever.

Anybody interested in this stuff would be better off with something like Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale (https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html) or Music a Mathematical Offering (https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths-mus...)

I only skimmed the article. There's a lot of good stuff (debunking a lot of classical harmony) but they miss some important things too. There's nothing about repetition. Repetition legitimizes. Our brain is really good at pattern recognition, and as soon as it can predict something you're more than half way there to make it sound good. There's plenty of chromaticism that works because the brain "gets" the sense of direction.

I was wondering whether this might have an explanation for why I don't really like major music, preferring minor / modal / non-functional harmony... it does:

> Throughout this derivation of different chords, you will note that a gradual progression or degradation from high-theme/low-complexity (Major Triad, Harmonic Series chords) to low-theme/high-complexity (Minor and Ambiguous chords). This progression is suggested by our measure of interestingness from Section 2.4 "Interestingness: Just Enough Complexity". That is, as we progress, more and more of the theme of the Harmonic Series is lost and more and more complexity is introduced. Notice that this progression seems to mirror that of musical sophistication as well: musically untrained listeners like Major chords while more musically trained listeners are more tolerant to loss of theme and more interested in complexity. (I met a signal processing engineer who had played piano for something like 18 years and who simply did not like Major chords at all.) Other fields seem to progress similarly: white wine is preferred by new wine drinkers, whereas more "complex" red wines are an acquired taste.

I have to highly recommend the book 'Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics' for mathematical/physical explanations of sound and music. Bells having multiple resonant modes, tuning kettle drums, how string materials and plucking methods changes harmonic profiles, why having lots of high frequency harmonics sounds bright (and electric guitars, pianos optimise for this), why sounds without high frequency harmonics sound hollow (nylon strings), virtual pitch, acoustics of rooms, etc.

My impression is that most sounds have their effect on us due to psychological association with familiar sources of those sounds, and that melody and harmony are fundamentally more subjective - they depend on looser associations with motion, mood, the human voice, the changes and developments of sounds in our environment.

Harmony has always been a principle that refers to more than music, let alone chords. Here is a recent review: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240587262...

It also refers to the “first” scientific experiment: an empirical test of the generalization of a mathematical model of harmony — from ratios of string lengths to ratios of chime thickness (as recorded by Aristotle’s student Aristoxenus)

I don't find this convincing at all. The actual interesting attempt at scientific theory of harmony in this could be distilled to a couple of lines, yet the author rambles endlessly in ways that don't add to the piece at all. I already knew his additions from traditional music theory already, so I can't really see what the purpose of this is.

The slight of hand in standard Western European music theory is that stacking 5ths gives you Lydian and its tritone as the foundational seven pitch scale. Major/Ionian is the fourth mode of this scale.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that…except when it comes to science as a basis for an argument from authority.

Like all music, people like what they like.

Nice. But, is there a less “conversationally” written piece on the subject? In any event, this stuck with me: > Most music theory books are like medieval medical textbooks: they contain unjustified superstition, non-reasoning, and funny symbols glorified by Latin phrases

Check out the 3Blue1Brown video on this topic as well! It goes more in depth on music theory than any music-community one I've seen. (Which tend to be presented as "Here are the rules"; Grant, like this article, goes into the "why"; a step below. With great visuals, of course!

i tend to think of this stuff in terms of top down information theoretic approaches to composition and bottom up psychophysics of auditory perception. there is some cool work out there where physicists attempt to compute information content of western classical music and then there is all the fun stuff around the biophysics of the cochlea, nonlinear frequency discrimination and frequency selectivity of the ear.

A good overview on the topic.

My general issue with things like these is the simple fact, that as a lifelong musician I find the "less worse" harmonic combinations (to quote the abstract) often very boring. Aside from great composers like Bach et al I find the harmonic relationship of the notes played one of the least interesting aspects of the music, and expression, timbre, rhythm, phrasing much more important and noteworthy. A set of great musicians can play a single note for minutes and get it to sound amazing, this has always fascinated me more.

Music theory IMO has historically a too strong focus on the harmony (or the lack thereof) between notes. Not that it isn't important, but with some texts you get the feeling it wouldn't matter to the authors whether the piece was heard expressively played on a grand piano or cut together from equal leveled sine waves.

In my experience harmonies are greatly influenced by the relative levels of the notes and the overtone content within each note, to a degree you can make a supposed "harmonic" chord sound bad and a supposed disharmonic one sound good.

It's all about big booties

The cuties with cooties

Corporate duties and African rubies

It's the doobies and boobies

That see K's like Louie

Shake out the loogies

And K-shape the Louis

I stopped automatically judging things 10 years ago and all of a sudden could enjoy listening to everything. Music theory based on pleasure without accounting for this self-manipulation we're brought up to do isn't solid at all. And expectation making is another thing I stopped doing. I now make music that tends to defy expectations and tonality.

Here's a statistical mechanics paper that I don't quite understand yet, but seems more aligned with the physics of harmony.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aav8490

Harmony isn't just the chords made, though. It's about the progression between chords,too.

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