Why is major "happy?"
Why Music: Practice & Theory Stack Exchange recommends it
Music Stack Exchange users link it when discussing the concept of brightness in chords, modes and keys, both as an authoritative explanation and as the source of questions about it.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2017 to 2019.
What it is
Adam Neely explains why major chords and keys sound 'happy' and minor ones 'sad' using the idea of brightness, meaning how the relative sizes of intervals shape our perception of a sound. The video is a short, demonstration-heavy music theory explainer from his YouTube channel.
What people said
Recommends ChipJust · 2017-04 · Music: Practice & Theory Stack Exchange · on “So... 84 modal scales vs actual practice and usage”
The Framework The framework for music is math, especially the harmonic series [LINK] . For rhythm, harmony and melody it is the mathematical relationship that creates the patterns that our brains look for when searching for meaning. Harmonic Polyrhythms Explained! by Adam Neely [LINK] does a great job of explaining and illustrating this in a way you can hear. The meaning that our brains associate with these patterns is not just about math, however; rather we build up associations between certain math patterns and emotional or cognitive meaning. How much the association between specific patterns and meanings is objective or subjective is debated [LINK] , but most will agree that there is an a
Recommends user45266 · 2019-03 · Music: Practice & Theory Stack Exchange · on “What is brightness?”
Other answers have missed that brightness is completely objective. (But it usually doesn't need to be precisely measured, so we speak of it rather imprecisely) Ultimately, in every sense of the word, "brightness" is higher frequency. A sound that is brighter than another is higher in frequency in some way, whether the description is literally of a higher fundamental frequency, or whether the timbre of the sound is more concentrated in upper harmonics, or the chord has one note raised, or whatever. Adam Neely has a great video on this subject, in which he notes brightness of chord qualities. He argues that an augmented chord is objectively brighter than a major chord, and from that he makes t
Cites user2679290 · 2019-09 · Music: Practice & Theory Stack Exchange · on “Some major keys are brighter than others?”
In this video, in 3:00 The author suggests some scales in the circle of fifth are brighter than others. Despite having the same intervals. In the demonstration there, it does sounds brighter. So, In what sense is it true for scales? Why did the played chord progression become increasingly brighter?