Daniel Levitin, in his popular bestseller entitled This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession from 2006, characterizes the perception of the minor chord, which lowers the third of a ...

A study suggests that minor and major seventh chords are the happiest sounds in music, but today’s songwriters are ditching them in favour of simple minor chords. But why does this matter? We all love ...

Much of our music, from classical to contemporary, is written in either a major or minor key (with exceptions, such as jazz, which uses neither). For most, a major key conjures up feelings of ...

Do you associate minor chords with sad music and major chords with happy music? If you do, you probably grew up surrounded by music that follows the basic rules of Western music theory. But not ...

If you work with other musicians, you may well have been confronted by the scenario where you need to quickly establish the ...

Once you know how to construct major and minor scales on the piano, you can take the notes within them and start stacking them up together to play chords. While it’s possible to form simple two-note ...

Guitar lessons: You’d be forgiven for thinking that you’d use the minor scale to construct minor 7th chords, but that’s not quite how it works. All scales and chords are compared to the major scale, ...

Harmonic minor keys are used when writing chords. There is another version of the minor key known as the melodic minor. This is used when writing a melody. Each key signature has two possible keys.