The mathematical rules for creating musical harmony may be more malleable than thought. Western music theory traditionally holds that chords sound most pleasant when they contain notes separated by ...

Almost every song you hear has a chord progression. This forms the harmonic content of the song, and is often what gives a song its emotional impact. But what about the melody? The notes of the melody ...

AT the Society of Arts yesterday, Sir F. Abel, C.B., F.R.S., Chairman of the Council, in the chair, Mr. Alexander J. Ellis, F.R.S., read a paper on “The Musical ...

If viewed within the bewildering context of the history of western music, the triad is one of the absolute bedrocks of all ...

Naming seven colors to correspond to seven notes is “a kind of very strange and interesting thing for him to have done,” says Peter Pesic, physicist, pianist, and author of the 2014 book Music and the ...

Play two notes that are three steps away on a musical scale, like C and the F-sharp above it, and you have what’s called the Devil’s Interval. It has long been used to symbolize tension, sinister ...

The ability to identify a note on the musical scale without a single reference point - known as absolute or perfect pitch - is a rarity even among musicians, but new studies with infants suggest that ...

A crucial link between mathematics and music is nicely illustrated by the Tonnetz, a geometric diagram representing the harmonic relationships between the notes of the musical scale. An early version ...