A Minor Bait with a Major Switch—Disembodied Chords and the “Social Construction” of Major and Minor

Preamble

I have written two articles on how we process and perceive music. The first is entitled Music and Evolution: Hearing Math, Seeing Sound, and other Unanswered Questions. It shows how our brains process sound by recognizing symmetry (consonance) in sound waves and how it supplies a "solution" to complex waveforms (dissonance) by projecting the closest symmetrical waveform as the resolution. This article led to many invitations to discuss the phenomenon on various podcasts. It also resulted in a related question—"Why do we perceive minor chords/keys as being 'sad and melancholic'?" I addressed that question in a follow-up article entitled The Plaintive Sigh of a Sonic Doppelgänger: Why are Minor Chords Perceived as "Sad?". It is a three-part article that begins with the history of the use of major and minor chords in Western music and builds a case suggesting that the reason lies in the hidden dissonance that exists when the minor third clashes with the ghostly major third that is not actually played, but is there in the ether nonetheless, conjured into existence because of its prominent position in the harmonic series of the root of the chord.

In that article, I implicitly assert that this capacity to hear the "math" as dictated by the harmonic series is universal—all humans have this peculiar ability to hear the hierarchy of pitches as found in the harmonic series and automatically perform the predictive calculations that give music its peculiar ability to create a narrative in sound. As expected, some people pushed back on this assertion—they claimed that ethnomusicologists have proven that the Western harmonic system is a social construct. I have heard similar claims many times before, but I never looked closely at ethnomusicologists' research.

I decided to engage with ethnomusicological scholarship to see firsthand the arguments for the social construction of music perception. What I found was both fascinating and revealing. This article will discuss one such example of ethnomusicological scholarship and the surprising findings and claims it contains.

---

The paper I will discuss is entitled Sweetness is in the ear of the beholder: Chord preference across United Kingdom and Pakistani listeners, a human-subjects study by Imre Lahdelma, George Athanasopoulos, and Tuomas Eerola. Their methodology is common in ethnomusicology:

1. Find an isolated community that has not had much, if any, contact with Western music;
2. Play them selected chords and intervals and ask them to rate their perception of those chords and intervals using broad categories like "positive/negative," "happy/sad," "consonant/dissonant," etc.
3. Play the same chords/intervals to Western listeners and record their perceptions;
4. Compare the two responses and draw conclusions.

This is precisely what was done in this paper—they performed this study in Northern Pakistan, with "two remote Northwest Pakistani tribes," the Kalash and the Khow, who they deemed had "minimal exposure to Western music," and with Westerners described as "UK listeners" (Lahdelma et al. 74).

Their hypotheses state that they expected Westerners would "perceive the major triad as positive and the minor triad as negative, but that is unlikely to be the case for Northwest Pakistanis: previous research implies that the affective distinction of major/minor is a learned convention in the West..." Their social constructivist viewpoint is thus explicitly stated, backed up by "previous research" (Lahdelma et al. 75) that supports their claims.

They played both groups a series of chords and those same chords as single-note arpeggios. There were three chords and a "chromatic cluster." The three chords played were a major, a minor, and an augmented triad. The chromatic cluster was a four-note chromatic scale contained in a minor third, [0123]. To remove any cultural connotations that might bias the results, they played the chords for Westerners using an electronically generated acoustic piano sound, and for the Pakistanis using an electronically generated sitar sound. They played the four chords and their arpeggios in random order—the entire exercise took about 15 minutes.

The augmented triad and the chromatic cluster probed, more or less, the subjects' responses to increased dissonance, while the major and minor triads tested their emotional reaction to the two chords. In each case, they asked the participants to rate the sounds according to their perceived degree of "pleasantness":

...in both Khow and Kalash languages, the term valence is untranslatable, so the word pleasantness was used as a synonym...valence was assessed via the pleasantness of the stimulus (how pleasant or unpleasant it is...) ...they heard all stimuli in a randomized order and proceeded to rate them with reference to valence... (Lahdelma et al. 77)

This study removes what it calls "covarying cues," which are identified as "tempo, timbre, and note density" (Lahdelma et al. 73). The most important element, i.e., tonality, is not even mentioned. They do not establish a mode or key center—they play the chords and their arpeggios, removed from any relationship to a key or tonal center, or any other covarying cues, as they state explicitly:

...the aim of this paper is to investigate how single isolated chords (vertical harmony) are perceived as opposed to looking at background harmonizations in longer musical excerpts (horizontal harmony) across these two non-Western tribes and UK listeners. (Lahdelma et al. 74)

Their study does show how "single isolated chords are perceived" without any other musical elements present. The different reactions to the major-minor chords from the Westerners and the Pakistanis are then characterized as evidence for that reaction being a "cultural convention" as opposed to a universal characteristic of our aural faculties:

The finding that the Western affective distinction of major-positive minor-negative is reversed for Northwest Pakistani listeners is striking; however, it is in line with our original hypothesis according to which this affective contrast is indeed a cultural convention and influenced by familiarity as per the mere exposure effect, which postulates that familiarity yields positive valence. (Lahdelma et al. 79) The findings of the current study empirically demonstrate that the Western affective mode distinction of major-positive minor-negative may not be across-cultural universal and is, in fact, reversed for Northwest Pakistani owing to an opposing distribution of major versus minor in their musical culture when compared with the West. (Lahdelma et al. 81)

To state that "Western affective distinction of major-positive minor-negative is reversed for Northwest Pakistani listeners" based on playing them a minor and major chord without any other clues is an extremely bold claim. Playing a chord and its arpeggio without establishing a key or a mode, stripped of all other musical elements, and then claiming that the differences between the groups' reactions are evidence that the emotional associations attached to major and minor are social constructs is an astonishing leap. Furthermore, what they are measuring is supposedly "pleasantness," and it is entirely unclear how pleasantness maps out onto a "positive/negative" grid. We associate "positive/negative" more with "happy/sad," which seems to be the intent behind the conflation of these different terms.

In addition to these issues, the title of the study makes another astounding leap—it is entitled "Sweetness is in the ear of the beholder," an obvious play on "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." The implication of the latter metaphor is that beauty is entirely subjective; there are no aesthetic standards of what is "beautiful." The problem is that we do not find "sweetness" or "sweet" mentioned anywhere in this paper—where is "sweetness" coming from? To this point, we have gone from a non-translatable term ("valence") to "pleasantness," which then becomes "major-positive minor-negative." All of which somehow morph, without explanation, to become "sweetness." We then find "Sweetness" featured prominently as the first word in the article's title, making the bold claim that "sweetness" (beauty? pleasantness?) in music is merely a social construct.

Let us now look at the interval of a minor third, which defines the minor chord. By itself, the minor third cannot create the impression of a minor key. Here is the children's rhyme "Ring around the Rosy," which features a minor third repeated many times in the first seven measures. Without the key of E minor being properly established, the listener does not hear this as being in E minor. We hear C major from the first measure, but we do not actually hear C, the tonic, until the end of the rhyme. Why don't we hear it as E minor?

The answer is that modes are tonally much weaker than the major scale. In order to establish E minor, we need its leading tone, D#, which is missing from the tune. Instead, we get mostly E-G-E and two As, which is a three-note fragment of the C major pentatonic scale. The relationships between these pitches lead our ear (brain) to conjure up C major, not E minor.¹ This occurs because our aural faculty calculates the relationships between their wavelengths, and supplies us with the nearest simple and symmetrical solution. ² We get this "solution" in the last note of the song, which is the C that we hear in our head, but which has not actually been played.

So, here we have Western listeners, listening to a minor third hammered home repeatedly, in a setting that has no harmony or instrumentation giving "covarying cues" that might bias the results, but we do not hear it as "unpleasant" or "sad." How could it be perceived as sad? A single minor chord or minor-third iteration simply cannot summon the minor-key affectation of major-positive/minor- negative referenced in this study. For that to happen, the key needs to be established, which is something they intentionally did not do.

The assumption in the major-positive/minor-negative argument is that Westerners hear minor keys as "sad." This is simply not true. Led Zeppelin's iconic classic rock tune, "Stairway to Heaven," is an example where the same minor key (A minor) is found in the first part of the tune (approx. 0:00-5:30) where the tempo is slower and the instrumentation leans on acoustic instruments. It is introspective and melancholic—characteristics from the "sad" spectrum. The second part begins with a slowly intensifying guitar solo that culminates in an aggressive and powerful closing section—a pointed declarative "warning" that is urgent and unrelenting. Thus, we have two entirely different postures, same minor key. The second part is not perceived as "sad," yet it is in the same key as the introspective, melancholic first part. This shows directly how important the "covarying cues" really are. There are so many other examples of this that could be cited, and also examples of major key music that is perceived as having minor key affectations. While the minor key excels at portraying sadness, introspection, and melancholy, it can clearly deliver a much wider array of emotions other than "sad," all of which Western listeners clearly enjoy. In short, implying that Westerners hear "minor keys" as "sad" and "major keys" as "happy" is not accurate.



The term "covarying cues" introduces language from another discipline—the concept of "covariation" is common in statistics and is used in biology, genetics, neuroscience, economics and other fields. It is not appropriate to remove "covarying cues" and then make claims about how the "music" is perceived—what they played for these people is not "music"; they played them disembodied chords and arpeggios with no tonal context whatsoever. Functionally, this strips the music of everything that makes it music, under the guise of "removing biases." This would be like handing someone a brake pad from a Mercedes-Benz and another from a Dodge Caravan, with all of the covarying elements like the seats, the engine, and everything else removed, and then asking: "Which car do you find more pleasant?"

Individual tastes and style-based preferences are also not considered. The authors do not entertain the possibility that different people within the same culture hear the same music in different ways.³ For example, a listener who likes Mozart but doesn't like Stravinsky will rate the latter as unpleasant, while the opposite is also true. The nearly 80 participants in the two groups almost certainly contributed a variety of responses in their assessments. Additionally, some styles of music use predominantly minor modes— for example, heavy metal music, industrial, darkwave, modal jazz, and many folk traditions from around the world lean heavily on minor modes. It would not be unusual for people who prefer these styles of music to also prefer the minor over the major.⁴ This preference, within a culture or across cultures, is simply an aesthetic choice that may reveal something about the listener's psychological disposition. The great German composer and polymath, Paul Hindemith, expounded at length on these questions in his treatise on music composition from 1952 entitled "A Composer's World: Horizons and Limitations":

...one given piece of music may cause remarkably diversified reactions with different listeners. As an illustration of this statement, I like to mention the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, which I have found leads some people into a pseudo feeling of profound melancholy, while another group takes it for a kind of scurrilous scherzo, and a third for a subdued pastorale. Each group is justified in judging as it does. The difference in interpretation stems from the difference in memory-images the listeners provide, and the unconscious selection is made on the basis of the sentimental value or the degree of importance each image has: the listener chooses the one which is dearest and closest to his mental disposition, or which represents a most common, most easily accessible feeling. (Hindemith 40-41)

Like Hindemith, the authors do acknowledge the idea that "familiarity" ["memory-images"] may play a role here, which is valid; however, as Hindemith theorizes, there are also deeply personal aesthetic proclivities that may play a significant role in what a listener finds "pleasant/unpleasant."

They further muddy the argument with several references to other studies focused directly on the "major-happy minor-sad" dichotomy, which is not what their study focuses on. They cite one study by Fritz et al. (2009) that found the opposite—members of the Cameroonian Mafa tribe "without exposure to Western music classified the majority of major pieces as happy, and most of the minor pieces as scared/fearful." Another one cited in the article is from a study of Chinese participants by Fang et al. (2017) that "found that Chinese listeners make the Western-style major-happy/minor-sad affective mode distinction, although this tendency was influenced by previous exposure to Western music." (Lahdelma et al. 73) Both of these studies, however, did not remove "covarying elements," so they were done with fully intact music qua music, not disembodied chords.

As described previously, they asked participants to rate "pleasantness," which in itself seems problematic as a qualitative measure, but that then jumps to "major-positive minor-negative," which then inexplicably becomes "sweetness." The issue is then further compounded by peppering the paper with references to the "major-happy minor-sad" affectation, which, by tacit implication and association, appears to me as an attempt to bolster the postmodernist argument that "major-happy minor-sad" is a social construct without actually saying it directly.

This is the classic "Motte and Bailey" strategy, coined by Nicholas Shackel in his devastating critique of postmodernism, The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology. Here is Shackel's description of the metaphor:

A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of land (the Bailey), which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier, such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible, and so neither is the Bailey. Rather, one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land. For my purposes the desirable but only lightly defensible territory of the Motte and Bailey castle, that is to say, the Bailey, represents a philosophical doctrine or position with similar properties: desirable to its proponent but only lightly defensible. The Motte is the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats when hard pressed. (Shackel 298)

A. Broad/Bold Claims (Baileys)

1. "Sweetness is in the ear of the beholder: chord preference across United Kingdom and Pakistani listeners" (Lahdelma et al. 72)
2. "The results suggest that the Western listener major-positive minor-negative affective distinction is opposite for Northwest Pakistani listeners..." (72)
3. " ...the current results imply that the Western major-positive minor-negative affective distinction could indeed be a cultural convention and its possible (and contentious) acoustic origins...might be overruled by familiarity through mere exposure." (79)
4. " ...this affective contrast is indeed a cultural convention and influenced by familiarity as per the mere exposure effect..." (79)
5. " ...the complete lack of preference for the consonance of the major triad among Northwest Pakistani listeners." (80)

B. Qualifiers/Limiting Conditions (Mottes)

1. " ...arguably because of the reversed prevalence of these chords in the two music cultures." (72)
2. "Our findings imply not only notable cultural variation but also commonalities in chord perception..." (72)
3. "The aversion to the harsh dissonance of the chromatic cluster is present cross-culturally but the preference for the consonance of the major triad varies between UK and Northwest Pakistani listeners, depending on cultural familiarity." (72)
4. "These findings imply that consonance perception may have a biological foundation, but it is evidently also notably shaped by culture." (73)
5. " ...influenced by familiarity as per the mere exposure effect, which postulates that familiarity yields positive valence." (79)

In Motte #4, they state that consonance perception "may have a biological foundation," and in Motte #3, culture is not mentioned as an explanation for the cross-cultural agreement. If it is not cultural and/or socially constructed, what else can it be but biology? If a chromatic cluster is heard as dissonant in both cultures, then the authors have found evidence that suggests our aural faculty is a shared universal that is grounded in our biology.⁵ Yet, for some reason, this is ignored, even though it is a finding directly supported by the acoustical properties of "roughness" and by the harmonic series in general.

Despite the issues raised in this paper, the study is still informative. ⁶ What it shows is that isolated chords and arpeggios, stripped of key, tempo, range, dynamics, and everything else included in the full musical tapestry, carry little affective weight on their own. Interestingly, they also cite other studies that show the opposite— when the music is fully intact, listeners from non-Western cultures respond similarly. This study supports those other findings from the opposite direction—it suggests that the major-minor distinction requires other musical elements to create the affectations major and minor are known to produce. This is not, however, the conclusion that the title and the discussion announce. The authors treat the difference in pleasantness ratings as evidence that the major-positive/minor-negative distinction is a learned convention, and they leave the one shared finding—the aversion to the chromatic cluster—as an unremarked commonality.

The experiment shows these listeners' perceptions when the music was removed. It does not show that "sweetness is in the ear of the beholder."

---

Postlude

In the footnotes of the preceding paper, I reference a test the researchers did not run that would have been a reasonable supplement to the cross-cultural finding that both groups found the chromatic cluster, a rather extreme dissonance, unpleasant. Would they then find an extreme consonance, i.e., an octave, pleasant?

Here is their chromatic cluster followed by an octave, played several times in succession. (Both the cluster and the octave have been randomly transposed each time to avoid tonicization of the octave.)



It would indeed be surprising if any listeners found the octave to be unpleasant, but if this is all socially constructed, would we not expect some culture to find the octave, with its simple 1:2 string length ratio, to be unpleasant? If the musical practices across cultures all tilt in the same direction and align with the harmonic series, which they appear to do, then it is not social construction, it is biology.

The music of the Kalash and Khow people, like the innumerable examples of folk music across the world, features, as the authors note, the use of major and minor modes, pentatonic and heptatonic scales, and drones. The use of these devices is found all over the world in different folk practices. Here are some examples from several different traditions, including the Kalash region.







They all use the same devices mentioned above—modes, pentatonic scales (or fragments thereof), and drones; but even with those commonalities, the music is quite different. What do all of the modes, pentatonic scales, and drones do? They establish a "key" center. What does that actually mean? It means that they use pitches that create mild dissonances whose "solution" is a pitch that is "heard" even when it is not played or has not been played, as we saw in our earlier example of "Ring around the Rosy." The fact that they all establish key centers this way tacitly acknowledges the hierarchy of pitches found in nature in the harmonic series.

This strongly suggests that this is a biological process and a universal human trait. It is not, however, just a human trait—one study, entitled "Chicks Like Consonant Music" (Chiandetti et al.), found that the young birds prefer consonance over dissonance, while another study, entitled "Preference for Consonant Music over Dissonant Music by an Infant Chimpanzee" (Sugimoto et al.), found the same thing in chimpanzees—remarkably, they are hearing the symmetry too.

The evidence for our biological recognition of the primacy of the harmonic series is thus simply overwhelming. Music from cultures around the world is inextricably bound to the harmonic series, and yet the resulting music is delightfully varied and unique—a moving testament to the human creativity that is another of our shared universals.

The case for our aural faculty as a biological universal is thus difficult to challenge. Questions about the cultural use of major and minor, or about differences in preference, are really questions about how each tradition has drawn on the same underlying capacities and resources. If we hear the chromatic cluster as dissonant, and the octave as consonant, then we have established that we do indeed hear the asymmetry and symmetry of the relationships between the sound waves and we process those mathematically—we experience the asymmetrical as unpleasant—(chaos?)—and the symmetrical as pleasant (order?).

Western music focused on exploiting elements like key areas, melodic and harmonic development, and long- term forms. In doing so, a body of work was created that has been recognized as deep and meaningful to people in cultures around the world. The converse is not true; it is very difficult for regional folk music to find its way into the heart and soul of people in other regions, although it has happened— look at how blues and its children (pop, rock, R&B, etc.) have captivated the entire world, but even then, rock and pop utilize a harmonic language derived largely from the Western classical and jazz traditions.

Our remarkable capacity to conjure a pitch without even hearing it drives music's ability to create a narrative in sound. Our aural faculty's ability to hear and predict that pitch makes it all possible, and we find it being utilized consistently in the music of different cultures. All of this music is the artistic and creative response of humans scattered across the planet and separated by millennia to the natural resources with which we have been provided, i.e., the harmonic series and our aural faculty. As a species, we have tacitly recognized the primacy of those natural resources, and we have capitalized on them to create bodies of work that have enriched our lives since time immemorial.

Notes

^[1] The G and E sounds in succession are the 3rd and 5th partials of C. These are low in the harmonic series of C and are therefore acoustically strong. The A appears a few times as well, which then gives us three notes from the C major pentatonic scale. The primary relationships are thus 1:3 (G), 1:5 (E), and 1:13 (A, somewhat flat). The result is that our ear calculates C as the tonic because it is the simplest solution to the relationships presented by the G, E, and A.
Conversely, if we do the same using E as the tonic, it becomes clear how much more complicated the relationship is: E and G are the first and 19th partials, and A is the 11th partial, which actually sounds closer to A♯ than to A. This presents the ear with 1:19 and 1:11 relationships to solve. Those partials are high in the series and are therefore much weaker than the lower partials as well. Conjuring C from 1:3, 1:5, and 1:13 is thus much easier than inferring E from 1:19 and 1:11.↩
^[2] See my article on Music and Evolution, link in the Preamble, for a detailed discussion of this phenomenon.↩
^[3] I have had personal experience with this phenomenon. As a jazz pianist, I was very influenced by the music of Bill Evans. I found his music to be deep, profound, and reflective—he delivered what I heard as erudite philosophical soliloquies in sound. When I talked about his music with other jazz musicians, I was always surprised when many of them characterized it as "depressing, sad, melancholic, defeated" and also that "it doesn't 'swing'"—same culture, same genre, entirely different perceptions of his music.↩
^[4] The reasons for this are difficult to answer, but I think it must be due to the unique psychology/personality/worldview of the listener—some music "speaks" to us because, in some way, the psychology/personality/worldview of the composer is embedded in the music, and when those align or elide, the listener responds positively to their own psychological scaffolding which the music incarnates in a self-revelatory process of discovery through a sonic narrative.↩
^[5] Should we not consider the converse here as well? If people from different cultures perceive strong dissonance as "unpleasant," do people across different cultures perceive strong consonance, i.e., octaves, as being "pleasant?" Are there any cultures that hear an octave as "unpleasant" or dissonant?↩
^[6] This appears to be a common practice in this discipline. The same pattern—a bold title (the Bailey) that is then hedged and qualified carefully (the Mottes) in the actual paper—appears in other cross-cultural work, for example, the paper by McDermott et al. (2016) entitled "Indifference to Dissonance in Native Amazonians Reveals Cultural Variation in Music Perception."↩

Bibliography

1. Chiandetti, Cinzia, and Giorgio Vallortigara. "Chicks Like Consonant Music." Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 10, 2011, pp. 1270—73.
2. Fang, Lele, et al. "Perception of Western Musical Modes: A Chinese Study." Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, 2017, article 1905.
3. Fritz, Thomas, et al. "Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music." Current Biology, vol. 19, no. 7, 2009, pp. 573—76.
4. Hindemith, Paul. A Composer's World: Horizons and Limitations. Harvard University Press, 1952. Internet Archive
5. Lahdelma, Imre, et al. "Sweetness Is in the Ear of the Beholder: Chord Preference across United Kingdom and Pakistani Listeners." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1502, no. 1, 2021, pp. 72—84.
6. McDermott, Josh H., et al. "Indifference to Dissonance in Native Amazonians Reveals Cultural Variation in Music Perception." Nature, vol. 535, 2016, pp. 547—50.
7. Shackel, Nicholas. "The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology." Metaphilosophy, vol. 36, no. 3, 2005, pp. 295—320.
8. Sugimoto, Tasuku, et al. "Preference for Consonant Music over Dissonant Music by an Infant Chimpanzee." Primates, vol. 51, no. 1, 2010, pp. 7—12.