Piano Guidance
Piano Guidance
Photo: PhotoMIX Company
This so-called “flatted third” is closer to the root note, and the distance from the major third is thought to create peripheral dissonance and a jarring discomfort in the listener's ear. And by making the note go a half-step down rather than up, it creates a “feeling down” directional emotion.
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Read More »T o find a song that matches our mood, in the 21st century, we need only type in how we are feeling or walk into a new room, and a streaming service’s algorithm will grab that data and intuit our needs with unsettling ease. But well before predictive computer models were let loose on music, German composer Christian Schubart was already on the case — albeit with manual handiwork and antebellum verbal flair. Schubart was a forefather of musical category creation: In his 1784 essay “A History of Key Characteristics in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries,” he balanced a study of the harpsichord with insights from literature and psychology to match all 24 major and minor musical keys to different auditory personalities, which streaming’s predictive models would later automate. “Melancholy womanliness” was Schubart’s preferred term in describing the D minor key, a key of particular fascination because it lent itself to music in which “the spleen and humors brood.” And its sibling key, D# minor, somehow evoked “feelings of the anxiety of the soul’s deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depression, of the gloomiest condition of the soul,” Schubart observed: “Every fear, every hesitation of the shuddering heart, breathes out of D# minor. If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key.” The post-Shubart twelve-tone equal temperament system divides the octave into 12 parts, so that distances between notes remain the same — which means that keys no longer sound so different from each other in a structural sense, and that it’s the chord structures within keys that define sounds. This should render Shubart’s argument moot. With equal temperament tuning, musicians can transpose songs between keys, and keys themselves are less important to the underlying personality structure of songs. Yet modern songs written in D and D# minor, by and large, still deal with misery. As Nigel Tufnel, the waggish musician protagonist of the 1984 mockumentary Spinal Tap, said when putting his sentimental “Lick My Love Pump” in D minor: “It’s the saddest of all keys. I don’t know why, but it makes people weep, instantly, when you play it!”
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Read More »As a case study, consider the D minor song “Nutshell” by Alice in Chains. Over three chords, Layne Staley tells of loneliness and despair: “We chase misprinted lies, we face the path of time, and yet I fight this battle all alone, with no one to cry, no place to call home.” “Nutshell” is often played with the guitar tuned down half a step (to E flat minor, the enharmonic equivalent to D# minor), so that the second down of each measure accentuates the D# sound; at the band’s well-regarded 1996 MTV Unplugged performance, the lead guitarist outlined the E-flat minor rhythm progression with notes from the D# minor scale, milking emotion out of the sound. The single makes an appearance on Rolling Stone‘s reader-chosen 10 saddest songs of all time — but it is the only one in the top 10 written in D minor. Keys and artists for the “10 Saddest Songs of all Time” collected by Rolling Stone readers in 2013 Data source: Rolling Stone Why would a key known for sadness only appear once on the list? Perhaps because, as mentioned, it’s simply more difficult to handle the non-standard tuning of D minor on guitar. Or perhaps it’s because D minor chord progressions have a tough time building suspense, unlike those of other minor keys — or like the irony-laden major-key composition of “Everybody Hurts.” Just as a story moves from rising action to climax to denouement, a chord progression follows a structure of suspense and resolution. The 1-4-5 progression, for instance, follows a predictable and calming resolution that makes it a favorite for pop artists. Think of the almost irresistible resolution you reach when humming “Twist and Shout.” Other keys have certain chords that contribute crucial suspense, like with the denouement of C7 rounding out the E minor key (listen to the buildup in “I’m “Only Sleeping”), or the triumphal release of the F major progression (Paul McCartney’s rapture in “Hey Jude”). By contrast, D minor’s chord progressions feel more uniform across the board. Another consideration is physical sound quality. Extremes of sound quality seem to strike in many D minor songs, where artists do one of two things. Either they go all in on the negativity (e.g. “Nutshell”), or they take pointed measures to enliven the D minor key, such as changing the timbre by altering guitar effects and tones, or adding a strong backbeat or a heavy lyrical count. Beyoncé’s D minor “Crazy in Love” was number One in the U.S. in 2003 and became a seminal song of the decade. It begins with a heavy marching band buildup as backup singers jump into a wordy beat. The repetitive chorus is accompanied by a funk-style dance rhythm, and further accentuated in its poppy music video. All of this is underlined by lyrics describing an obsessive love (perhaps one so crazy that it harkens back to the “deepest distress” Schubart had in mind).
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Read More »Measures of valence across keys of all Taylor Swift tracks listed on Spotify. Musicologists classify songs by positivity (à la Schubart’s category creation), and then data scientists train machine-learning algorithms to extend such classifications to a larger, previously unseen, more diverse, group of songs. Source: Spotify API The trend persists in classic rock, where only 2 percent of songs in a randomly sampled “Classic Rock” playlist on Spotify were written in D or D# minor. Additionally, positivity spreads well across keys — perhaps because these keys are frequented by artists in their song writing. Songs in D minor seem more likely to hit on one end of the emotive spectrum: either very positive or very sad. In the first extreme, artists use the D minor melancholies to their advantage (“She’s So Heavy,” “The Prophet’s Song,” “In the Air Tonight”). In the other extreme, the artists pumps up extra feels like backbeats and vocals to trend on the side of positive polarity (“Can’t Stand Losing You,” “Love Is a Battlefield”). Schubart talked of a “brooding love.” Fittingly, many of these overly positive songs in D minor read like animated love songs on the surface, until you take a deeper look at the lyrics. These songs tend to put on a happy face in the face of brooding despair, and the manic mutability of D minor is overshadowed by an outwardly upbeat pop jam.
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