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 everyone has that experience. A new study published today showed that people in some communities in Papua New Guinea don’t associate chord progressions with moods in the same way that people do if they’re surrounded by Western music.
Music with major chord progressions sounds happy to a lot of people, but only if they’re familiar … [+]
To many people, minor chord progressions in music “sound sad” while songs in a major key “sound happy”. But for researchers who study how people respond to music, it has always been difficult to figure out whether this has to do with the way that your brain processes different sounds, or whether it’s a cultural association. That’s because the vast majority of studies that look at how people hear music have been carried out among cultures where everyone has been exposed to Western music styles their entire lives.
That broad term, “Western music” isn’t just about music made in the West, but includes anything that follows the core rules of Western music theory and its system of scales and chords: Classical music, jazz, pop (including subgenres like K-pop), rock, folk, punk, hip hop, many Hollywood film scores, a lot of on-hold music, video game music, ringtones and much more. Western music is ubiquitous in a large part of the world.
All of these styles (and more) use the same set of scales, chords, and general rules about the rhythms and patterns that make up chords and melodies. These rules say for example that combinations of notes that produce a certain type of resonance are called major chords, while others are minor chords.
People who have been regularly exposed to this type of music over the years have become familiar with those rules, even without being able to describe them in music theory terms. To many ears accustomed to Western music, major chord progressions “sound happy” while minor chord progressions “sound sad”. But there doesn’t seem to be anything inherent to the chords themselves that would make them “happy” or “sad”. So researchers from universities in Germany and Australia decided to find out how people who have had very little exposure to Western music thought about these chords.
They visited a few remote communities in Papua New Guinea, where people were mostly exposed to their own traditional music styles and only rarely heard Western music. The researchers asked them to listen to a number of major and minor chord progressions and to indicate which of the sounds made them feel happier. In Sydney, Australia, several musicians and non-musicians were asked to do a similar task, with the same sets of music samples, but with the difference that their daily lives in Sydney were thoroughly steeped in Western music.
Unsurprisingly, the Sydney test subjects made the predicted associations between happy moods and major chords. Both musicians and non-musicians did this, so it wasn’t related to musical training. But among the Papua New Guinea communities the findings were a bit different. Two of these groups had been exposed to a small amount of Western music over the years, for example through music brought along by church missionaries in their Lutheran and Seventh Day Adventist communities. Members of these communities made some connections between mood and chord progressions, but not as strongly as the Sydney test group did. The third group, which had received minimal exposure to any Western music at all, did not really think there was a link between mood and the type of chords at all.
In their research paper published today in PLOS One, the researchers suggest that this means that “the emotive valence of major and minor is strongly associated with exposure to Western-influenced music and culture”. So if major chords make you happy, that may have more to do with how music is used in your culture than with the music itself.
