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5.3.10 Emotions of Sadness: Are There 'Sad Keys' in Music?
Research strongly supports the “happy” vs “sad” distinction most people (both adults and children) associate with major vs minor modes. Mode and tempo are two of the most important musical variables with respect to emotion-elicitation. Both could easily be exploited by songwriters to great effect, but usually aren’t, because most songwriters have no idea how powerful they are. More on these variables in Chapters 7 and 9.
(Bob Dylan’s “Who Killed Davey Moore?” and Vaughn Monroe’s original recording of Stan Jones’ “Riders In The Sky,” aka “Ghost Riders In The Sky” are examples of songs that maximize the emotional power of fast tempo combined with the minor mode.)
It may be that the unsettled feeling people have when hearing a minor interval or chord arises from the fact that the intervals that make up minor chords and scales are derived from less simple frequency ratios than those for major chords and scales, which stand out prominently in the first overtones of the harmonic series (see Table 23) and enable easy identification of the origin of the sound as a single soundmaker. If you can’t be sure the source is a single soundmaker, you find it unsettling. Fear of the unknown.