The emotional connotations of major versus minor tonality: One or more origins?

Abstract

The association between major/minor tonality and positive/negative emotional valence is psychologically robust, but without a single accepted explanation. I compare six partially related theories. Dissonance: On average, passages in minor keys are more dissonant because, on average, the minor triad is more dissonant (rougher, less harmonic) or because tonal structure is more complex. Alterity and markedness: Major triads and scales are more common than minor, and positive valence is more common than negative. Major and positive valence are the norm; minor and negative are marked Others. Uncertainty: The minor triad has a more ambiguous (less salient) root than the major, and the minor scale has more variable form and a more ambiguous (less stable) tonic; uncertainty is associated with anger, sadness, distress, and grief. Speech: By comparison to major triads and scales, minor contain pitch(es) that are lower than expected – just as sad speech is lower than expected. Salience: In diatonic chord progressions, flattened diatonic scale degrees are more salient than sharpened because their harmonics better match the prevailing scale. Scale degrees 3 and 6 are more likely to destabilize tonality in minor than major tonalities. Familiarity: Arbitrary emotional differences between major and minor were reinforced in a historical process of cultural differentiation. For each theory, there are credible arguments and evidence for and against. All theories are broadly consistent with Terhardt’s pattern-recognition model of pitch perception (non-musical perceptual familiarity with the harmonic series), Schenker’s concept of prolongation (specifically, tonal voice leading as a prolongation of the tonic triad), evolutionary explanations of the emotional connotations of alterity, and a psychohistory of tonality in which melody, polyphony, leading tones, and the major–minor system emerged at different times, explicable by different psychological principles.