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You don’t have to be a music specialist to recognize “the minor mode,” which is most likely associated with its ability to evoke grief. His brilliant brother, “The major key,” on the other hand, frequently enters heralding delight. This is true… to a degree, and always in the context of Western music.

To begin with, the apparent bipolarity of Major-Minor music is rather new. Even within the Western tradition, seven separate modes have been utilized since the time of Ancient Greece—and possibly even earlier: there are suggestions that Sumerian music used a similar system based on seven-note scales.

Each of these modes has a long history of being associated with specific functions and emotions. Pentatonic scales, octatonic scales, scales with microtones, and scales that divide the sound range into more or less equal units can all be found as we move away from Europe and its history (such as the Western chromatic scale, from 12 semitones).

The notes of a scale can be thought of as intentionally restricting the sounds that can be used to create music. In a similar vein, the rhythm can be viewed as a restriction on the number of possible times. Both limitations may be required simplifications in order to be able to sing in unison with other people and recall songs.

Although the use of scales may be owing to adaptive concerns, determining their emotional connotation is more difficult. However, it appears that scales are one of the factors humans utilize to understand music without even realizing it. Its tone establishes the template for each song, allowing us to form expectations. Only a few bars of music are needed to gain a sense of what sounds will be heard throughout the piece, in what order, and how often.

These expectations may or may not be met, which keeps us listening and engaged in a never-ending stream of surprises, suspicions, and wishes fulfilled.

However, determining whether sound collections are “happy” or “sad” is dependent on a number of elements, some of which are entirely cultural. The minor scale, for example, is associated with numerous forms of emotions in Bulgarian folk tradition, despite its apparent melancholy. The sounds of a mode or scale give it its own distinct sonority.

Musical chords are possibly the tiniest musical components capable of retaining emotional information. However, according to various research, there has been controversy about how early these emotional connotations are processed.

A study carried out on several volunteers who had no musical training sought to observe if the immediate reactions of facial gestures agreed with different chords, then the emotions would belong to the same emotional category. The results were based on a monitoring of neural activity whose observations were measured from reactions ranging from happy, sad and neutral when hearing major and minor chords.

This shows that major and minor chords have profound emotional connections rather than surface ones, implying that minor triads have negative emotional implications and major triads have good emotional connotations.