Why are some musical chords so inherently pleasing while others sound so obviously dissonant? A study of a group of people with the genetic condition amusia, which causes sufferers to incorrectly ...

An altered chord is one that contains notes from outside its scale of origin – chords such as b9 or #5 are frequently seen examples of this. What the example chords are designed to demonstrate is how ...

Many people dislike the clashing dissonances of modernist composers such as Arnold Schoenberg. But what’s our problem with dissonance? It’s long been thought that dissonant musical chords contain ...

Johnny Cash's Hurt hits way different in A Major, as much so as Ring of Fire in G Minor. The dissonance in tone between the chords is, ahem, a minor one: simply the third note lowered to a flat. But ...

There’s no such thing as a nasty-sounding chord: it all depends on what you’re used to. That’s the suggestion from a study of more than 160 people from the US and Bolivia, which found that people may ...

Guitar skills: With dissonant chords and aggressive rhythm playing, the harder side of blues-rock overlaps into funk. The ‘7#9’ shape (shown here in F#) below is known as the Hendrix chord thanks to ...

What sort of music we like listening to does not depend on how our brain is wired, but on cultural factors, scientists have found. Exposure to western music could potentially lead us to develop a ...

The notes used in Western music—or, more accurately, the relationships between the notes used in Western music—have a strange power. Bobby McFerrin demonstrated this dramatically by showing that an ...