A song can sound totally different when you play it in a minor key on a xylophone or harpsichord. What kind of effect will increasing or decreasing the tempo have on your song? Play around with it and see what gives you the effect you’re after. Use a minor key (see above and be sure to reference the related links for more in-depth info and cheat sheets).
Build-Your-Own Creepy TuneĪrmed with some minor key theory and emboldened by the spirit of Halloween, you are now ready to take on the sacred task of writing your own frightening magnum opus. To bring an even spookier feel to an A minor song, use the following chord progression: i – ii dim – V – i.įor more exercises in creating your own minor chord progressions, head over to this guide to discovering more minor chord progressions. To turn a C major tune into a song evoking a sad, melancholy, or spooky feeling, sub in the 1-4-5 chords from C major with the 1-4-5 chords from A minor.Ģ. Now that we’re familiar with the relationship between major and minor, let’s use the example of cousins C major and A minor to see how we can go from a cheery major to a foreboding minor.ġ. And that, boys and ghouls, is knowledge, and knowledge found here is musical power. Three half-steps down from C is A, so A is the relative minor of C major. If you want to use a major key to find the relative minor key, just find the name of the major key and move three half-steps backwards (or down). Because they share something in common – musical DNA, so to speak – the minor is a relative to the major, hence the name relative minor. Now would be a good time to point out that major keys share the same key signature with their relative minor keys – in this example, A minor shares the same key signature of having zero sharps or flats with C major. You’d end up playing (starting from A, remember): A-B-C-E-D-F-G-A. It goes a little something like this:įor example, if you wanted to turn a regular A major scale into a something a bit more, shall we say, haunting, simply follow the pattern of whole-half-whole-whole-half-whole-whole up the scale and back. The pattern of a minor scale takes the following steps up from the starting note (also known as the base note or tonic note). Essentially, we know if a song uses a minor key by seeing if it’s using a minor scale. So how can you begin to create your own creepiness and unease? To begin with, we must understand what constitutes a minor key. This cover by Tyler Ward & KHS takes a sad song and makes it sadder: It doesn’t matter whether you subscribe to the nature or the nurture theory: when a happy song takes on a minor key, the sound summons a bit of the sinister. Such nonlinear sounds – a dissonant chord, a child’s cry, a baby animal’s scream – trigger a biologically-ingrained response by making us think our young are threatened, according to Blumstein’s study, sponsored by the University of California at Los Angeles and published in the journal Biology Letters. Yet another study suggests that there is a connection between horror music and the screeches of young frightened animals.
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Her findings support the theory that human vocal expressions and music share an acoustic code for communicating sadness. The musical interval referred to as the minor third is generally thought to convey sadness, and that minor third also occurs in the pitch contour of speech conveying sadness. Meagan Curtis of Tufts University’s Music Cognition Lab led a study whose results revealed that the relationship between pitches serves as an important cue for conveying emotion in music. However, new evidence has emerged, indicating that we may be wired to listen for sadness in the minor key after all. She writes, “ Constantly touching base with our musical memory back catalogue helps to generate expectations of what might come next in a tune, which is an important source of enjoyment in musical listening.” Vicky Williamson, lecturer in Music Psychology at Goldsmiths University, we are culturally conditioned to perceive major key music as happy and minor key music as… not. Simply put, the minor key is often synonymous with:īut why? The Science Behind the Creep FactorĪccording to Dr.
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If you want to know about how to summon the spirit of All Hallow’s Eve in your own music, or just how to make some poppy bubblegum song turn dreary), then read on. We could spend ages talking about the theory behind mode, minor key songs that are actually joyful-sounding, and the debate on whether or not it’s a biological response or solely the result of how Western musical culture dictates how our ear perceives the minor key… but it’s already Halloween, and you don’t have much time (cue door slamming and tick-tocking of clock).
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