Reddit reviews How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond

Hi, I was also completely new to understanding music recently, and these video lectures from Yale (starts from the ground up, goes into great detail), and this book, How Music Works (fun, and informative read about the fundamentals of music), have been the most helpful in my research. There is also this great free course on the Introduction to Music Theory from edX/Berklee. Good luck!

Why? /u/MSc_in_Sadistics reply was far more factual, but IMHO far less accessible to someone without a background in music & math.

It's a complicated subject & it's not really possible to boil it down to a couple paragraphs and yet still convey all the crazy history & nuance.

If you don't like my answer, try this book for a more accurate intro to music theory.

How Music Works by John Powell. It is a good breakdown of many elements of music and how we hear sounds and read notation. Other than the, look on Amazon for a used music theory textbook and go from there.


I used this on in college classes.

Another decent theory book.

Download a piano app, we're going all in.

While it's downloading, think of all the songs you heard or sang as a child.

Happy Birthday or Mary Had a Little Lamb are great examples (and you should look up how to play them when we're done here!)

These songs are in a "major" key, which basically is what we associate with happy in music.

To understand, check out this diagram I made.
http://imgur.com/3CUdEsu

Play the "major" notes, all white keys, in order. Notice the note labeled B next to the top note, C? This is what gives major keys the sound we love so much: the leading tone. Between most notes, you will see a black piano key. But between E and F, along with B and C, we have nothing.

Alone, no two piano keys next to each other have this effect, but because we started on C, the B is leading us into C again.

So basically, major keys make us feel happy and complete.


But within a major key, there is a lot more going on. For example, there are major and minor "chords"

>Minor chords in a major key? What's going on?

Yes that's right! In fact, within the white keys is another key signature which we call "A minor." Test it out now and play it through!

You'll notice, unlike in C major, we do not have a leading tone in this sequence of notes (which we call a scale).
You may also notice that these are technically the same notes as before, don't get too hung up on this!

What you need to know is that in these two scales there is one big difference, the leading tone. In minor keys we don't experience the completeness that major keys have to offer, so they sound a lot more ambiguous and we don't know where they're going.

Both key signatures though, use both types of chords (in fact, there are many other types of chords). If you want to play around with this, play alternating notes together (C-E-G, D-F-A, etc) and you'll notice that some sound very different than others. But they're all white keys!

In short, the difference between A minor and C major is where we start. In C major, we want B to move into C. But there's nothing inherently happy about C or sad about A, it's just where we start, and what notes are played accompanying these notes.

Part of our association with these sets of notes is because of sound-waves and how our ears interpret them, and part of it is because we are raised listening to a lot of major sounding music.

We listen to this music because its a lot easier to sing, not because it's inherently happy. So it's kinda confusing.

I'm sorry if this didn't make sense, I spent a lot of time on it but I have to acknowledge that I'm only just getting into music education and still have a lot to learn.
I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Please check out these resources. Do not shy away from music theory, it will only make you enjoy listening to music more!

Videos by Adam Neely

Why is major "happy"?

Which key is the saddest?

Books:

How music works

The Everything Music Theory Book


edit: formatting