Which is the saddest of all keys

And so it goes. Last thing: you should be skeptical of any study purporting to prove anything quantitatively objective about emotion in music, because the art form is highly subjective and context-dependent. Pingback: What is the Saddest Key in the World? MusicMonday « Adafruit Industries — Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! And another one. This drawing by Roger Penrose gives you the idea: I have been getting responses to this post that say, okay, but absolute pitch height affects timbre, and that affects how the music makes you feel.

Comments are closed. Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website. The Nirvanas of the world instead build depressive sounds through melody and song structure.

Why would a key known for sadness only appear once on the list? The progression , for instance, follows a predictable and calming resolution that makes it a favorite for pop artists. Another consideration is physical sound quality.

Extremes of sound quality seem to strike in many D minor songs, where artists do one of two things. Either they go all in on the negativity e. It begins with a heavy marching band buildup as backup singers jump into a wordy beat. The repetitive chorus is accompanied by a funk-style dance rhythm, and further accentuated in its poppy music video.

Measures of valence positivity across keys of all Beyonce tracks listed on Spotify. Valence, an algorithmically generated variable, rates the musical positiveness conveyed by a track on scale of 0 to 1. Tracks with high valence sound more positive happy, cheerful, euphoric , and tracks with low valence sound more negative sad, depressed, angry.

When the song is played in stripped-down acoustic chords , however, D minor takes center stage. Taylor Swift is similar. Among the songs she has released, across 23 albums, only one song is in D minor. Measures of valence across keys of all Taylor Swift tracks listed on Spotify. Additionally, positivity spreads well across keys — perhaps because these keys are frequented by artists in their song writing.

Songs in D minor seem more likely to hit on one end of the emotive spectrum: either very positive or very sad. These songs tend to put on a happy face in the face of brooding despair, and the manic mutability of D minor is overshadowed by an outwardly upbeat pop jam. The exploration of the unique characterisics of musical keys has gone on for centuries. In the late 18th and early 19th century, it was the subject of much popular analysis and debate.

In Germany, Christian Schubart wrote many books on music. In his Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst of , he shares his descriptions of each major and minor key. There are also many famous songs in D minor.

Some which are truly blue, while others have a poignant tone, but are not sorrowful. Though he fought against the sickness with all his power so as to realize the Requiem, he lost the battle and died before it was complete.

This valiant attempt on behalf of his music augments its tone of deepest, darkest despair. Although ending forever unresolved by the composer, it remains one of the most beautiful and timeless vessels of the essential D minor sorrow.

His 9 th Symphony, though containing moments of great triumph and joy , does sing forever with the tragic dimensions of D minor. He composed it between and , a time of great decline in his health: He was completely deaf while writing this music.