Do Keys Feel Different?

1:04 What's good, everybody?So I just dropped a new post on my sub-stack, LoveMusicMore.substack.com, and whenever Ido that, I get a bunch of texts and emails, and it's super fun, and it tends to give meideas for what to talk about on the podcast, and one of my friends hit me a question thatI was like, that is heavy enough for us to unpack for a solid 12 minutes or so.

1:29 The question is, what's more important, a major chord, just in general, or like a C majorversus a G major, as in, is there a different emotion or impact between C versus G, forexample, or are all major chords the same?

1:51 So this is an interesting, I think, exercise in something that's even deeper of the questionof relational versus absolute.As in, is it the context that matters, or is it the key itself that matters?Are the notes the things that are important, or are the relationships between the noteswhat are more important?

2:12 And this is Your Brain on Music, a great book focuses on a lot of that very topic.And from what I remember, vaguely, I'm not a neuroscientist, is that, yes, humans areable to assign very easily in the same way that you can transpose songs, move them fromone key to the next, like, happy birthday is always happy birthday, no matter how vaguely

2:39 pitch-centered it is, or if people are saying it way too high or way too low, it's neverin between.You still know it's happy birthday, right?So I agree with that on the one hand, is that the relationship between the notes indicatesthe shape of the melody and indicates like what the tune is, the tune exists within therelationships.I think that's true.

3:02 But I also think that there is something to be said about the individual frequencies,just because we abstract them away, and we call them a C, or we call them an A.

3:14 I'mgoing to choose A because I actually know what those frequencies are, A in our commonmodern tuning sense is 440 hertz, you know, 440 hertz, and every single instrument agrees on that, but if I play the same song, let's smoke on the water, you know, play that on

3:36 the A, or you can play it on the E, same notes, different feeling, not that different, butdifferent feeling, and it's not just necessarily that it's higher or lower, I am a proponentthat every key has its own kind of flavor, but it's not just because it's like differentor higher or lower, it's because these are frequencies that we're dealing with, notabstractions.

4:06 The abstractions matter, the abstractions allow us to think like, okay, it's a G chord,but also a B chord, Bb chord.They both have that central nature of majorness, because of this, and relationally they'rekind of weird together, but if I play it, you get the point.

4:35 There are ways that notes follow each other and change the value of everything that camebefore and everything that came after, but then in a vacuum, on their own, they arejust these frequencies.And while yes, we do assign things like root third and fifth makes a major chord, and

4:58 we can shift them around, called inversions, as in like the order of those three notes,but when we play a chord, it's just those three notes, some of them are doubled, someof them are tripled, but it's just three notes, just reinforced.All those decisions, though, really matter.Just in the same way that even in that one chord, the inversions change the feeling

5:20 very deeply, so I'm not going to add any notes, verses, verses, verses.What I'm trying to say, though, is the order of the notes matter, because the frequenciesmatter.

5:45 The frequencies interact with each other in very interesting ways as chords, and whileyou can shift everything up or down, you are not just changing the location of the shape.You're changing the fundamental frequencies and the ways that they all interact witheach other, and the ways that they interact with the instruments themselves.

6:08 So on this podcast, we've talked a lot about tamber, which is the experience of what makesa violin sound like a violin or a guitar sound like a guitar, or my voice on differentthan your voice.It's tamber.And tamber is the series of additional frequencies that are highlighted, but my voice has a differenttamber if I'm talking in different places and lower and lower and lower, because it

6:28 is resonating in my chest or in my head or in my mask in different ways, depending onwhere I'm having to hit those frequencies.And so as I'm shifting, I'm not just shifting the relationship.I'm also shifting all of the harmonics, all of the frequencies, all of the relationships,and the relationship between that frequency and my very self.

6:52 Same thing with the violin or a guitar or a cello or whatever, is as you move up anddown, you're not just moving up and down, you're changing everything.A cello sounds very, very different high up than it does way down low.And even just those slight changes of ways that you're able to fret the notes, so sayfor example, you're playing a song that has an E, but you want to shift down to, you

7:18 know, like a C sharp, so you would have to go, but the equivalent without detuning, nowif I was playing a song that was, I had to go down to the C sharp, I don't have lowernotes on the guitar, so I have to go up in order to go down, so, same note, right, octave,very different, right?

7:47 There are ways that I can mitigate that and make it so that there's less octave jumping,but fundamentally there are limits on every instrument as to how far lower high you cango, and then you have to, when you start transposing, you have to shift drastically up ordown the octave.All of those things matter, and so that's why I think, like a G chord in and of itselfis a G chord and has its own sort of colors.

8:15 You can transpose that song where you're going to transpose the colors too.And yes, you might maintain that sense of the song, the songness, the relational networkthat is a melody, but you do change the emotion, and there's a historical precedence here.So part of why I think we might feel this way is that we have such a mathematical way

8:39 of thinking, and we're able to distill everything into digital technology and actually see allof the frequencies, and also we have perfect relationality in terms of equal temperamentand being able to move keys around, we've figured out that math, and so I think it tookaway some of the magic of key signatures.That said though, they're still in there.

9:04 I firmly believe this, and it might be because of everything that has come before us inthat C major is the most used scale, it's the easiest to play, it is the most associatedwith like starting out and child like wonder, so C major still feels that way to me.You can take the exact same song from C major and move it down a whole step to B flat,and it has a more adult edge to it.Why?It shouldn't.

9:35 This might be cultural.There could be something in the notes though too.So Mahler's Ninth Symphony, it's one of my favorite examples.He does it in D major, and it is a meditation on death.I always feel like D major has this weird kind of churchy sense to it, I don't know why,

9:56 but that was like a big moment because a lot of people find D major to be very radiantor bright, and he was writing that as his farewell to life.He was dying seriously ill, lost his child, that long conscious farewell, but he chose D majoras a unique splash, as a stronger farewell.

10:29 There's something beautiful about the personification of these keys, because it points towardssomething that goes beyond relationality.It's like, we've talked about Bach, but he chose different keys to reflect differentsenses.So like G major, his G major suite, a cello suite, is quoted as innocent in child, like D minor

10:57 suite, hurt and sorrowful, like a teenage poet, C minor suite, melancholy aloof and threatening.And people calling E flat major is heroic, F minor, as the funeral and infernal key.I like that stuff, like that's fun, right?I want a little bit more of that magic back in music in my life, even if I recognizethat a lot of it is cultural, a lot of it is experience.

11:25 There is still something to be said that each of these notes are frequencies, they arenot notes.The notes are abstractions, they are layers on top of something that exists naturally.And anytime you have abstractions, you can run the risk of thinking that the abstractionsis the thing unto itself.And that's why I really like talking about things like equal temperament, or the 12 notes

11:50 that we arbitrarily, somewhat arbitrarily chose, when you round them down, they startto get a little arbitrary.But Pythagorean way, it feels a little less arbitrary.But it's easy to get caught up in ratio in the same way like talking about Pythagoras,like all of his stuff is how beautiful of a ratio can we have.And certainly, like, humans can perceive this.

12:12 It's part of how we perceive beauties, like ratios in beautiful architecture, ratios inbeautiful music.But that's an us thing.The frequencies exist with or without us.We just call them in and order them in ways that we find pleasing or displeasing, or in waysthat give us tension and movement and motion.

12:37 So doing all of that and being arbitrary about your key decision is a key failure, becausethe decision of where the notes live, where their home is, the center of their gravity,is not just, does it feel good in the singer's voice, it's, does it feel right by the melody,does it feel right by the mood, does it feel right by the way that it hits the instruments.

13:04 And I think that that might even be the most important thing.What is your instrumentation?Your instrumentation is going to determine a lot of your keys.You see this in jazz, like a lot of horn-based songs are in B-flat E-flat, F-flats forsome reason.A lot of the songs on guitar, sharps, like you like those open strings, then again, that

13:28 creates its own sense of time and place, because open strings are more commonly associatedwith the classic rock, because that was when people were like doing very guitar-driven,guitar-heavy work.And you have a cultural component, at least to me, I hear G major, and I feel way moreclassic rock than I do for E-flat.And that's just part of the genre experience.

13:53 And yeah, sure, you might sound a little bit better in your voice there, but it mightchange the entire vibe of the genre of the song by the key decision that you make, because

14:01 it is also putting the players, the actual instrumentalists, into a certain headspace dependingon what key you choose.If it's a difficult key, that might unlock something outside of their typical box thatthey play in.If it's a really comfortable and easy key, you might allow them to play more freely, butthey also might play with more cliché.So like all of these things weigh in.

14:29 So my answer to this is it's both, and it's complicated.You can't just don't arbitrarily choose a key, do it with intention, try other things,move it up, move it down, but at the end of the day a great song is a great song, andit is relational.It's happy birthday.But that doesn't mean that you should view the whole thing as relational, because thesethings at the end of the day, they are frequencies.

14:58 They're not notes, they're not abstractions.Every frequency on every instrument comes with its own set of timbers, including yourown voice.So choose wisely and try stuff.If you enjoyed this episode, my name is Scoobert Doobert, and you can listen to my musicat scoobertdoobert.pizza, or search me up on Spotify.I play more than smoke on the water.

15:22 If you enjoyed it, feel free to share it with one of your friends, rate it five star.We've got some great guests coming up.I can't wait for you to hear those conversations, going to get even nerdy or about notes, y'all.This is how you love music more.You learn more about it.Hope you have a great week, and I'll see you next week.Happy Thanksgiving.