My meandering thoughts about music brought me to this today. That basically, this whole branch of the arts we call music is essentially noises we make that fill us with strong feelings not generally brought on by other noises.
So what is it about music noises that make us feel all emotional? How is singing different than talking? What’s the difference between a chord or a melody and a bunch of random sounds?
Having once been a trombone player, I know that a chord is a group of notes. I understand what music is structurally. I even understand a little bit about musical improv. What I don’t understand is what makes a chord more pleasing than a dischord.
Music is supposed to be, of all the arts, the closest expression of, and influence on, the pure soul.
I feel like an answer to this question should take into account the few people with the kind of amusia where they can hear music just fine, but it just sounds like any other noise to them, nothing special to it.
You ask about chords. There are some theories where more consonant intervals, ones that lead to closely matching harmonics (for example as a result of a 2:1 frequency ratio, 3:2, etc.) sound more “pleasant” compared to dissonant/discordant intervals where your ear has more trouble fitting all the pitches into a harmonic sequence. Schoenberg, with appropriate caveats, defines “consonances as the closer, simpler relations to the fundamental tone, dissonances as those that are more remote, more complicated. The consonances are accordingly the first overtones, and they are the more nearly perfect the closer they are to the fundamental. That means, the closer they lie to the fundamental, the more easily we can grasp their similarity to it, the more easily the ear can fit them into the total sound and assimilate them, and the more easily we can determine that the sound of these overtones together with the fundamental is ‘restful’ and euphonious, needing no resolution.”
At the other end of the spectrum from this low-level psychoacoustic stuff, it has to be noted that good music uses dissonant chords [assuming your music has chords in the first place!] in an essential way, otherwise it would be quite boring and perhaps not real music at all, also what sounds acceptable depends on the musical tradition. Students are taught about tension and resolution and how dissonant chords should be prepared and resolved.