In music, what's the word for the type of interval or chord?

[picker]

In Jazz Theory & Pedagogy, at least as it is taught at the university level in the States, there is a term: Quality

As I mentioned in Post #8

There might be others that work, but that term is the one that I was taught from middle school music class through my undergraduate studies, and the one that is understood fairly universally among working music professionals and educators that I have encountered in my career.

Tonality is a more over-arching term, not usually applied to single chords. It’s usually offered or implicitly contrasted to atonality.

Function and character, as described by GorillaMan make a lot of sense in Classical Theory - the terms describe the role played by a chord in its place in a harmonic sequence or progression.

But in Jazz, Rock, Blues, Gospel, and Bluegrass in particular, I’ve heard more people than I can remember call it a chord quality.

[Cyberhwk]

@friedo

IOW, I want to talk about the _____ness of chords in general, where _____ may be major, minor, augmented, diminished, etc.

Honest to god my college music professor asks, “Is it happy or sad?”

[outlierrn]

@CC

There’s not going to be much agreement on this because the experience of music is so subjective. If you say, for instance, that music in a minor key has a certain “character” or “quality,” then what do you make of those people who can distinguish between d minor and c# minor? They seem different to those people, but in ways that they usually cannot describe very well, beyond saying that their tonalities have different character or quality from each other. For some people, minor keys are always sad, as noted above, but there are pieces of music written in minor keys that are incredibly satisfying and glorious. Not terms you associated with sad. So, good luck finding a word that works for you. But there’s little universal when it comes to feelings and comparing the sensations that music evokes. xo, C.

We had a thread awhile back about how all the sexy tunes are in minor keys.
well maybe not all, but many, the band Morphine is the only name I can recall from the thread