From there is something that keeps cropping up:
Often, that seemingly-obvious statement seems ignored by the supporters of the Nature argument. Even “Happy Birthday” can sound dirge-like with the wrong tempo, though it sounds even more so when played in a minor key.
With regards to that study, I would like to see the raw data before drawing conclusions. How did they determine the major/minor key status? Since much of today’s music is blues-oriented, and blues deliberately blurs major/minor feelings, what kind of key is a blues-inflected song in? I know some songs that use both major and minor (either relative or parallel). Which statistical column do those fall in?
That same study compares the Beatles’ Help with Mariah Carey’s We Belong Together for tempo purposes and concludes that songs are getting slower. Just for fun, I listened to Help again after hearing the Mariah Carey song. If you alter the accents for one or the other, they are almost exactly the same tempo (double time the Carey song, half-time the Beatles’). So it’s the beat division and accent that has changed over time (not to mention the instrumentation and arrangement), not the actual tempo.
(My favorite example of this is For Your Love, by The Yardbirds, which alternates tempo & feeling in sections. The faster-feeling part is actually in a slower tempo. It’s the beat division/accent that makes it sound faster or slower, not the metronome numbers.)
As far as key, that Mariah Carey song is only called a major one because of music theory that suggests the tonal center is C (the only harmony used is a repetitive, continuous F MaJ7 - G - Em - F). But a C major triad is never played. This is vastly different from a Tin Pan Alley song, not to mention 17th Century harmony, upon which classical music theory is based.
Both the ambiguity of never expressing the tonal center and the ambiguity of blues flavors change the landscape; many songs cannot be put squarely in the major or minor camp. Indeed, that is the main difference I would note for today’s music, and that difference began a century ago.
My point is that you can’t shoehorn all songs into the same mold, then make strong assertions about how they are different.
I was actually a bit curious about that myself, with blues in particular. But my ear tells me that tonality has shifted towards minor sounds in pop music, and this study does suggest that to be the case. When I listen to Top 40 dance music, it seems to me like that majority of it has a minor tonality (like, let’s pick out an easy one, Lady Gaga–pretty much every hit of hers is minor tonality.) There is the issue of tonal ambiguity that you mention. But what I personally hear is a lot of music in minor tonalities these days. I mean, just look at stuff like Gangnam Style.
And, personally, if I have to categorize it in one of two camps, I consider blues to be generally be in a “major” tonality harmonically. Unless you’re playing minor blues, of course, which has a very different feel. The harmonies behind blues are general major chords with a dominant 7th. The melody plays with ambiguity, clashing minor thirds against major harmonies (or playing in between major and minor thirds, or incorporating both major and minor thirds, etc.) And, yes, there are those songs which are based on “power chords” which drop the third all-together from the harmony, leading to even more ambiguity.
I couldn’t have said it better.
I have a little experiment I often use to demonstrate how important the 3rd of a triad is, and how little of that sound is necessary to define major/minor-ness. Loudly hit as many C’s and G’s on a keyboard that you can almost at once, holding the sustain pedal down. What is the tonality? Ambiguous, since there’s no 3rd. Then, before the sound dies away, touch, very softly, a single E or E flat, mid-keyboard. The loudness of the 3rd is very little compared to the roots and 5ths, but the major/minor-ness is firmly established.
Yep. I agree. I wonder why the third is so particularly important in harmony. I mean that’s where the “color” comes from more or less. In jazz comping, you’re taught to ignore the root/unison and the fifth and just concentrate on the third and seventh (and extended notes) to color the harmony. I wonder why those notes, in Western harmony, are particularly important.
There’s probably a good, but boring, reason due to mathematical relationships between pitches, but I’d say, “Just ask your ear.”