Why do tunes in a major key, such as Singin’ in the Rain, sound cheerful, while those in minor keys – Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, say – sound gloomy and depressing?

The answer – in part – seems to be that the patterns of pitches in major keys mirror those of excited speech, whereas minor keys parallel subdued speech. That suggests that language shaped our musical expression of emotion.

Several factors affect music’s sentimental influence, and some are common sense: a fast, loud, jumpy rhythm sounds happy because it reflects the way an excited person behaves, and slow, quiet music with a regular beat mimics a mournful emotional state.

What’s less obvious is why tunes in major keys tend to sound cheerful, whereas those in minor keys sound sad. “This is an age-old problem in music theory,” says Daniel Bowling, a neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who suspected emotional speech patterns might be behind the link.


To find out, Bowling and his colleagues first measured the distribution of tones in around 7500 western classical melodies and Finnish folk tunes in both major and minor keys. They found, for instance, that minor thirds – with the melody note pitched three semitones above the tune’s keynote – made up 15 per cent of tones in minor pieces, but unsurprisingly made up less than 1 per cent of tones in major pieces.

Happy talking

Then they compared these musical intervals with those between important tonal frequencies in spoken vowels uttered by American English speakers in either excited or subdued voices. Their speech samples came from ten volunteers who were recorded reading various monologues, including animated accounts of winning the lottery and morose descriptions of failing marriages.

Sure enough, the frequency relationships in excited speech closely matched those of music in major keys, while those of forlorn speech matched minor music.

Bowling adds that his team found the same association for Mandarin Chinese speakers, suggesting the link is common to different cultures, if not universal.

“This makes a good case that it has biological roots,” he says.

Tell us your favourite gloomy minor-key and upbeat major-key songs below

Journal reference: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, DOI: 10.1121/1.3268504