Notes on notes

(Celebrating yet another trivia victory. Here is the frightening part: while I was out today I was thinking “Do I need to go to the ATM?” and my response was, “Nah, I’m playing trivia tonight so I’ll just win the money instead.” At some point I will receive my comeuppance. I mean, given an infinite amount of time a monkey will write Hamlet so it shouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that I’ll lose at trivia. I just wouldn’t bet on it.)

While listening to NPR yesterday I heard something that has been bouncing around my head for the past day. They were talking to this guy who had just released a classical CD that reinterprets Elliot Smith songs. (Elliot Smith was the guy who was nominated for an Oscar for “Miss Misery” from the goodwill hunting soundtrack and who “allegedly” committed suicide a few years back in a case that is still really, really fishy.) Anyway, the guy was discussing how he wrote the songs and started by talking about the chord structure and how you couldn’t tell if he was using happy chords or sad chords and that is what has been occupying my mind.

Isn’t it odd that we can describe a musical chord as being happy or sad? He played an E minor and I immediately went, “Yeah, that is a morose type of chord” but that makes no sense at all. A chord in and of itself really shouldn’t mean anything. All it is is a group of notes being played simultaneously. More accurately, it is simply the aural equivalent of a numerical pattern and I don’t think that anyone would look at a set of numbers and have an emotional reaction.

Correction: no regular person would look at a set of numbers and have an emotional reaction. I’ll hold off judgment on myself on this point other than, man are fours depressing.

But the thing is, we can all agree that certain chords are positive and others are more downbeat even though by themselves there is no context for us to place those emotions. There is simply some hard wired part of our brain that connects certain sounds to emotions, which may at one point of time have served a purpose but now is just a point of fascination for me. This also probably explains why people so often misinterpret songs. People play “Every Breath You Take” at weddings on the fact that they feel it is a wonderful love song completely missing the fact that if you listen to the lyrics it’s about stalking someone. “Every breath you take, every move you make, every single day, every word you say, I’ll be watching you.” Or the Green Day song “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”that is played at every high school graduation because people think it is about remembering good times but is really about telling someone to go to hell. We’re connecting to the notes and not the words.

I know that I’m not the first person to make this point. Hell, it shows up in Spinal Tap. But it just amazes me how universal a reaction to a sound can be. To the point that it influences our views on instruments. Piccolos are upbeat, oboes are the most depressing instrument known to man regardless of what they are actually playing. Maybe this just shows that despite how much we have evolved at the end of the day there is a lot about of us that is still instinctual.