The opening track of Black Sabbath’s self-titled 1970 album launches off with a jarring tritone, a reverberating note that, when combined with a young Ozzy Osbourne‘s atonal vocals, helped to spark a ...

Why are some musical chords so inherently pleasing while others sound so obviously dissonant? A study of a group of people with the genetic condition amusia, which causes sufferers to incorrectly ...

(Medical Xpress)—Researchers from the University of Montreal and New York University suggest in a paper they've had published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that the ...

In Western styles of music, from classical to pop, some combinations of notes are generally considered more pleasant than others. To most of our ears, a chord of C and G, for example, sounds much more ...

The notes used in Western music—or, more accurately, the relationships between the notes used in Western music—have a strange power. Bobby McFerrin demonstrated this dramatically by showing that an ...