# Affective Characteristics of the Keys



## Mr. Big Noodles (Jan 2, 2014)

Because I know you all love pseudoscience, mysticism, and frail pretense in your music, I wanted to share something that I stumbled upon while working on my last undergraduate research paper.

Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart's Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst, annotated and translated by some lovely person back in 1983.

Page 442 contains a 1:1 guide to matching keys to emotions. I've put it in a more readable format, organized chromatically instead of whatever order the original was in (none). There's a little preface:



C.F.D. Schubart said:


> Each key is either colored or not colored.
> One expresses innocence and simplicity with uncolored keys; gentle, melancholic feelings with flat keys; wild and strong passions with sharp keys.



(^ What of enharmonic equivalency, silly man?)







Sorry if the image is unreadable, Photobucket compressed the the hell out of it. Let me know if you want it uploaded in another manner. There is another translation out there that I like somewhat more, but I don't have the book on hand. It's floating around the web, with little variations here and there that cause me to yearn for the original source. Link!

I came across this treatise/history while writing on tonality in Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe cycle, as Schumann was apparently familiar with Schubart's ideas. This is his take on the key characteristic thing:



Robert Schumann said:


> There have been arguments for and against; the truth, as always lies in the middle.
> 
> One can as little say that this or that sentiment can be expressed only in this or that key (rage in C-sharp minor, etc.) as that every key is capable of expressing anything, as [Carl Friedrich] Zelter maintained.
> 
> ...



From page 62 of Schumann on Music.

Like a freakin' zodiac for tonality. Have fun, kids.


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## Yo_Wattup (Jan 2, 2014)

I knew there was a reason Slayer are in Eb 

Seriously though, what are you thoughts on this schecter, a load of BS or does it hold some truth? Why?


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## yingmin (Jan 2, 2014)

Wasn't all of this written before pitches were standardized? In other words, at the time this "research" was being conducted, am I right to say that the difference between the "pure" C major and the "leering" Db Major was simply in how a particular musician chose to tune?


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## 80H (Jan 2, 2014)

lost me at d minor lol


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## Hollowway (Jan 2, 2014)

I saw the thread title and thought we'd lost you to the dark side. Happy to report you're still here among the sane and learned! (And still more learned than I!)


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Jan 2, 2014)

I am happy to have enough of a reputation to elicit concern with such a thread title. 



80H said:


> lost me at d minor lol



Hey, it's the saddest of all keys.



Yo_Wattup said:


> Seriously though, what are you thoughts on this schecter, a load of BS or does it hold some truth? Why?



I thought that my ire-laced comments would answer that question.

My opinion is that nothing is preordained. I believe that there are many considerations in how music is conceived, interpreted, and received. Culturally, you may have grown up hearing a lot of music that occupied the following keys: C, D, F, G, E, A, B&#9837;. Basically a lot of stuff that doesn't stray too far from C on the circle of fifths and is easy to play on popular instruments (piano and guitar being notable). That is practicality. How often do you hear music in C&#9837; major, or more importantly, how often do you see it? Some people have difficulty coming to grips with the existence of C&#9837; ("Does it exist?"), it is so far outside of our cultural paradigm. Now ask a harpist. C&#9837; is an extremely common key for harp music, on the basis that their "open tuning" is a C&#9837; major scale: the strings are designated C D E F G A B, and by fiddling with the pedals, you can make each string go flat (pedal up), natural (pedal in the middle), or sharp (pedal down). So, all pedals up is C&#9837; D&#9837; E&#9837; F&#9837; G&#9837; A&#9837; B&#9837;. In this way, a concert harpist can play in any key. Now, how many of youse guys play harp? None of you? Okay, how about your friends? Zero, you say? How many bands have you ever seen with a harpist? Probably not many. Harp music does not permeate our day-to-day living, so of course C&#9837; is an elusive unicorn of a key: it is one of the few instruments that moves well in that key.

Some keys are more facile than others, depending on the instrument. On the chromatic harmonica, it is far easier to play in C or C# major than it is to play E&#9837; major, simply because C and C# are played either with the slide engaged the entire time or not. E&#9837; requires one to move the slide around quite a bit more. There is a technical reason why some keys will sound more labored on an instrument than another, and the performance (and thus the emotion) of the music will sound similarly labored. Making instruments do awkward things makes instruments sound awkward.

There are keys that you will not hear very often (for aforementioned practical reasons), and they will be selected by composers for this fact, imparting a particular emotion simply because of the solidarity and awareness required to compose in said keys. The singer-songwriter that croons at the coffee shop every second Thursday of the month probably isn't going to write a song in B&#9837; minor; they don't see pitch center as a vehicle for their emotional expression, because they have three chords and a dream. Beethoven would, though.



yingmin said:


> Wasn't all of this written before pitches were standardized? In other words, at the time this "research" was being conducted, am I right to say that the difference between the "pure" C major and the "leering" Db Major was simply in how a particular musician chose to tune?



It's arguable. I think this is a concern for Westerners because we have pitch standards. It's only because of twelve-tone equal temperament and International Organization for Standardization that people whine and say that A432 is better than A440. In the Indian classical tradition, the key is whatever "Sa" is, which is not any defined pitch, though that is on the way out with the increasing popularity of the electronic tanpura. (At the same time, the time-of-day associations of the ragas is being lost because of the modernization of India and the changing landscape of raga performance. As Indian classical music declines in its listenership, and as concerts must be scheduled to meet the times that audiences attend, you hear more mid-morning ragas and more 5AM ragas at 8PM. They wouldn't be heard otherwise.) D&#9837; will not have any more significance as a tonic than C, simply because that concept does not exist in that music: the tonic is the tonic, and the intervals of the raga are relative to that movable pitch.


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## yingmin (Jan 2, 2014)

SchecterWhore said:


> It's arguable. I think this is a concern for Westerners because we have pitch standards. It's only because of twelve-tone equal temperament and International Organization for Standardization that people whine and say that A432 is better than A440. In the Indian classical tradition, the key is whatever "Sa" is, which is not any defined pitch, though that is on the way out with the increasing popularity of the electronic tanpura. D&#9837; will not have any more significance as a tonic than C, simply because that concept does not exist in that music: the tonic is the tonic, and the intervals of the raga are relative to that movable pitch.



That's basically the point I was making: it's nonsensical to say that C and Db have distinct characteristics at a time when there was no agreement on what constituted a C or a Db. That's not to say the argument isn't nonsensical for other reasons as well, but especially for that reason. Someone making that same argument today should still not be taken seriously, but at least now he would have the benefit of clear, scientifically defined pitches on which to base his flight of fancy.


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## viesczy (Jan 2, 2014)

Great point about keys and their application to various instruments. 

I started first on organ (as lamented many times), so the more #s/bs there are the better it was to me as it is far easier to accurately rip when you have a few bs/#s than in C maj. Major or minor, the more #s/bs the better it was to me. 

Now something written in F # and played on guitar would stand out as "odd" to my ear but not on piano/organ.

Derek


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## Mr. Big Noodles (Jan 3, 2014)

I should add that, while the relationship between key and emotion is not something I consider to be fixed, it is necessary for the artist to indulge in fantasy from time to time. After all, what is art if not assigning meaning to the inherently meaningless? The sounds that we produce as musicians are facts of nature: mode of vibration, cycles per second, amplitude, and so on. At some point, those perfectly quantifiable laws and facts must gain a subjective body as well. Symbolism is immensely important to the arts, so I fully support the assignment of emotions to keys, and whatever other element of music you like; just keep in mind that I would not be so prescriptive or dogmatic in my own choices.

In the course of my research for the paper, mentioned in my first post, I ran across the work of Eric Sams, whose interest in cryptography led to the discovery of a cipher system in the music and letters of Robert Schumann. To Schumann, tangible things like keys and, more importantly, certain melodic figures contained meaning beyond their face value. He was evidently very successful with this approach, and encoding his musical language was a way for him to express his feelings and intellect. And the guy's music is certainly no worse than that of his anti-intellectual, hyper-emotional Romantic contemporaries, so there is certainly nothing wrong with using a table of key-emotion relationships if that's what helps you to compose meaningful music.


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## metalmonster (Jan 3, 2014)

I don't see why not, but i also don't see why. 

Though G major does sound like campfires. And B minor is pretty much introspective. 

But that's because campfire jammin' is all about big ol' chords and because Tarantas in spanish traditional music (hate the word "flamenco" pretty bad) rely heavily on a B minor chord, and they're all about introspection, prayer and this kind of crap. I wrote an (instrumental) song about a lost love which relies a lot on B minor. 

I wonder ... old instruments, they often have an 'uneven' frequency response. That translate to keys perhaps sounding a bit different from fret to fret. 

This, and perhaps all the instruments didn't had the same temperament as today. Try Addictive keys, you can change the piano's temperament. It gives you a whole different sound ...

These are all random theories. My old flamenco guitar does sound pretty uneven (long love/hate story with that one) though. Notes don't ring the same on the whole neck and i have to compensate using my technique. 



> that people whine and say that A432 is better than A440


 but IT IS better ! (just kidding).


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## ElRay (Jan 3, 2014)

But I have all my guitars in Bach Temperament, not equal, so each key does sound different! 

Ray


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## Sonic Anomaly (Jan 4, 2014)

it does at basis come down to psychological interpretation:
and though SW you are right:
_"_
_After all, what is art if not assigning meaning to the inherently meaningless? The sounds that we produce as musicians are facts of nature: mode of vibration, cycles per second, amplitude, and so on. At some point, those perfectly quantifiable laws and facts must gain a subjective body as well. Symbolism is immensely important to the arts, so I fully support the assignment of emotions to keys, and whatever other element of music you like; just keep in mind that I would not be so prescriptive or dogmatic in my own choices.
"_

_that interpretation will be as diverse as giving ten people each of a different language, the word:_
_Svfysfeldex_
_and asking each of them what it meant (or what they thought it meant)... you will get 10 very different answers (either all or none are justified in even attempting to answer, as all will be unsure, being as there is no objective rule somewhere written in the universe that it "is indeed this")_

_(ironically, this is also one of the reason morality/Truth is impossible without God)_

_paired-associative learning is the technical term needed for explaining what is here being proponed;_
_pairing any experience or innate tendency towards any sound, object, name/sensation/etc, etc with any other... (I'll leave you to grasp its implications)_

_in a more concrete sense, if one heard a single pitch (the nascence of any scale)_
_and was asked to identify what it suggested, they would most likely say it did not suggest anything (save monotony)._
_however, as soon as a second pitch is sounded, immediately there is indeed a suggestion spawned, but the finer the shades of pitch, the more subtle the mental response._
_and seeing that any arbitrary groups of pitches (in this case western 12notes) are a conjuncture of several singular intervals, the emotional response can be broken down into quintessentially the difference in two pitches, and then exponentially increasing in implications with the addition of other simultaneously or linear pitches._

"music" goes through the mind first, (rather the awareness of what could be consciously identified as "music", rather than vibrations that the body can feel) before is goes anywhere else (and there is plenty of opinions where it goes afterward) thus psychology is saliently when dealing with what any tonality seems to suggest.


I don't know what I just wrote... sorry


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## Hollowway (Jan 4, 2014)

SchecterWhore said:


> Hey, it's the saddest of all keys.



 We need someone to do a dissertation on Lick My Love Pump.


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## yingmin (Jan 4, 2014)

metalmonster said:


> spanish traditional music (hate the word "flamenco" pretty bad)


Flamenco is not, strictly speaking, "Spanish" traditional music, but rather the music of Spanish gypsies. It's a distinction that probably gets missed by most people, but flamenco is perfectly legitimate as a style of music. Is that why you hate it, or do you have other reasons?


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## metalmonster (Jan 4, 2014)

Really , it's because when i say "flamenco" people in my town are goin' all crazy like "olé olé *claps randomly" and that's why i don't use that word. Though i do play both flamenco, and spanish traditional and i also played gipsy jazz and klezmer. And i used to play a bit in a Salsa band. (and that's about it for the "world" music repertoire. Not that i'm good at anything).

Oh and also, flamenco is cante, baile, palmas and then toque. Flamenco, at its origin, does not include guitar ... that's also why i prefer the "spanish blah blah music"

And yes, i don't like flamenco that much, mostly because i've tired of this flamenco/corrida/spanish crap i got in my town. It's just touristy crap, and that's why i keep myself from using this name ...

ps: paco de lucia is awesome.


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## fwd0120 (Jan 4, 2014)

Yeah, my mind went to LMLP, too. Very interesting, though. I need to check this out more, later!


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## tyler_faith_08 (Jan 4, 2014)

Well, at least I gained a signature addition... Sonic Anomaly's "I don't know what I just wrote..." was a gem IMO. 

Anyway, I believe that there is a bit of truth to this, but I believe that, "...how music is conceived, interpreted, and received" (per SW) will skew the original idea. Might there exist a chance that the author derived these concepts from analyzing each key's relationship to C Major? 

I also think that those who claim perfect pitch would have a somewhat better grasp on this and call this more of a reference than a pure informative read. DLB's Perfect Pitch has a lot of information that falls close to the descriptions above. For those of you who've listened to it, Burge describes each pitch as having an aura or vibe about it like an F having a sort of roughness and an E having a similar roughness while being more refined. He also states that the E in comparison to the F "is just missing something". I don't think that his claims that anyone can learn what he's teaching hold up very well, but I believe that there are a few that could definitely catch on (maybe even a few more if you introduce some illicit substances). 

All in all, every time I read through this (3rd time now), I just keep thinking Perfect Pitch and senselessness. I mainly think senselessness because the average person who doesn't try very well to actually try to understand what another tries to communicate comes to mind. Those people make me cringe, really. However, I personally don't think it senseless. I believe that there is some value to this, but I believe that there is more to be found through each individual's research into the topic.


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