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 ...

An altered chord is one that contains notes from outside its scale of origin – chords such as b9 or #5 are frequently seen examples of this. What the example chords are designed to demonstrate is how ...

Many people dislike the clashing dissonances of modernist composers such as Arnold Schoenberg. But what’s our problem with dissonance? It’s long been thought that dissonant musical chords contain ...

Recent work suggests that every culture may develop its own rather arbitrary rules for what music sounds right and wrong. In the arts world, the shock of the new usually fades fast. Picasso we can ...