Many people are of the “major-minor” distinction in Western classical music. The building blocks of Western classical music include major and minor chords, which are conventionally thought of a set of notes of certain frequency ratios in relation to the base note (see footnote for more information). Put simply, a major chord (like C major, C E G) has a root, a perfect fifth, an a major third; while a minor chord (like C minor, C E♭ G) has a root, a perfect fifth, and a minor third. This is one of the most important distinctions in Western tonal music, and virtually all popular music makes use of this schema.
So what if, even though this major-minor dichotomy is ingrained in our culture, some of us have trouble telling the difference?
In a paper by Chubb et al., (2013), researchers tested undergraduate students on whether they could describe randomized tone rows (containing notes in either major or minor chords) as either “happy” (major) or “sad” (minor). They found two groups in their sample population: ~30% that could tell the difference with virtually perfect accuracy, and ~70% that did no better than chance. Taken at face value, this would suggest that most of their population was unable to hear the difference between the major or minor tone rows. There was, however, a correlation between having music education and being able to distinguish the two.
An interesting and more convincing study that followed performed a similar experiment in infants, conducted by Adler et al. (2020). Here, the auditory stimulus (a major or minor tone row) was associated with a visual target that would appear in a given location. Infants who learned to associate the stimulus with the location would anticipate where the visual target would appear. In this study, infants performed similarly to undergraduates: ~30% could anticipate the target location with near perfect accuracy, whereas ~70% could do no better than chance. The design of this study allowed for several variables present in the original study to be accounted for.
Although preliminary, these results could be surprising to a lot of musicians. If you are a musician, what do you think? Could there be other factors influencing it?
References:
1. Chubb C, Dickson CA, Dean T, et al. Bimodal distribution of performance in discriminating major/minor modes. J Acoust Soc Am. 2013;134(4):3067-3078. doi:10.1121/1.4816546
2. Adler SA, Comishen KJ, Wong-Kee-You AMB, Chubb C. Sensitivity to major versus minor musical modes is bimodally distributed in young infants. J Acoust Soc Am. 2020;147(6):3758-3764. doi:10.1121/10.0001349
Footnote:
The 12-tone equal temperament (12-TET) tuning system is most commonly used in western music, although intervals can also be thought of in other tuning systems, such as in “just intonation” which uses simple ratios. A major chord has a perfect fifth (12-TET 12√128:1, Just 3:2) and a major third (12-TET 3√2:1, Just 5:4) on top of a root, whereas a minor chord has a perfect fifth and minor third (12-TET 4√2:1, Just 6:5) on top of a root.