Why is dm the saddest of all keys

Today, your choice of key is purely arbitrary. And so it goes. Last thing: you should be skeptical of any study purporting to prove anything quantitatively objective about emotion in music, because the art form is highly subjective and context-dependent.

Pingback: What is the Saddest Key in the World? MusicMonday « Adafruit Industries — Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! And another one. This drawing by Roger Penrose gives you the idea: I have been getting responses to this post that say, okay, but absolute pitch height affects timbre, and that affects how the music makes you feel.

It begins with a heavy marching band buildup as backup singers jump into a wordy beat. The repetitive chorus is accompanied by a funk-style dance rhythm, and further accentuated in its poppy music video. Measures of valence positivity across keys of all Beyonce tracks listed on Spotify.

Valence, an algorithmically generated variable, rates the musical positiveness conveyed by a track on scale of 0 to 1. Tracks with high valence sound more positive happy, cheerful, euphoric , and tracks with low valence sound more negative sad, depressed, angry. When the song is played in stripped-down acoustic chords , however, D minor takes center stage. Taylor Swift is similar. Among the songs she has released, across 23 albums, only one song is in D minor.

Measures of valence across keys of all Taylor Swift tracks listed on Spotify. Additionally, positivity spreads well across keys — perhaps because these keys are frequented by artists in their song writing.

Songs in D minor seem more likely to hit on one end of the emotive spectrum: either very positive or very sad. These songs tend to put on a happy face in the face of brooding despair, and the manic mutability of D minor is overshadowed by an outwardly upbeat pop jam. The musical gymnastics that artists perform around this troublesome minor key raise a good question: Does one have to be sad to write a good sad song? In the move Almost Famous , the fictional, precocious Rolling Stone critic holds onto the question for a long time.

That the key of D minor is the key of true sorrow is ostensibly inarguable at this point in time. Unless, of course, someone cares to argue. Yet it seems fairly unlikely that anyone can find another key more closely associated with the tearful, melancholic, mournrful, doleful, woeful, desperately down, disconsolate. Many esteemed authorities on music and its systems are unified in their accord on this issue. It is fundamental: If you want to give your music the authentic flavor of human misery, only one key will suffice.

The key of D minor. When we turn to the scholars over the centuries and ending in this one, among many musicologists, composers, songwriters, there is an ever-expanding consensus that D minor leads all others in its evocation of melancholy.

Here in this famous exchange with his manager, Marty DiBergi, is one of the greatest ever cinematic homages to a musical key:. Jared H. It certainly is a fascinating thing to consider. And to my ears and I think the ears of most people , if you play pretty much any song in two or three different keys, you can hear a subtle shift in nuance. My hands have an inner accord with my emotions and they fall where they may on the ivories. I trust them. I can just throw a capo on if I need to go higher — one of the things I love about guitar.