The Physics Behind the Chords
Every piano tutor and every piano student should know their chords, respectively. Regardless of their form (arpeggios, broken chords, block chords) as a performer we study and memorize every single one of them: Major minor, diminished, augmented; and for the balder ones, or better said, “Jazzy ones” we also can talk about dominant sevenths, major and minor sevenths, diminished, half-diminished even chords with major and minor ninths.
All these chords have a common denominator: the Overtone Series.
It might sound a little too far-fetched, or perhaps even too scientific, but it is a fact that every possible chord has its origin in nature, and physics can show us how through the so-called “harmonic series.”
The overtones series is the foundation upon which all Western harmony is based as the first five notes of it give as a Major chord.
The harmonic series can be compared with the light refracted through a prism in many colors (the colors that we see in the rainbow, actually)
The notion of consonance and dissonance also comes from this principle.
Arnold Schoenberg says in his book Treatise of Harmony:
“I will define consonances as the closer, simple relations to the fundamental tone, dissonances as those that are more remote, more complicated. The consonances are accordingly the 6th overtones, and they are the more nearly perfect, the closer they are to the fundamental. That means, the closer they lie to the fundamental, the more easily we can grasp their similarity to it, the more easily the ear can fit them into the total sound and assimilate them, and the more easily we can determine that the sound of these overtones together with the fundamental is ‘restful’ and euphonious, needing no resolution. The same should hold for the dissonances as well. If it does not, if the ability to assimilate the dissonances in use cannot be judged by the same method, if the distance from the fundamental is no measure of the degree of dissonance, this is, even so, no evidence against the view presented here. For it is harder to gauge these differences precisely since they are relatively small.”
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