Perceived Relatedness of Musical Tones in Major and Minor Tonal Contexts

A scaling study compared the utilization of major and minor tonalities as frameworks for judging the relatedness of musical tones. Subjects judged how related one test tone was to another in the context of a major or natural minor scale. In general, the larger the musical interval created by the test tones, the less related the tones were judged to be. However, for a given interval size, tonic-chord tone pairs received higher relatedness ratings than other-scale pairs, which in turn received higher ratings than nonscale pairs, but only in the major scale context. When the test tones were from two different groups, the ratings were often asymmetric, reflecting the consistent assignment of tones to different levels within the hierarchy of tonal functions. A regular pattern of asymmetries was observed in the major but not the minor context. Multidimensional scaling of the ratings showed that the minor context was less effective than the major in suggesting a clear distinction among tonic-chord, other-scale, and nonscale groups of tones. An explanation is given which suggests that a minor scale makes contact with an internal representation which, because of a basic difference between major and minor scales, is necessarily more ambiguous than the representation of a major scale.