Major or minor?

What makes a chord major or minor

A plain chord is three notes stacked: a root, a third and a fifth. The middle note decides it. Four semitones above the root and the chord is major; three, one semitone lower, and it is minor. One note moving one key on a piano is the whole difference between the bright sound and the darker one.

"Happy" and "sad" are a shorthand, and a good one for a first ear: most listeners in most Western music hear major as brighter and minor as darker. Plenty of cheerful songs are in minor and plenty of sad ones in major, so the label is about the chord's colour, not the song's mood.

How it works

Part one plays ten chords one at a time, each in a new key. The first five are the plain stack; in the last five the notes are reshuffled (inversions), so the top note no longer gives it away and only the colour is left. Part two plays five four-chord progressions of the kind pop songs are built from, and you mark each chord. That is harder: in a song in major, a minor chord shows up as the sad turn (the "vi" chord), and the ear has to catch it in passing. The chords come from your browser, three voices each, so nothing is downloaded and nothing leaves your phone.

Questions

Why can I hear it alone but not in a progression?

On its own a chord has nothing to compete with. In a progression your ear hears the movement between chords first and the colour of each second. That is normal, and it is the part that comes with a little listening practice: play the progression again and listen for the one that turns darker.

What's a good score?

Guessing gets about half, fifteen of thirty. Most people who listen to music get the single chords nearly all right; catching every chord in the progressions is what musicians train for.

Then make something of it

The last progression you heard goes into Brumm as a melody, its chords played one note at a time inside a club track; then hum your own line over it. No account, no upload.

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