Minor Triads Research Articles

Formalized Harmony

Different theories have been proposed to explain the perception of a root in a pitch set, with Terhardt’s (1984) virtual pitch theory being the one generally considered most plausible, despite none of them having been confirmed empirically. Understanding the perceived root phenomenon is an essential component in explaining the origin of the major and minor triads as the most fundamental chords in twelve-tone equal temperament or 5-limit just intonation, as well as in proposing new chords for new tunings. This music perception study, in which 42 participants rated chords in 10 different tunings, empirically establishes harmonic dualism, negative harmony, and Barlow’s harmonicity as the key factors for the perception of the harmonic root and the origin of the major and minor triads, and proposes a model as a basis for a tuning-agnostic—trans-spatial—music theory.

The Origin of the Dominant: Schoenberg's ‘Strong Progression’ and the Realisation of Implied Virtual Pitches

ABSTRACTIn major‐minor tonality, V implies I, and rising fourths, falling thirds and rising seconds between successive chord roots are more common than falling fourths, rising thirds and falling seconds respectively. Possible explanations involve history (in two‐part medieval counterpoint, harmonic major sixths resolved to octaves – maintained in V–I); the rising leading note (V–I includes it, IV–I does not); acoustic speculation (in V–I, the third harmonic of resolves to the second); voice leading (in V7–I, a tritone resolves to a third by contrary step); melodic closure (a rising melodic leap implies subsequent falling steps, and melodies often end with –, harmonised V–I); root newness (chords ‘progress’ if the second chord's root is not part of the first); and tonal stability (V is less stable than IV, giving it a stronger ‘urge’ to resolve). An additional possibility combines the ‘virtual‐pitch’ theory of Ernst Terhardt with the ‘implication‐realisation’ theory of Leonard B. Meyer and Eugene Narmour. Major and minor triads imply subsidiary virtual pitches (missing fundamentals; see Rameau's ‘fundamental bass’) at third and fifth intervals below the root. These weakly perceived pitches are realised in the next chord if the root falls by a third or rises a fourth or major second, creating a feeling of forward progression – while also facilitating intonation for singers and melodic instrumentalists. The theory correctly predicts that successive harmonic complex (but not pure) tones an octave apart sound more similar if rising, and rising octaves are more common than falling in melody. It also explains why Classical modulations are asymmetrical in the opposite direction, major keys tending to modulate to V (not IV) and minor to III (not VI): accidental flats tend to be more perceptually salient or stable than sharps.

Dancing with math: Using Kleins quartic for music generation

Studying music from a mathematical perspective is often based on the notions of symmetry and topological space. A group G acting on some set S of musical objects in a meaningful way is seen as a symmetry group in music. This can be used in analysing motif development and chord progressions. In neo-Riemannian analysis, one has three principal chord transformations that generate a group GD_12, acting on the set S of 24 major and minor triads. Moreover, this theory is visualized through a simplicial complex whose underlying space is a topological torus. In this paper, we first introduce various symmetry groups and graphic presentations in music theory. We then propose a way of doing neo-Riemannian analysis on Kleins quartic, which is a genus 3 surface instead of a torus, realizing an idea of John Baez. Finally, we use our theory to perform a harmonic analysis of The Imperial March from Star Wars.

Cornelius Cardew's Camouflage and Bun No. 2

ABSTRACTCornelius Cardew's Bun No. 2 (1964) provides a unique opportunity to reconcile the composer's indeterminate graphic score Treatise (1963–7) with a more determinately scored orchestral work which uses orthodox staff notation. It represents an amalgamation of Cardew's approach to two notational systems that, owing to their concurrence of use in his oeuvre, can inform our understanding of how graphic scores can be used in determinate compositional processes and vice versa. This article explores why Cardew decided to embark upon this experiment, using contextual information relating to Autumn ’60 (1960) and the influence of other composers, such as Morton Feldman (1926–1987). This is situated in Cardew's notion of ‘camouflage’, a socio‐musical construct relating to the situation and presentation of his widely varied compositional output in the changing musical environment of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The analysis itself covers a small portion of Bun No. 2, drawing extensively upon Cardew's Treatise Handbook (1971), identifying and extrapolating tendencies of musical‐graphical translation and focussing on the use of major and minor triads and their deformation using geometric concepts of ‘perfection’ and ‘imperfection’. Finally, the article considers the implications of this work both for Cardew and for the aesthetics and wider study of graphic score readings, briefly offering a reflection upon the concept of isomorphism in Ludwig Wittgenstein's picture theory (building upon Cline 2020) in relation to the rhetorical notion of ekphrasis (Bruhn 2000) as a means of explaining the uneasy position that this piece occupied for Cardew, read through the lens of camouflage.

Children’s orchestral set “Harmonika” by H. T. Statyvkin as a source of developing initial skills of ensemble and orchestral music playing for preschool children

The figure of Hennadii Tymofiyovych Statyvkin as a reformer of the methodology of teaching the button accordion has always interested researchers for its versatility: ideas of restructuring the educational process of primary music education; experimental introduction of new methodological principles in the educational process; introduction of a seven-year period of training for button accordionists in children’s music schools; production of special training children’s selectable and ready-made button accordions; development and publication of a new curriculum and teaching aids. The above-mentioned ranges of H. Statyvkin’s activity have been covered by scholars at different times exclusively from the point of view of changing the methodology of teaching the button accordion from a selectable to a ready-made instrument. The problem of studying the structure of children’s accordion instruments created by H. Statyvkin has never acquired the format of a special separate study. The proposed article aims to reveal the design activity H. Statyvkin by analysing the design features of children’s musical instruments created by him for ensemble and orchestral music for preschool children. The scientific novelty of the research results is due to the introduction of some facts about the design features of the children’s orchestra set “Harmonika” into the scientific circulation of musicology, which made it possible to reveal the specifics of H. Statyvkin’s design thinking. Based on the analysis of the system of sound disposition at the right keyboards of the “Solo-1” and “Solo-2” instruments, we can conclude that H. Statyvkin’s system corresponds to the right keyboard of the piano-type accordion, but in the button version. Unusual for the button accordion disposition of the sounds at the right keyboard and grouping of major and minor triads in one row of the left keyboard is based on ergonomic and physiological data of preschool children (height and width of the chest, length of hands and forearms). It was this design that made it possible to reduce the overall sizes of the instruments and to make them in accordance with the physiology of a preschool children.

The Musical Language of Rock

The Musical Language of Rock

Perception of melodies and triads at high frequencies

Accurate pitch perception is possible for harmonic complex tones with fundamental frequencies (F0s) in the musical range ( 6 kHz). However, it is unknown whether this basic pitch perception supports multiple simultaneous pitch perception. To address this, we measured (1) melody discrimination with and without a complex-tone masker and (2) major-minor discrimination for triads and arpeggios composed of complex tones with low (∼280 Hz) or high (∼1400 Hz) F0s. The tones were filtered to ensure that in high-F0 conditions only harmonics beyond the limits of phase locking were audible. Melody perception was poorer for isolated high-F0 tones than for isolated low-F0 tones, although performance was above chance in both cases. Adding a complex-tone masker in the same spectral region degraded performance for low- and high-F0 tones. Listeners could discriminate major and minor triads and arpeggios for low-F0 tones. For high-F0 tones, some listeners could discriminate major and minor arpeggios but none could discriminate major and minor triads. These results will help elucidate whether different mechanisms underlie the perception of combinations of complex tones at low and high frequencies. [Work supported by NIH R01DC005216 and NSF NRT-UtB1734815.]

Half‐Diminished Seventh Chords and Their Contexts

ABSTRACTA comprehensive theory of half‐diminished seventh chord usages recognises the potential of the chord's outer pitches to move in one of four ways: wedging inward, wedging outward, with the root as the common tone or with the seventh as the common tone. Typical destination chords are major and minor triads but can also be seventh chords, as in the opening phrase of Wagner's Prelude to Act 1 of Tristan und Isolde. Examples from the music of Berlioz, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Dvořák, Grieg, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss and Wagner demonstrate the full range of possibilities and some artistic contexts. Extended implementations of half‐diminished harmonies include the Finale of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, the interlude between Scenes 2 and 3 of Act 1 of Wagner's Götterdämmerung and Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande.

A 5-dimensional Tonnetz for nearly symmetric hexachords

The standard 2-dimensional Tonnetz describes parsimonious voice leading connections between major and minor triads as the 3-dimensional Tonnetz does for dominant seventh and half-diminished seventh chords. In this paper, a 5-dimensional Tonnetz is introduced, providing a geometric framework for parsimonious voice leading among nearly symmetric hexachords of the mystic-Wozzeck genus. Cartesian coordinates for points on this discretized grid, generalized coordinate collections for the vertices of the 5-simplices corresponding to mystic and Wozzeck chords, and the geometric nearest-neighbours of a selected chord are derived.

Pitch discrimination with mixtures of three concurrent harmonic complexes.

In natural listening contexts, especially in music, it is common to hear three or more simultaneous pitches, but few empirical or theoretical studies have addressed how this is achieved. Place and pattern-recognition theories of pitch require at least some harmonics to be spectrally resolved for pitch to be extracted, but it is unclear how often such conditions exist when multiple complex tones are presented together. In three behavioral experiments, mixtures of three concurrent complexes were filtered into a single bandpass spectral region, and the relationship between the fundamental frequencies and spectral region was varied in order to manipulate the extent to which harmonics were resolved either before or after mixing. In experiment 1, listeners discriminated major from minor triads (a difference of 1 semitone in one note of the triad). In experiments 2 and 3, listeners compared the pitch of a probe tone with that of a subsequent target, embedded within two other tones. All three experiments demonstrated above-chance performance, even in conditions where the combinations of harmonic components were unlikely to be resolved after mixing, suggesting that fully resolved harmonics may not be necessary to extract the pitch from multiple simultaneous complexes.

Impact of room acoustic parameters on speech and music perception among participants with cochlear implants

ObjectivesBesides numerous other factors, listening experience with cochlear implants is substantially impaired by room acoustics. Even for persons without hearing impairment, the perception of auditory scenes, for example, concerning speech intelligibility, acoustic quality or audibility, is considerably influenced by room acoustics. For CI users, complex listening environments are usually associated with heavy losses.The aim of the present study was to determine room acoustic criteria that particularly influence speech pleasantness for CI users. DesignAccordingly, speech material of the Oldenburg Sentence Test (Oldenburger Satztest, OLSA) as well as basic music material (major and minor triads) were auralized using the software Auratorium which allows auralization of simulated rooms. The constructed rooms for speech stimuli were based on the standard DIN 18041:2016–03 concerning acoustic quality in rooms, the binding standard referred to by room acoustic consultants in Germany, which also includes specifications for inclusive applications in schools. For the music perception tests, two typical concert halls of different sizes were modelled. The auralized test stimuli were unilaterally presented to 10 CI users via their auxiliary input as well as to 18 participants with typical hearing via headphones (control group). Speech pleasantness was evaluated using modified MUSHRA tests. Concerning music perception, chord discrimination was tested using paired comparisons. ResultsA strong preference of small source to listener distances by CI users was found, but no significant preference for room acoustic attenuation which exceeded the recommended for inclusive applications in schools. The analyses of the energy-time-structures suggested that a dense concentration of early reflections makes a beneficial impact on CI listeners’ pleasantness ratings. Music materials were distinguished more consistently without any room acoustic impact, while any room acoustic impact led to performance close to chance level. This effect is probably due to spectral smearing effects caused by reverberation. ConclusionsThese results suggest that in terms of pleasantness of speech, for CI-users, source-to-listener distance is the more influential parameter than room attenuation which goes beyond the German standard recommendation. Reflections from which CI users can benefit seem to occur much earlier than those from which NH listeners benefit. Future studies on chord discrimination concerning room acoustics are needed.

음악분석을 통한 영화 《디아워스》의 재해석: 장3화음과 단3화음의 내러티브적 의미

음악분석을 통한 영화 《디아워스》의 재해석: 장3화음과 단3화음의 내러티브적 의미

음악분석을 통한 영화 《디아워스》의 재해석: 장3화음과 단3화음의 내러티브적 의미

본 논문에서는 영화 《디아워스》(The Hours, 2002)의 음악을 분석함으로써 내러티브와 음악 간의 상호 연관성을 연구하고자 한다. 이를 위하여 필자는 이 영화에서 빈번하게 등장하는 표면상 의 7화음(apparent 7th chord)에 주목하였으며, 이 7화음이 영화가 진행될수록 공통음 관계에 있 는 장3화음과 단3화음의 결합으로 이루어져 있음을 발견하였다. 보다 더 흥미로운 점은 이 영화에 서 중요한 주제로 다루어지는 삶과 죽음이 이들 장3화음과 단3화음의 교대로 표현됨으로써 영화의 내러티브에 반영된다는 점이다. 즉 장3화음과 단3화음의 대조적 음향은 삶과 죽음의 대조를 의미하 기도 하며 또한 최대한의 공통음 관계에 있음으로써 삶과 죽음의 연관성까지 표현한다고 볼 수 있 다.

Effects of resolved and unresolved harmonics in the perception of multiple pitches

The mechanisms underlying pitch perception have been studied for several decades. Most studies have concentrated on the pitch of single sounds, some have investigated the pitch of two simultaneously presented sounds, but few if any have investigated pitch perception with three or more simultaneous pitches. In contrast, in music it is rule, rather than the exception, that we are presented with multiple pitches. Here, pitch perception was studied with three simultaneously presented harmonic complexes, filtered into a single bandpass region to control the extent to which harmonics from each of the three tones were spectrally resolved. The tones comprised the three possible inversions of the major or minor triad, and the listener’s task was to discriminate between major and minor. Preliminary data suggest that subjects who could reliably discriminate major and minor triads in a pure tone training task were also capable of this discrimination when tone complexes were filtered such that the combination of harmonic components should have been unresolved on the cochlea. This finding suggests resolved harmonics may not be necessary to extract the pitch from multiple complex tones. Predictions from various spectral and temporal models of pitch were compared with the results. [Work supported by NIH grant R01DC05216.]

Musical chords and emotion: major and minor triads are processed for emotion.

Musical chords are arguably the smallest building blocks of music that retain emotional information. Major chords are generally perceived as positive- and minor chords as negative-sounding, but there has been debate concerning how early these emotional connotations may be processed. To investigate this, emotional facial stimuli and musical chord stimuli were simultaneously presented to participants, and facilitation of processing was measured via event-related potential (ERP) amplitudes. Decreased amplitudes of the P1 and N2 ERP components have been found to index the facilitation of early processing. If simultaneously presented musical chords and facial stimuli are perceived at early stages as belonging to the same emotional category, then early processing should be facilitated for these congruent pairs, and ERP amplitudes should therefore be decreased as compared to the incongruent pairs. ERPs were recorded from 30 musically naive participants as they viewed happy, sad, and neutral faces presented simultaneously with a major or minor chord. When faces and chords were presented that contained congruent emotional information (happy-major or sad-minor), processing was facilitated, as indexed by decreased N2 ERP amplitudes. This suggests that musical chords do possess emotional connotations that can be processed as early as 200 ms in naive listeners. The early stages of processing that are involved suggest that major and minor chords have deeply connected emotional meanings, rather than superficially attributed ones, indicating that minor triads possess negative emotional connotations and major triads possess positive emotional connotations.

기하학적 모델을 이용한 장, 단3화음의 수학적 구조 연구

음악과 수학은 구조적인 유사성이 많다. 음악에서 중요하게 사용하는 장,단3화음은 서로 음정의 순서가 뒤바뀐 전회(Inversion)관계가 되는데 이는 수학적으로 반사(reflection)에 해당한다. 기하학적인 표현은 수학에서뿐만 아니라 음악에서도 그 구조를 이해하는데 도움이 되는데 음악에서 조성관계를 나타낸 도표를 톤네츠(Tonnetz)라고 한다. 톤네츠를 활용하면 장,단3화음의 반사 관계를 쉽게 파악할 수 있고 또한 이도(transposition)를 평행이동(translation)으로 나타낼 수 있다. 본 연구에서는 기존의 톤네츠를 살펴보고 수학적 원리로 새롭게 구성한 S-Tonnetz를 소개한다. Music and mathematics have a lot of structural similarities. Major and minor triads used importantly in music are in a relationship of inversion in which the sequence of the intervals is reversed, which is equivalent to reflection in mathematics. Geometrical expressions help understand structures in music as well as mathematics, and a diagram that shows tonal relationships in music is called Tonnetz. Relationships of reflection between major and minor triads can easily be understood by using Tonnetz, and also, transpositions can be expressed in translation. This study looks into existing Tonnetz and introduces S-Tonnetz newly formed by a mathematical principle.

Review of Paolo Susanni and Elliott Antokoletz,Music and Twentieth-Century Tonality: Harmonic Progression Based on Modality and the Interval Cycles(Routledge, 2012)

[1] For the first installment in Routledge's "Studies in Music Theory" series, Paolo Susanni and Elliott Antokoletz have contributed a book on analyzing twentieth-century music. As its title suggests, the book adopts a fairly specific framework: it focuses on non-serial, post-tonal music, mainly from the standpoint of scalar collections and interval cycles. The collections include the usual suspects-diatonic, pentatonic, whole-tone, and octatonic-along with some non-diatonic "hybrid" modes, such as Lydian with . The cycles are also the familiar ones: those generated either from moving by a single interval repeatedly or by alternating between two different intervals. Together with these primary topics, the book mixes in a few secondary ones, the chief one being the technique of inversion about an axis.Example 1. Ravel: Ma mere l'oye, "Laideronnette," measures 38-41[2] The book is unified by an overarching concern with how these various concepts interact and relate to one another. For a brief sample of its approach, consider the excerpt from Ravel's Mother Goose Suite quoted in Example 1. (Chapter 6 discusses the opening of the movement up to and including this point [109-11].) The first two measures convey the Fmajor hexachord, i.e., F-G-A-B-C-D, rendered in scalar order. This collection could be understood, at least on an abstract level, as part of a 5- or 7-cycle: B-F-C-G-D-A. Yet this hexachord also comprises portions of both whole-tone collections-F-G-Afrom WT0 and B-C-Dfrom WT1-in other words, a pair of incomplete 2-cycles. This whole-tone potential is then realized in the next two measures, where the music expresses the WT0 collection, i.e., a complete 2-cycle. The trichord F-G-A, prominent throughout in both hands of the piano part, thus serves as a link from the diatonic (or 5- or 7-cycle-based) first half to the whole-tone (or 2-cycle-based) second half.[3] To its credit, the book features many examples of this sort, drawn from a range of composers spanning from the best known (Debussy, Bartok, Stravinsky) to ones less often discussed (Riegger, Symanowski, Muczynski). Yet a number of problems beset the book. The first concerns its intended purpose: it's not clear whether this book is meant to be a work of scholarship or a work of pedagogy. Several factors point to the former: the book's methodological focus; its lack of the usual textbook apparatus (such as exercises, self-tests, and an accompanying anthology); its sheer quantity of detailed analytical discussions, which would make it heavy going for a less experienced student; and of course its inclusion in Routledge's "Studies in Music Theory," which is presumably meant for research monographs.[4] Yet the book breaks little ground in the way of original research. Instead, it advocates an analytical approach based primarily on Antokoletz's prior work.(1) Beyond this, the book exists mostly in a scholarly vacuum. For example, even though the book is centrally concerned with interval cycles, it does not substantively engage with, build upon-or in most cases, even cite-more recent work relating to them.(2) For a more specific but telling example, Chapter 2 shows how to take an augmented triad and move one or two of its pitches by a semitone in order to obtain various major and minor triads. This discussion impinges on fundamental principles of Neo-Riemannian theory, yet the book does not make the connection.[5] Indeed, such is their lack of engagement with contemporary post-tonal music theory that the authors hardly invoke its most basic elements, including not just pitch-class sets and set classes, but even pitch-class numbers.(3) Their stance toward pitch-class set theory emerges most strongly in the Preface, where they dismiss it as a form of "mathematical reductionism" (xiii). In the same paragraph, they concede that pitch-class set analysis "is perhaps applicable to atonal music such as that of Schoenberg," but then assert that "[t]he complicated numerical formulae that arise from these kinds of analyses are so far removed from any form of simple musical terminology that they tend to further alienate prospective students and teachers. …

The influence of mode and musical experience on the attribution of emotions to melodic sequences.

The power of music to elicit emotion is intuitively understood. As Robert G. Ingersoll noted Music expresses feeling and thought, without language. It was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. (1891). The connection between emotion and music is deep, and scholars have long sought to explain the connection between melody, harmony, and emotion. One question of particular interest is how melodic structure itself conveys emotion. Despite a growing body of research on the influence of musical structure on emotion perception, the way in which specific combinations of notes communicate specific emotions is only partially understood (Costa, Fine, & Ricci Bitti, 2004; Gabrielsson & Lindstrom, 2010; Sloboda & Juslin, 2001). Furthermore, theories of musically induced emotions suggest that previous experience shapes our emotional reactions to music in several ways (Juslin, Liljestrom, Vastfjall, & Lundqvist, 2010), which is supported by preliminary findings that specific note combinations may communicate different meanings to individuals who have received formal training in music theory or have a high degree of musical experience (Collier & Hubbard, 2001a). The present research seeks to address the issue of whether the diatonic modes convey specific emotions, and whether musical training influences perception of emotion in the diatonic modes.In attempting to describe the relationship between musical structure and perception of emotion, researchers have identified multiple contributing factors including mode, tempo, consonance, rhythm, harmony, and pitch register. The Modified Lens Model of communication in musical performance (Juslin & Timmers, 2010) posits that acoustic cues communicate emotion in a probabilistic fashion. For example, a fast tempo may be indicative of happiness or anger, depending on other factors, and therefore happiness is communicated through a combination of multiple acoustic cues. Below we briefly review the acoustic cues that have been proposed to be important for conveying emotions.Temporal factors such as tempo, rhythm, and melodic contour have been shown to have a differential effect on perceived emotion. Tempo has been shown to have a large impact on perceived emotion (for a review see Gabrielsson & Lindstrom, 2010). Whereas some studies have found that tempo may exert a slightly bigger influence on emotion than mode (Gagnon & Peretz, 2003), other studies have found that the two are equally powerful overall (Juslin & Lindstrom, 2010). Lindstrom (2006) utilized computergenerated variations on the melody Frere Jacques where the rhythm, melodic contour, and direction were altered. Accent structure and rhythm were significant predictors of emotion, whereas there was little or no contribution by melodic direction and contour. Similarly, reversing ascending versus descending melody had a minimal effect on emotion (Hevner, 1936), while others (Collier & Hubbard, 2001a) find that pitch height and direction are important for expression of happiness.Harmony is also known to be an important factor in emotional expression. Lindstrom (2006) found that harmonic progression was a significant predictor of perceived emotion. Simple, consonant harmonies may be associated with expressions like happy, relaxed, graceful, serene, dreamy, dignified, serious, and majestic whereas complex dissonant harmonies may be associated with excitement, tension, vigor, anger, sadness, and unpleasantness (Gabrielsson & Lindstrom, 2010). Crowder (1984) found that major triads were perceived as happier than minor triads. Kastner and Crowder (1990) found that harmonic accompaniment diminished the perceived happiness and sadness of common practice major and minor melodies, respectively.Register and Interval Size are two additional contributors to musical emotion. Collier and Hubbard (2001a, b) found that higher pitch tones are rated as happier, brighter, and faster, and as speeding up more than tones at a lower pitch. …

The Tonic as Triad: Key Profiles as Pitch Salience Profiles of Tonic Triads

Major and minor triads emerged in western music in the 13th to 15th centuries. From the 15th to the 17th centuries, they increasingly appeared as final sonorities. In the 17th century, music-theoretical concepts of sonority, root, and inversion emerged. I propose that since then, the primary perceptual reference in tonal music has been the tonic triad sonority (not the tonic tone or chroma) in an experiential (not physical or notational) representation. This thesis is consistent with the correlation between the key profiles of Krumhansl and Kessler (1982; here called chroma stability profiles) and the chroma salience profiles of tonic triads (after Parncutt, 1988). Chroma stability profiles also correlate with chroma prevalence profiles (of notes in the score), suggesting an implication-realization relationship between the chroma prevalence profile of a passage and the chroma salience profile of its tonic triad. Convergent evidence from psychoacoustics, music psychology, the history of composition, and the history of music theory suggests that the chroma salience profile of the tonic triad guided the historical emergence of major-minor tonality and continues to influence its perception today.

Perception and acoustical analyzes of traditionally orchestrated musical structures versus non‐traditional counterparts.

Many studies use single‐tone or dyadic‐unison stimuli in the exploration of musical timbre. Musical contexts, however, often employ larger numbers of simultaneous voices. Recently, we have conducted perceptual/acoustical studies of consonance, dissonance, and roughness in multitimbral triads often finding that chord quality (major, minor, diminished, augmented) had perceptual primacy over timbre. The present research extends this work to include major and minor triads in similarity scaling, blend, and identification experiments. In addition, four‐tone chords were orchestrated according to procedures articulated in orchestration texts: juxtaposition, interlocking, enclosure, and overlapping. Sampled instrument tones (Sibelius/Kontakt) of oboe, flute, and clarinet were used, allowing comparison to previous research, and non‐traditional combinations with saxophone and trumpet were included. Triads with each tone assigned a different timbre provided nontraditional orchestrations to be compared and contrasted with traditional orchestrations that duplicated timbres within a chord. Perceptual data were correlated to acoustical analyzes of spectral distribution and time‐variancy.