its not the pale moon that excites me chords

Is the following a chord? The two half-notes in the first bar are most definitely chords, but would you say it ends on a non-chord?Ĭonsider your context and make up your own mind. Is this a chord? Is it major, minor or suspended? Cluster chord? If you heard that played, would you say you heard a chord? Did you hear one pitch or multiple pitches? Regardless of instrument? If you sample this, can you play melodies with it? Can you play other chords with it? What is your context? When is it justifiable to call something a chord? Will doing that labeling be good or bad for your intentions? unless you keep playing the F note for so long that in your mind you move your bed and fridge there. If you only hear a single F note, it doesn't leave room for imagining this - you are not at home with any stretch of imagination. Or at least a plain C note that leaves room for imagining the C major around it. You want to hear a C major to make yourself feel that you returned home. If you hear an F major chord as the set of currently sounding notes, but in your mind you've established C major as the tonic position and shape, then you feel that you're not at home. It is powerful in terms of timbre and for putting more weight to its root note. The so-called 'power chord' is actually a weak harmonic device, not harmonically powerful at all.

That's a very weak harmonic device! Definitely not a bulldozer. When you have one or two or three or a thousand different sounding C notes, even the whole mass of them only says 'there is a C', that's all.

(plus, the lowest note is an extra feature, but IMO that's not relevant for the chord vs non-chord question) It says three things: (1) there is a C, (2) there is an E, and (3) there is a G. If you have a chord C, E, G, you can voice it in many ways by spreading the notes in different octaves, and it will create a different sound, but harmonically it still only does the same thing any C major triad does. The set of octaves and that kind of spacing has more to do with timbre than harmony. It doesn't say which octave, because there are no octaves in the harmonic context. A single note, say, C, can only explicate 'C'. The harmonic context around the tonic is defined in a space of one single octave. is the harmonic position and shape of the set of currently sounding notes sitting on the tonic and in the home shape, or is it away from the tonic in some way, or in a non-home shape. (2) what is the expected harmony, i.e.

When you listen to music, your ear constantly tries to keep track of a few important things: Chords are harmonic bulldozers compared to single-note shovels. Chords are capable of explicating more features per time unit than a single-voice melody line, so they have more harmonic expressive power. (The 'is' word is called a copula (linguistics) and your question is basically a general request for explanations about the problem domain where the word 'chord' is used - and the answers better be focused around sentences about doing, not other copulas) What does a chord do?Ĭhords explicate, bring out several features about the harmonic context at the same time. If you encounter something that doesn't do those things, then you shouldn't call it a chord in that sense.

Its not the pale moon that excites me chords