changing major song to minor/vice versa

Again I don’t think that’s a fair comparison.

Listening to music is not about listening to individual chords any more than eating food is about eating individual ingredients.

There is an equivalent with food when people are given a sauce or a composed dish and asked to identify the individual ingredients that have gone to make up the flavour. Chefs will normally pass this test because they have to understand the tools of their trade. Critics and ordinary diners often won’t, because they just have to understand and respond to how the finished dish tastes.

1 Like

thread got interesting, gonna have to pull a few thoughts together and might take me ages

1 Like

I agree it is quite an extreme example. It’s not really about technical knowledge, more just being able to tell apart two things that are obviously different (even if you don’t know why or what they are called).

I consider myself pretty close to tone deaf yet I can tell major and minor chords apart about 90% of the time (as I know having been to guitar lessons with my son when he was little).

I stand by my basic position that you don’t need to have any technical musical knowledge at all to write meaningfully about the experience of listening to music though.

3 Likes

Personally I would much rather read someone talking about the emotional impact of a piece of music than about the time signature or the key changes, but each to their own.

2 Likes