* It’s possible that wine number five did so well because the wine drinkers were just thinking more positively about everything after tasting all that wine. Perhaps more tests are required? And if so—can I come along?

* I’ll be explaining what major and minor keys are later in this chapter. For this part of the discussion it’s only necessary to know that the key of a piece of music is the team of notes being used for that piece. Major keys have a more tightly connected team than minor keys, and major keys are often associated with happiness in Western music. As we shall see, however, this is not always the case.

* The pleasant music was happy classical stuff. To make the unpleasant music, the researchers re-recorded the pleasant music twice, at different pitches. They then played all three versions at the same time. It sounds impressively awful, as you’ll hear if you go to: http://www.stefan-koelsch.de/Music_Emotion1.

* The stories are great, though. Have a look at the TV series with Kenneth Branagh—but don’t expect it to be a cheery evening’s viewing.

* In classical music terms, this piece is a “rondo” or “rondeau” (i.e., it has a main opening tune that it keeps returning to), but Purcell jokingly referred to this particular piece as a Round O. Benjamin Britten used the tune as the basis for his “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.”

* This principle will be discussed in more detail in chapters nine and twelve.

* The timbre of an instrument is the quality of the sound it makes. Low notes on a clarinet have a rich, warm timbre. A flute has a clear, pure timbre. The timbre of your voice can vary from warm and relaxed to anxious and stressed. Timbre is more fully described in section A under “Fiddly Details” at the back of this book.

* http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i= 212.

* One of my more recently discovered goose bump moments is in a track, “The Birds,” by the band Elbow (on the album Build a Rocket Boys!)—the synthesizer entry three minutes, twenty-five seconds into the track.

* People who have a high “openness to experience” rating tend to have above-average levels of active imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, and intellectual curiosity.

* For those of you who sang this song at school without ever being told what it’s about: Frère Jacques is a monk and we are singing to him to wake him up so he can ring (sonnez) the bell for morning prayers (les matines).

* The questionnaire is available in various forms and asks from twelve to sixty questions about how you’ve been feeling over the past few weeks.

* About half of the people in this age group have occasional sleeping problems, and a substantial proportion of them take hypnotic drugs to help them sleep (although none of the participants took these drugs during the test).

* My present favorite is an album called Cantabile by Nigel North.

* I’m going for “Blue, Red and Grey” by the Who.

* Actually, Albinoni might be music’s only no-hit wonder. There’s a good chance that “Albinoni’s” Adagio was actually written by Italian musicologist-composer Remo Giazotto in the 1950s.

* Whenever I give a talk about music, I have to begin by saying, “Before we start, I’d better point out that I’m not the John Powell—I’m just a John Powell.” This usually gets a laugh from most of the audience—but there are always a couple of people who look a bit disappointed. The disappointment doesn’t last long, however, because within seconds my bodyguards have them forcibly ejected from the auditorium and thrown out onto the street.

* Sandra Marshall composed the music for the experiment. The “weak” music used a major key at a moderate tempo and generally used only one note at a time. The “strong” music was in a minor key with a slow but accelerating tempo and more than one note at a time.

* The Congruence-Association Model, or CAM. For Professor Cohen’s full description of the model, read chapter two of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia, ed. Siu-Lan Tan, Annabel Cohen, Scott Lipscombe, and Roger Kendall (Oxford University Press, 2013).

* If you’re wondering how long that is, it takes about a quarter of a second to say the word “it.”

* Goldwyn was reputed to be a rich source of one-liners, including “Include me out” and “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” But the work-luck line isn’t completely original. It’s a paraphrase of a quote from Thomas Jefferson, who said, “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

* Sound waves with pressure ripples below twenty times a second are known as subsonic. Vibrations above twenty thousand times a second are ultrasonic.

* The note “middle A” or “A₄ ”—which has a frequency of 440 vibrations per second.

* Actually it’s one second divided by the frequency of 110 Hz (9. 0909 milliseconds), but we’ll use the approximate value of nine milliseconds for this discussion.

* Actually 4. 5454 milliseconds.

* If you want to know more about this “bouncing back” rule (including why it doesn’t work in “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”) have a look at “Fiddly Details,” section B, “Post-Skip Reversal.”

* One of my favorite older-newer pairs is Chopin’s “Berceuse” and Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece.”

* If you’d like to know how we choose the accompanying chords and harmonies for tunes, you’ll find more information in “Fiddly Details,” section C, “Harmonizing a Tune.”

* If you’d like a bit more explanation about how we get to this huge number, please read “Fiddly Details,” part D, “How Many Tunes Are Hidden in the Harmony?”

* As I explained in chapter nine, the cycle time of a note is the amount of time it takes to complete one cycle of its particular air pressure ripple pattern. The number of these cycles that can fit into a second is the frequency of the note. If a note has a cycle time of one hundredth of a second, then its frequency is 100 Hz.

* You’ll find a bit more detail about how scales are put together in “Fiddly Details,” section E, “Scales and Keys.”

* Fixed-note instruments (keyboards, harps, marimbas, etc.) have all their notes tuned to the equal temperament (ET) scale, and the pitch of the notes can’t be changed by the performer. On a completely variable-pitch instrument (violin, cello, slide trombone, etc.), you can play any pitch you like within the range of the instrument. On partially variable-pitch instruments (flute, saxophone, guitar, etc.), the player has a limited ability to alter (bend) the pitch of the standard notes for the instrument while playing.

* For example, if you organized your Just tuning around the note of C, then most of the key of C major would work out very nicely, but the key of F sharp major would have lots of mismatched combinations that would sound out of tune.

* Pure tones are computer-generated notes with a very clean (though rather boring) sound. For more details, see “Fiddly Details,” section A, “Timbre.”

* None of the notes that make up an F major chord are members of the key of B major.

* As usual I’m generalizing here. There are lots of exceptions to the observational “rules” I present in this chapter.

* Just to make life extra difficult, “andantino” has two meanings: slightly faster or slightly slower than walking speed. You just have to guess which one the composer had in mind.

* Dance music needs a repetitive beat so you can coordinate your movements to it. J. S. Bach and some other composers often build up elaborate interweaving patterns that require the clarity of a steady beat.

* For more information on timbre, see “Fiddly Details,” section A.

* Some of the bigger harpsichords have two keyboards that have different sounds, to make things more interesting, but the basic problem is still there.

* See “Fiddly Details,” section A, for further details.

* For more about how this works, see “Fiddly Details,” section C, “Harmonizing a Tune.”

* If you want a great introduction to world music, I recommend Real World 25, which is available as a three-CD boxed set or MP3 download. You’ll find a list of suggestions for listening and watching in all sorts of genres at the back of the book—but this is the one I’d recommend most of all.

* Not forgetting all you fathers, sisters, brothers, etc.

* If any of you are in this quandary, you might find the selection of albums from various musical genres at the back of this book useful.

* It’s also known as a “sine wave.”

* For an example of earlier theories, see L. B. Meyer, Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations (University of Chicago Press, 1978).

* C₃, C₄, and C₅ played together would not be a chord because, as far as harmony is concerned, notes with the same letter name are similar to one another. For a chord you need three or more different letter names (C, E, and G, for example).

* The same principle works for any major key.

* Once a chord has been inverted it is no longer named after its lowest note. If you want to find its name, then you need to un-invert it back to its simplest form—as explained at the beginning of this section—and then identify the lowest note.

* I’ve used very simple arpeggio patterns here, but you can present the notes of the chord in any order, with any rhythm, and the technique still works.

* Capital letters mean that we want a major chord. Minor chords have a lowercase “m” or “min” after the capital letter, like this: Am or Amin.

* To keep things simple I’m writing here as if everything is written in C major, but this progression works in any key as long as you use the appropriate chords for that key. For example, if the song is in the key of E major, the progression would be E major, B major, C sharp minor, and A major.

* Those of you who enjoy juggling numbers might like this proof of things not always working out in the Just system. The distance between note 1 and note 3 in a major scale is four semitones, and the distance between note 1 and note 8 is twelve semitones. So three times the four-semitone jump should equal the octave: ⅘ x ⅘ x ⅘ should equal ½. But if you do the calculation, you’ll find that the answer (0. 512) is slightly more than ½.

* For example, if A has a frequency of 110 Hz, then the note one semitone up (which we call either A sharp or B flat) has a frequency of 110 multiplied by 1.059463, which is 116.54 Hz. The next note up, B, will have a frequency of 116.54 multiplied by 1.059463, which is 123.47 Hz, and so on.