A perceptual study investigated the ability of scale degrees to evoke qualia, and the impact of harmonic context in shaping a scale degree’s qualia. In addition, the following questions were addressed: What role does music training have in shaping qualia? Are listeners consistent in their descriptions? Are experiences similar across participants, or are they individual and subjective? Listeners with or without music-theoretic training were asked to rate the qualia of scale degrees following various chord progressions, each ending with a different final harmony. Scale degrees were found to exhibit relatively consistent musical qualia; however, the local chord context was found to significantly influence qualia ratings. In general, both groups of listeners were found to be fairly consistent in their ratings of scale-degree qualia; however, as expected, musician listeners were more consistent than nonmusician listeners. Finally, a subset of the musical qualia ratings were compared against Krumhansl and Kessler’s (1982) scale-degree “profiles.” While profiles created from the present data, overall, were correlated with the K&K profiles, their claim that tonal stability accounts for the high ratings ascribed to tonic triad members was found to be better explained by the effect of the local chord context.

A fundamental assumption of distributional key-finding methods is that the frequency distributions of pitch classes in all keys are transpositionally equivalent. We tested this assumption with three experiments. First, using data from the openings of 995 major-key pieces and 596 minor-key pieces in the Yale-Classical Archives Corpus, we found that scale-degree distributions differ significantly from one key to another, and further analysis revealed that pieces keys with signatures having relatively more accidentals exhibit significantly more chromaticism than keys with fewer accidentals. Second, we examined whether these data might be accounted for by different keys’ varying modulation tendencies, and found this to be the case: keys with more accidentals modulate more frequently to more distant keys. Finally, we attempted to exclude modulatory passages from our data using a key profile analysis to identify key and mode within our dataset; however, the results of Experiment 1 still held. In sum, even when using a method that assumes transpositional equivalence, we found a difference between key profiles of different keys.