...Niels J. Verosky Scales from divergent musical cultures tend to have both intuitive structural similarities and one common functional property: within a given scale, each note takes on a unique shade of meaning in the context of the scale as a whole. It may be that certain structural traits...

...Daphne Tan; David Temperley In a prior study (Temperley & Tan, 2013), participants rated the “happiness” of melodies in different diatonic modes. A strong pattern was found, with happiness decreasing as scale steps were lowered. We wondered: Does this pattern reflect the familiarity of diatonic...

...) with a constant tonic of C; all pairs of modes were used. The results suggest that modes imply increasing happiness as scale-degrees are raised, with the exception of Lydian, which is less happy than Ionian. Overall, the results are best explained by familiarity: Ionian (major mode), the most common mode in both...