From music cognition researchers to casual listeners of music, many have asked the question of why certain notes or chords make us feel the way they do. While this experiment does not decipher the why of the question, it does indicate similarities across people in the emotions evoked by certain chords.

David Huron’s 2008 study described in his chapter “Tonality” in Sweet Perception, while providing an interesting starting point for tracking the similarities between people in the descriptive adjectives that come to mind upon hearing certain notes (in the case of Huron, scale degrees), certainly leaves something to be desired.

The experiment detailed below was intended as both an extended attempt to reproduce the Huron experiment with a few variants –– examining diatonic chords in the major scale instead of scale degrees –– and also as a rebuttal to Huron’s assertion that all produced descriptive adjectives are independent from terms learned in the Western-classical music theory classroom.
The 60-participant study had two main objectives:
Explore whether similar results would be obtained when participants were tested on diatonic chords in the major scale instead of scale degrees (as in the Huron).

Examine whether the overwhelming consistency Huron found in the descriptor for tonic as (home) is reproducible in a study with a large number of both musician and nonmusician participants and truly unrelated to theory terms that are taught, thereby eliminating the possibility of a learned association.

The experiment detailed in this report is an attempt to expand the study of evoked descriptors from the realm of scale degrees to that diatonic chords and examine one possible instance of influence from musical training on selected descriptors.