I heard there was a scary chord…

October 31, 2018 6:35 PM

During the 19th century, composers like Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner cracked the code of creepiness. The sonic dread they pioneered involved two key ingredients that horror movies and metal bands still use today: a forbidden sequence of notes known as “Satan in music,” and a spooky little ditty that Gregorian monks sang about the apocalypse. ♫ Cue unsettling chord. ♫
posted by Johnny Wallflower (24 comments total)

The original metal tritone!
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 7:09 PM on October 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

Okay, what exactly IS that "forbidden sequence of notes"? There's no link, and a quick search of youtube just takes me to evangelical fearmongering about the music industry. Feh
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 7:19 PM on October 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

I do not like this. It's written in a way that implies some kind of religious prohibition on tritones, but AFAIK diabolus in musica is meant to be taken metaphorically. Yes, manuals on harmony and counterpoint counselled avoiding it because it was perceived to be dissonant, but they didn't treat it as literally demonic and they discussed ways to use it effectively (citation). This breathless gee-whiz write-up goes too far and is pop musicology done wrong IMO.

At least spell diabolus correctly.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:26 PM on October 31, 2018 [5 favorites]

what exactly IS that "forbidden sequence of notes"

The tritone (i.e. an interval of three whole tones), which has historically been regarded as unpleasant or even diabolical (in western music, anyway).
posted by jedicus at 7:27 PM on October 31, 2018

The Dies Irae even shows up in Star Wars, ever so briefly, when Luke finds the bodies of his uncle and aunt
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:31 PM on October 31, 2018

AFAIK diabolus in musica is meant to be taken metaphorically

Tell it to Thomas Mann!
posted by praemunire at 7:35 PM on October 31, 2018 [3 favorites]

Coming into music school with this little bit of folk apocrypha in your head is kind of a surreal experience, because in the course of studying Western musical history you find plenty of melodic tritone leaps in music starting from at least the thirteenth century. Granted, care is taken to resolve them properly, but that's true of literally every dissonance (ignoring liberties taken in "free" textures). So, yeah, this sort of writing is a little irritating. Plus, for my money, the non-diatonic minor ninth is a much more unsettling interval (at least in a tonal context), but maybe my ears are just so used the tritone as a primarily functional dissonance that the original qualia of it have been lost to me.
posted by invitapriore at 7:35 PM on October 31, 2018 [9 favorites]

Thanks for the lucid commentary, guys! As always, the comments here are much more interesting than the original article. I also found this fascinating Youtube link about the tritone, which explains the technical aspects in more detail, as well as expanding on the fact that the tritone wasn't "taboo in medieval times," as per the linked blog.
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 7:41 PM on October 31, 2018 [4 favorites]

This is authoritatively discussed in episode 6 of Look Around You at 5:45.
posted by boilermonster at 8:02 PM on October 31, 2018 [5 favorites]

I think the Tritone is prominent in the Futurama theme.

Demonic music (violent gossip/weird chords) often tends to flow towards Carlo Gesualdo. There's a Herzog film.
posted by ovvl at 8:27 PM on October 31, 2018

One of the most complete, tied-up-with-a-bow examples of the tritone may be Tartini's Devil's Trill Sonata. The sonata starts out pretty, drops some dread around two minutes, returning to it again and again between the lovely bits, then starting around 13 minutes in, it gets pretty metal. (Yes, Tartini was my gateway drug to the Baroque when I briefly tired of punk and Eno when I was a teen.)

This article from Luka Osborne goes into more detail, including a little guide on how you can play the tritone. Also re Tartini:

The baroque composer Guiseppie Tartini is famed for cementing the Faustian legend in music. He claimed the devil appeared to him in a “dream” and kindly played him a beautiful violin sonata. ... The violin sonata that Tartini scribbled down, formed the now classic Devils Sonata or The Devil’s Trill Sonata, and yes, it contains many tritones. Tartini actually advocated the use of a specifically tuned tritone called the lesser septimal tritone which is tuned lower to the ratio of 7:5, and sounds slightly more resolved. This particular piece is most likely where the tritone began its descent into darkness.

posted by maudlin at 9:07 PM on October 31, 2018 [7 favorites]

I think the Tritone is prominent in the Futurama theme.

I don't remember it there but it is definitely strong in The Simpsons theme
posted by thelonius at 5:21 AM on November 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

The diatonic tritone formed by the seventh and third degrees of the major scale is the primary engine of tension and release in western music. It sounds a bit spooky on its own, but it was never "forbidden"--in fact, its harmonically indispensible.
posted by The Horse You Rode In On at 8:03 AM on November 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

Specifically, the resolution of the tritone to the tonic major third is the primary fact of western functional harmony; the whole structure is more-or-less built out from there.
posted by The Horse You Rode In On at 8:07 AM on November 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

It's exactly half an octave chromatically, and an antipode long the circle of fourths or fifths. When you're in the key of C, then F# is as far away as you can get from "home".

(Some musicians have played with this, like Ben Folds Five's "Ballad of Who Could Care Less", which immediately starts in a G chord, then moves to F, E-flat, D-flat (the tritone), and C-flat, aka B major, and at that point you're actually closer if you continue "going around the world" via E, A, D back to G.)
posted by kurumi at 8:40 AM on November 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Specifically, the resolution of the tritone to the tonic major third is the primary fact of western functional harmony; the whole structure is more-or-less built out from there.

This is good-natured quibbling and I'm mostly just taking the opportunity to nerd out, but I think this isn't quite true: the dominant tritone's resolution is a nearly equal partner to the 5-1 movement in the bass as a means of signaling resolution or phrase termination. I'm not one to base the workings of Western functional harmony in the overtone series as a way of justifying its workings (although I'm sure that those overtones contribute to our sense of its function), but it doesn't hurt that the fifth is the first non-tonic overtone in that series, and that the fifth's own first three (unique) overtones constitute the tones of the dominant triad. You can generalize that notion to explain the effectiveness of descending fifth sequences, whose legacy from the common practice period continues well into show tunes and jazz, where rhythm changes are an instance of a brief descending-fifths sequence. Despite appealing to overtones, I'm quite sure that this is mostly a culturally-determined syntax, since we have a few centuries' worth of music where resolution was entirely signaled by the major sixth between the 2 and the 7 resolving to the octave (in the spirit of this post, I remember one of my music history TAs finding that technique to be decidedly creepy-sounding). In conclusion, music is a land of contrasts.
posted by invitapriore at 8:21 PM on November 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Especially considering that, like kurumi notes, the tritone polarity along the circle of fifths between e.g. C major and F# major also the B-F tritone is enharmonic with the B-E# tritone, the ambiguity of which enables the lovely tritone substitution technique.
posted by invitapriore at 8:56 PM on November 1, 2018

Although given that wormhole between the two tonal centers, I might venture to suggest that C major is more distant from Cb or C# than it is from F#, although it's hard to quantify when all three of those remote keys share the same number of scale tones (two) in common.
posted by invitapriore at 8:58 PM on November 1, 2018

The Dies Irae even shows up in Star Wars, ever so briefly, when Luke finds the bodies of his uncle and aunt

Rey's theme appears to be based on the Dies Irae as well.
posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were at 9:07 PM on November 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Is there anywhere online that I can, like, click something and *just* hear a tritone? Maybe my reading comprehension is just crap tonight, but all the examples in the article seem to be "imagine this piece of music" or "here's a link to an entire youtube video that features a tritone somewhere in it." Even the videos with time stamps or descriptions of a passage aren't that helpful, because I'm not sure exactly what I'm supposed to be listening for. The most useful illustration (I think) for me is the "Maria" link; is the tritone the interval between the notes of "I" and the first syllable of "ever" at about 1:14 in this youtube video?
posted by Meow Face at 9:10 PM on November 1, 2018

Well, if you find a YouTube video of the Simpsons theme, the first interval that the voices saying "The Simpsons" sing is a tritone.
posted by invitapriore at 9:12 PM on November 1, 2018

MetaFilter: mostly just taking the opportunity to nerd out
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:48 PM on November 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

Audio of a tritone:

European siren
Tritone paradox (I hear a descending pattern)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:01 PM on November 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

Thanks!

Also, that tritone paradox stuff is bizarre (I hear an ascending pattern)!
posted by Meow Face at 11:18 PM on November 1, 2018