Do music chords affect human moods?
Consonant chords sound harmonious and pleasing to Western ears, while dissonant chords sound clash and create a sense of tension. It has been proven that the amount of sound or dissonance in an agreement affects a person's mood, and there are some studies that show that even amusing people recognize dissonant chords as “sad” and consonant as “happy” sounding. There is no need for explicit music knowledge to recognize the difference; the degree of dissonance in a piece of music has shown to create biochemical effects in the listener associated with various pleasant and unpleasant emotional states.
Consonant and Dissonant
The effect of consonant and dissonant chords on the listener has been recognized in Western music at least since the Greek mathematician Pythagoras in the 5th century BC. Recent psychological research has shown that even 4-month-old infants prefer dissonant music. However, scientists are not yet sure whether the recognition is a learned or inherent feature, because studies on people from non-Western cultures have different results, and studies on non-human species such as chimpanzees and chicks are also unconvincing.
