Like everyone else who grew up during the heyday of the show and has since had to deal with countless reruns over the last 25 years, I have heard the Friends theme song roughly a billion times. I’m ...

It’s a mysterious thing. Why do songs sound happy or sad depending on whether they’re in a major or minor key? Mathematically the two are barely distinguishable. A song in C major uses the same notes ...

"In Western music, there's nothing that says 'sad' like a minor key," explains the Exploratorium science museum. You don't have to be up on your music theory — or have synesthesia — to recognize when ...

This is our second story in our series on the characteristics of musical keys. We started with the “people’s key,” C major. From there it’s an easy skip to D, the root of today’s subject, the “saddest ...

Each piece of music, be it a song, symphony or concerto, is written in a specific ‘key’. But what do we mean when we refer to a musical key, why are there 24 of them, and how do composers choose which ...

A secondary key used to identify a record. For example, if transactions are sorted by account number and date, account number is the major key and date is the minor key. THIS DEFINITION IS FOR ...

Why do tunes in a major key, such as Singin’ in the Rain, sound cheerful, while those in minor keys – Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, say – sound gloomy and depressing? The answer – in part – ...

Whether you mean to or not, you’ll almost inevitably work in a particular key when writing a song. You might decide “right, this will be in C minor,” or you might just string together a seemingly ...

Rickey Minor (above), who's moving from "Idol" to "Tonight," thinks Harry Connick Jr. should replace Simon Cowell as a judge on the Fox show. “Tonight Show” fans will see a “new” face Monday night, ...