An interesting experiment is to ask people how many chords there are in music. You’ll be surprised to find out that most musicians don’t do any better at answering that question than non-musicians.

Why do you suppose is that?

It is probably because it sounds like one of those questions such as “How many grains of sand on the seashore are there?”, or “How many stars are there in the sky?”

And in a sense it is, but in another sense, we can get a fairly accurate sense of chord population just by calculating all the chord types and then multiplying them by the number of inversions that are possible and the number of octaves that are possible on any given instrument.

Article continued at:

http://www.playpiano.com/Articles/29-howmanychords.htm

Tags: Chords, music, piano

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Chords & chord progressions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.