Talk:Minor seventh

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[edit] Dissonance

Articles on intervals should contain information about their consonance and dissonance. Hyacinth 07:40, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

I like the revision a little better. The previous statement I found odd, speaking of "most dissonant" after three other intervals, when there are only twelve to begin with. However, it was really the first interval admitted as an extension to triadic harmony (Claudio Monteverdi caused a big stir by doing this, as I recall), and was used extensively in this way thereafter in Baroque and Classical music. Harmonically, it's also the next step in the harmonic series after that which admits thirds. In Blues music (and Armenian ethnic music, for example) it's treated plainly as a consonance.

What I'm trying to say is that dissonance is really contextual. Unless you're limiting discussion of the intervals to just intonation (where a mathematical model can be strong enough to assert some amount of universality), there's not really a good way to describe this interval's consonance or dissonance in a concise manner. Rainwarrior 18:45, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Explanation?

Could someone explain (in the article!) what the following means:

"A minor seventh is the smaller of two commonly occurring musical intervals that span seven diatonic scale degrees."

I understand roughly what major and minor sevenths are, but I don't understand what "span seven diatonic scale degrees" means here. I thought at first that it just meant seven notes in the scale, but that doesn't make sense because a "span of seven degrees" is then a single specific span that can result in only one note (namely the major seventh), not two as is claimed. Clarification is needed.

I realise I'm not explaining this in the article, but I'm feeling too lazy for that right now, so it's this or nothing from me: Consider the C major scale. If you take the seven note span from C to B, say, you have a major seventh. But if you take the seven note span from G to F, say, you have a smaller interval, and this interval is a minor seventh. So that's what the article means. How it's best clarified, I don't know. --Camembert 14:12, 4 December 2006 (UTC)