Why does it sound different? Well, the Moonlight uses up quite a bit of keyboard. It can’t be played on a five octave 61 key organ style keyboard, for example. And, the ear doesn’t have the same response up and down the scale. Three octaves below A 440 is only 55 Hz. That’s near the lower limit of human hearing.

This summer he published “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton), a layperson’s guide to the emerging neuroscience of music. Dr. Levitin is an unusually deft interpreter, full of striking scientific trivia. For example we learn that babies begin life with synesthesia, the trippy confusion that makes people experience sounds as smells or tastes as colors. Or that the cerebellum, a part of the brain that helps govern movement, is also wired to the ears and produces some of our emotional responses to music. His experiments have even suggested that watching a musician perform affects brain chemistry differently from listening to a recording.

“At the beginning of the 17th century, Michael Praetorius reported in his encyclopedic Syntagma musicum that pitch levels had become so high that singers were experiencing severe throat strain and lutenists and viol players were complaining of snapped strings [...] At La Scala in Milan, the A above middle C rose as high as 451 Hz.”

-cvj

Do you like any modes, outside of the regular major and minor scales?

In the past, I liked playing around with modes like Phrygian, Phrygian Dominant, and Locrian.

Locrian has sort of a weird sound I like. It’s missing a major 5th interval.

One time I tried playing a 7-string guitar with all the strings tuned down a half step, where the extra (low) B string was tuned to B flat. It sounded kind of odd at first. It seemed like the sort of sound which takes an acquired taste to get use to, whether something was played in B flat major or minor. In contrast on a normal six string guitar, it’s always tempting to play in the key of E major or minor. (Or with all the six strings tuned down a half step, E flat major or minor).