The Devil in music (an untold history of the Tritone) 

My first guitar teacher was the first person I met who was a dangerously badass looking dude and an intellectual. As well as being an amazing musician. During my first lesson he said to me, "Minor doesn't have to sound sad, the tritone doesn't have to sound evil, and pop music doesn't have to be liked." That had a major impact on me later in my life when I understood what he meant! Also Adam, best video yet!

Instruction unclear, accidentally summoned a demon

What if the Tri-tone legend was actually just a mideval meme and we took it seriously...

Aren't Link and Zelda always looking for the tritone

"The tritone was not banned in the Middle Ages." My life is a lie

His background colour is more creepy than the music

Tritone: ☑️Dissonant ☑️Unstable ☑️Small ☑️May summon the devil if provoked ☑️Unpleasant ☑️Left out "You know, I'm something of a tritone myself."

When a tritone is played, it is hard to tell if it goes up or down due to the scale. That's actually what makes it "evil", it can confuse.

I failed badly at learning music theory because there was no context to the course material. It was like trying to learn a foreign language, without ever being told what the words you are learning actually mean. Your channel changes all that.

I have to admit, when I saw the title, I thought: 'Oh god, here we go again - another repetition of this tired anecdote '. But then I thought 'Adam wouldn't phone it in like that'... and you didn't.

"tritones are disonant and unstable" Me too music me too..

So....."The Devil in the music...." is more like the common phrase today "the devil in the details" since in the way back days, saying "This tri tone thing is a hell of a thing to work with when composing music!" would not have been said or written since "hell" was not a word to be lightly used in "polite" society or around children. This was a wonderful video and i thank you for making it and sharing!

Not to detract from the value of the lesson, but, I like the lighting in this video a lot.

More like this please! I very much enjoy these deep dives into specific concepts.

*What the hell is going on? Why have I been summoned?*

Yeah, the song "Black Sabbath" from the album Black Sabbath by the band Black Sabbath is a great track. I also like the song "Motorhead" from the album Motorhead by the band Motorhead.

My dm had a devil character called Tritone, who possessed and lived as a bard. And just now i got the reference

"its used on police sirens because of its..." yup definitely evil

love how the first metal song was pretty much nothing but the tritone played in the most sinister way possible.

2:00 repeated over and over on the internet 3:14 hexachords C F G 4:12 semantic shift Dante Liszt Used in police sirens 6:25 satie sought to achieve boredom in music 7:25 Tartini, the devil, and the blues 8:35 blue note = lesser septimal tritone

This is not the greatest violin sonata in the world, no. This is just a tribute...

guns can't stop the devil but the word of the lord can put him on the run

I got to the page about tritones in "Your Brain On Music" (Levitin) and searched it here for supplementary material. Was really happy to see you'd covered this. The use of the tritone in blues never would've occurred to me, thank you for including that. You are the music theory hero we all need but don't deserve. Please never stop making these! 🧠💥

Wow what a great job you’ve done explaining “The Devils Third”. I learned of this years ago in reference to Black Sabbath but I could never find anything more on the topic and believed like many others that it had been banned in medieval times. Thanks for clearing up so much of the history, how it’s applied in music (besides just Black Sabbath references) and giving examples in a multitude of music genres and historical applications. Well done!

Hi Adam, you are a music theorist with an interest in cognitive science and I am a cognitive (neuro)scientist with an interest in music theory - I've been watching everything you publish and I'd like to take this chance to say a huge thanks! I've been meaning to write to you for a while to suggest a tritone video and I like the direction you took it but I thought you would find the scientific literature interesting also. In the late '60s Roger Shepard developed "Shepard tones" composed of ten octave-related harmonics constrained by a Gaussian amplitude envelope (loudest sounds in the middle of the scale). These create a series of cool illusions that might be a great video in their own right such as eternally ascending sounds used by Godspeed you Black Emperor, Pink Floyd and others. It turns out, thanks in the late '80s to Diana Deutsch's research at UCSD that when you play a pair of these back to back which are built on scale degrees a tritone apart people either hear an upward pitch motion or a downward but not both. This is called the tritone paradox and has to do with the brain's process of binding of co-occurring sounds into single sources. I.e. because the sounds all hit us at the same time we perceive there to be only one instrument and we assume all available sounds are a part of the same overtone series (this is in itself a pretty cool branch of acoustic neuroscience). Here is Deutsch's website with some examples: philomel.com/mp3/musical_illusions/Tritone_paradox.mp3 Deutsch continued to expriment and found that each individual hears some tritone-related shepard tone pairs as ascending and some as descending and this is consistent, differs between individuals, is correlated with region, etc. lots of cool stuff. Here's where I come in. In 2011 I was preparing to conduct an EEG neuroscience thesis for my degree at Reed College in Oregon. I had been looking into the literature on bistable images (like the necker cube, a wire-frame cube which can be seen as having either of two faces as the front) and wondered whether there was such a thing as a bistable sound. I found the tritone paradox and with a little modification I was able to adapt it for EEG. The neuroscience research on bistable images is extensive but to my knowledge this was the first attempt on the auditory system. We found exactly what we were hoping for, signals which were analogous to the visual signals with slightly different scalp distributions, and we proved that the tritone paradox is a true bisatable sound along the way. Why is this relevent to your devil theme? Well to do the experiment I put 20 of my friends into a dark, low-ceiling, faraday cage of a room and played each of them the tritone paradox 300+ times while they stared for hours at a white + sign on a black computer screen. Not fun. The work was later expanded, refined and published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. You can check it out here; graydavidson.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Davidson-Pitts-EEG-Neuroscience-Bistable.pdf Thanks for taking the time to read this and feel free to contact me if you're ever in need of some deeper neuroscience type research!

Props for making a 9min 59sec video without stretching it to 10min

So actually, Jazz is the devil’s music.

Every one of your videos impresses me. You've got some serious theoretical mastery. I absolutely love watching them!

Music Vsauce

vsauce, devil here

I came looking for plain and straight examples of the tritone throughout history...and Adam you delivered, mate! Thank you and good work.

Textbook 10min lecture; filled with cold hard facts, a few anecdotes and multimedia examples. Lots to learn here people! (I have an MA in Renaissance vocal polyphony, and I learned some stuff today)

Frank Zappa loved to use tritones in humorous ways. And he was real good at it as well. Especially in his later synclavier pieces - many songs on Civilization Phase 3 for example. Or sometimes his used to twist things up in little happy ways with tritones, like in his piece The Girl In The Magnesium Dress. No evilness for miles!

Dat cat! 0:55 - 1:01

This was super interesting- I saw a comment of the “devils chord” via the behind the lyrics section on the song ‘ghost town’. You explained perfectly what that was!

You’re great at explaining things and really enjoyed watching!

advocates for a broader perception of the tritone, has a devilish red background😂😇

As a lecturer in music theory and professional musician, what a delight to hear someone who actually knows what they're talking about. This is sadly a rare event on the internet, where music is concerned.

Very thorough explanation and (brief) examination of the subject. The amount of information given on the topic was impressive and appreciated. As were the all of the additional bits of historical facts surrounding this mysterious item called the Tritone. So thank you.

This is by far the best treatment of the subject anywhere on the InterWebs! Thank you for the research.

I'm just going to enrol in University get a masters degree in music so I can understand what the hell you're going on about I'll be back in 3 years

The Lydian mode! It adds sooo much beauty and mystery to the music!

I love how you dive into cultural history besides being a formidable music theory channel! Chapeau.

Well, I just had to like to like your video because week you really do know what you're talking about... It's hard to find someone who knows what they're talking about on RU-vid... Good work

It’s about creating a frequency with an instrument to open mental and spiritual changes which can allow negative and positive effects. Sound is powerful and seeing is believing.

"What will you do with the tritone?" yah, imma make a song so dissonant that the tritone will actually be resolving

This was really good and well researched! As a guitarist I always heard the tritone was “banned” in Medieval times too. Damn, they lied to me - fake news! Thanks for your excellent presentation of the topic, I learned a lot! Never realized the “blue note” in the blues scale (which is the basis of blues / rock / pop guitar) creates a 7:5 tritone - the guitar geek in me finds that fascinating. That explains the dissonant, but not too dissonant, unresolved quality of the blue note.

Thanks for this -- well written and perfect delivery -- I learned and enjoyed! Much appreciated.

My favourite use of the tritone interval is in the opening to One-Winged Angel; or Sephiroth's Theme. So the tritone might not summon the devil IRL but it does in the Final Fantasy universe.

The thing about tritones in Renaissance counterpoint is not it was banned for being "evil", indeed, but because in the diatonic modal system it shouldn't be supposed to exist. There is no such thing as augmented intervals on the period, and the tritone is an augmented interval that >was part of the modes

Dude. RU-vid officially can read my thoughts. I was doing interval training and notice how ridiculously dark and mysterious the Tri tone was, then this video was in my recommended.

Fun fact: Azula's chime sound in ATLA is a tritone

Aa-Dam-Nee-Ly For-got-da-introoo-OO. Cool vid by the way. Keep it up!!

Satan was the Minister of music in Heaven before he fell.

Nice video man, it is a great tribute to the awesomest interval!

by far the most intriguing video ive come across in a long time woww

Tritones are used all throughout gospel music. Especially the traditional gospel music

yeah, but what about the brown note?

I don't even know how I ever ended up here but this channel is just.. wow..

Well crafted video, I clicked here to learn more than needed about tritones, mission accomplished.. Just like your video on the Girl from Ipanema.

Apparently gothic music used quite alot of it. Its just hard to sing.

I have no idea what this guy is saying...but I found it so interesting I watched the whole thing! Great job!

Your videos are so inspiring... Thank you for that !!!

I love the science of music. Thank you for uploading this!!

"especially crunchy" I've never heard a better way to describe something (':

He showed a picture saying demagogue used to mean popular leader and now means tyrant which is funny because tyrant underwent a similar shift. It used to just mean king, and became associated with people like Oedipus and a lot of Darius I who gave it a bad name.

This was brilliantly well explained and interesting ... nice job

In indian culture they consider the tritone a sweet and charming note. For example is a really strong note in raga yaman, the first raga the student learn.

I live two blocks away from a railroad and it's surprising how many trains use the tritone as its horn. Everytime I start to feel a little unconfortable at home... I realise that a tritone is coming... :P

Amazingly well done video on this subject....thank you Adam

I love this channel extremely

EXCELLENT VIDEO! Thanks Adam!

When I was doing my bachelors while learning to recognize intervals by ear the teacher used simple classic to make it easier and the “song” used The Simpson’s theme song intro which after being a mega simpsons fan when I was younger made it even more evil and I thought it was crazy the tritone was there, at the intro, like they thought about everything! Cool stuff sir!

The intro of Converge "The Saddest Day"...

It's amazing what a key change can do for a piece of music. The Animals version of "House of the Rising Sun" is a good example that comes to mind.

Very interesting Adam, though I'm completely untrained in music theory this was great and thanks for breaking it down into language that one of my lacking abilities can understand. New sub here.

A tritone can sound beautiful if played in lydian mode

Next you'll be telling us Paganini was buried in hallowed ground. Party-pooper! Hey while we're on outrageous stories from the crypt of classical music, is it a myth that Chopin only shaved the side of his face that would be seen in a recital? Dude must have looked really rad walking around with half a beard!

I Dont know anything what you are saying but hearing your explanations i feel that i need to learn music really deeply

Awesome stuff, always great to see misinformation getting corrected.

Adam neely the content cop of music

I Fux with this.

I actually like the sound of the tritone quite a lot, especially when it's used creatively. Glad to hear I'm not some Satan-worshipping demon-summoning hellchild because of it.

I actually been trying to find this song for 2 years... Thank you.

The devil got outplayed by a guy named Johny when he went down to Georgia looking for a soul to steal !!

So the Devil lied to me about the tritone? 👿 Damn... I want my soul back! 😤

So I just found you accidentally. You are an extremely intelligent informative and entertaining person. I learn things that I never knew existed. Thank you

Found this video after looking for any discussion of the tritones in DC Talk's Jesus Freak (around three and a half minutes into the song), very glad I did. Fascinating!

Hi Adam - great video as usual. Have you heard of the Tritone Paradox? It's an auditory illusion where 2 Shepard tones, separated by a tritone, are played one after the other. Some people hear the 1st as being higher in pitch than the 2nd, some people will hear the 2nd being higher than the 1st.

For FUX's sake, tritone isn't the devil of music.

Really very interesting. Love a bit of musical history.

The only sound that can truly be deemed evil can be heard in the dark hours of night when I have returned from a battle with some Taco Bel burritos

God I've been waiting for this video

Very interesting. You are very knowledgeable! 😀

honestly, this still hold up as a good video, but i looove youre new style (as in the new video on the same subject)

That was awesome, thank you so much for explaining that, it is extremely useful.

People give the Devil too much credit . Tension and resolution is like storm then sunshine, it tells a story .... God Bless in Christ Name Be save be smart

I don't even know what "tritone" or "hexachord" is. I know very little about music and these terms are all new to me.

Hey! I'm studying musicology and I really like your videos! Thank you!!

1:49 "The tritone, that's the devil's NOTE" god i'm not even that deep into music theory but hearing an interval get called a note is making me feel shit