The association between major/minor tonality and positive/negative emotional valence is psychologically robust, but without a single accepted explanation. I compare six partially related theories. Dissonance: On average, passages in minor keys are more dissonant because, on average, the minor triad is more dissonant (rougher, less harmonic) or because tonal structure is more complex. Alterity and markedness: Major triads and scales are more common than minor, and positive valence is more common than negative. Major and positive valence are the norm; minor and negative are marked Others. Uncertainty: The minor triad has a more ambiguous (less salient) root than the major, and the minor scale has more variable form and a more ambiguous (less stable) tonic; uncertainty is associated with anger, sadness, distress, and grief. Speech: By comparison to major triads and scales, minor contain pitch(es) that are lower than expected – just as sad speech is lower than expected. Salience: In diatonic chord progressions, flattened diatonic scale degrees are more salient than sharpened because their harmonics better match the prevailing scale. Scale degrees 3 and 6 are more likely to destabilize tonality in minor than major tonalities. Familiarity: Arbitrary emotional differences between major and minor were reinforced in a historical process of cultural differentiation. For each theory, there are credible arguments and evidence for and against. All theories are broadly consistent with Terhardt’s pattern-recognition model of pitch perception (non-musical perceptual familiarity with the harmonic series), Schenker’s concept of prolongation (specifically, tonal voice leading as a prolongation of the tonic triad), evolutionary explanations of the emotional connotations of alterity, and a psychohistory of tonality in which melody, polyphony, leading tones, and the major–minor system emerged at different times, explicable by different psychological principles.

New conference formats are emerging in response to COVID-19 and climate change. Virtual conferences are sustainable and inclusive regardless of participant mobility (financial means, caring commitments, disability), but lack face-to-face contact. Hybrid conferences (physical meetings with additional virtual presentations) tend to discriminate against non-fliers and encourage unsustainable flying. Multi-hub conferences mix real and virtual interactions during talks and social breaks and are distributed across nominally equal hubs. We propose a global multi-hub solution in which all hubs interact daily in real time with all other hubs in parallel sessions by internet videoconferencing. Conference sessions are confined to three equally-spaced 4-h UTC timeslots. Local programs comprise morning and afternoon/evening sessions (recordings from night sessions can be watched later). Three reference hubs are located exactly 8 h apart; additional hubs are within 2 h and their programs are aligned with the closest reference hub. The conference experience at each hub depends on the number of local participants and the time difference to the nearest reference. Participants are motivated to travel to the nearest hub. Mobility-based discrimination is minimized. Lower costs facilitate diversity, equity, and inclusion. Academic quality, creativity, enjoyment, and low-carbon sustainability are simultaneously promoted.

Greenhouse-gas emissions are indirectly causing future deaths by multiple mechanisms. For example, reduced food and water supplies will exacerbate hunger, disease, violence, and migration. How will anthropogenic global warming (AGW) affect global mortality due to poverty around and beyond 2100? Roughly, how much burned fossil carbon corresponds to one future death? What are the psychological, medical, political, and economic implications? Predicted death tolls are crucial for policy formulation, but uncertainty increases with temporal distance from the present and estimates may be biased. Order-of-magnitude estimates should refer to literature from diverse relevant disciplines. The carbon budget for 2°C AGW (roughly 10¹² tonnes carbon) will indirectly cause roughly 10⁹ future premature deaths (10% of projected maximum global population), spread over one to two centuries. This zeroth-order prediction is relative and in addition to existing preventable death rates. It lies between likely best- and worst-case scenarios of roughly 3 × 10⁸ and 3 × 10⁹, corresponding to plus/minus one standard deviation on a logarithmic scale in a Gaussian probability distribution. It implies that one future premature death is caused every time roughly 1,000 (300–3,000) tonnes of carbon are burned. Therefore, any fossil-fuel project that burns millions of tons of carbon is probably indirectly killing thousands of future people. The prediction may be considered valid, accounting for multiple indirect links between AGW and death rates in a top-down approach, but unreliable due to the uncertainty of climate change feedback and interactions between physical, biological, social, and political climate impacts (e.g., ecological cascade effects and co-extinction). Given universal agreement on the value of human lives, a death toll of this unprecedented magnitude must be avoided at all costs. As a clear political message, the “1,000-tonne rule” can be used to defend human rights, especially in developing countries, and to clarify that climate change is primarily a human rights issue.

In the current study, 11 expert music teachers were asked to reflect on their own practice and compare their experience of individual and collective teaching settings. Adopting an approach based on grounded theory, two interrelated themes were identified in the raw data: teaching issues and professional development. In both categories, the notion of ‘presence’ emerged as a defining feature of the comparison. Teachers reported to be less present in collective settings, whereas one would expect that the higher (cognitive, teaching, etc.) demands associated with more learners would result in teachers being instead more involved in the unfolding dynamics of the lesson. Inspired by the conceptual tools offered by the Extended Mind (ExM) approach, we suggest that in collective settings teachers feel less present because they can offload the cognitive role of ‘teacher’ onto the learners, giving rise to a hybrid extended system that fosters a shared sense of responsibility, where pedagogical dynamics are functionally distributed across the whole group. In reporting excepts from music teachers, and adopting a novel perspective to frame our discussion, our research may contribute to existing literature in (collective) music pedagogy.

We counted trichords in a database of vocal polyphony. In modern terminology, the most common in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries were major (in semitones: 047), minor (037), suspended (027), unnamed (025, 035), and diminished (036). Prevalence profiles correlated with predictions of simple models of roughness and harmonicity; sometimes also with evenness (pitch-class spacing), but not diatonicity. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, 047 and 037 became more relatively prevalent, after which profiles stabilized. Our results imply that today the C/D of trichords depends mainly on familiarity, roughness, and harmonicity. C/D is best understood in an interdisciplinary, psychohistoric approach.

In a qualitative study, we explored the range of reflections and experiences involved in the composition of score-based music by administering a 15-item, open-ended, questionnaire to seven professional composers from Europe and North America. Adopting a grounded theory approach, we organized six different codes emerging from our data into two higher-order categories (the act of composing and establishing relationships). Our content analysis, inspired by the theoretical resources of 4E cognitive science, points to three overlapping characteristics of creative cognition in music composition: it is largely exploratory, it is grounded in bodily experience, and it emerges from the recursive dialogue of agents and their environment. More generally, such preliminary findings suggest that musical creativity may be advantageously understood as a process of constant adaptation – one in which composers enact their musical styles and identities by exploring novel interactivities hidden in their contingent and historical milieux.