Musical Modes: compiled, analysed and compared
By Matthieu on Tuesday, May 8 2018, 09:42 - Permalink
After my first attempt in 2009 to review the modes used in modern jazz, I'm deepening the analysis and including the 72 ragas from southern India.
The diagram shows which of the 12 semitones are used to build the musical scale, with colours indicating their natural consonances or tensions with the starting note.
The excel sheet gives all the data and functions.
Here are the 5 pentatonic modes built without semitone interval:
The pentatonic mode of Re# was used for the melody of this 2011 composition.
The Indian raga KamaVardani was used in the last part of this 2015 composition (Krishna talks!), and in this one (descending little devils..)
Here are the 28 modes of modern jazz, starting with the 7 Greek modes. By shifting the starting note to each of the degree of the scale, we can form systems of 7 modes, sharing common structure and colours.
The 7 Greek modes form a system with exceptional harmony between the notes:
- fifths and fourths in blue, consonant
- minor thirds and major sixth in green
- major thirds and minor sixth in yellow-light-green
- tritons in red, explosive!
Here is this cyclical graph for the minor harmonic system, with more tensions. The lower half of the circle has the structure of whole-tone scale, and the upper half is like the diminished scale:
Further on, here is the Neapolitan system and the modes with limited transpositions:
And finally, the massive set of 72 Indian ragas, with identification or similarities with other known modes if any: More !
This is being discussed here in French.