Voice-Leading Attractions: A Study of Diatonic Seventh Chords

 

Greg Bulls, Texas Tech University

 

 

Recently, Fred Lerdahl's Tonal Pitch Space (2001) addresses how "listeners of varying degrees of training and of different cultures hear pitches (and pitch classes), chords, and regions as relatively close or distant from a given tonic and in an orderly way." (p. v) It develops a quantitative model of our musical intuitions within a diatonic pitch space. With such a broad scope, it is inevitable that many aspects of the theory cannot be fully explored therein. One such aspect is the tonal attraction associated with diatonic seventh chords. This paper extends Lerdahl's quantitative model to investigate our musical intuitions when hearing root-position diatonic seventh chords and their common resolutions.

Through a comprehensive comparison of diatonic seventh-chord progressions to their common resolutions, with the same root movement, this paper will demonstrate 1) how the chordal seventh serves to intensify the attraction from dominant to tonic, yet fails to have the same effect when added to triads on the other scale degrees and 2) how the roles of root movement and semitonal voice-leading in the diatonic space have a direct relation to the relative strength of harmonic attraction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work Cited

Lerdahl, Fred. Tonal Pitch Space, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.