I like music. I like music. I like music. I like music. I like music. Hard to argue with that. You just heard several different people give voice to the same idea. Chord voicings are similar. They give a voice to the same musical idea. These voicings contain all the same notes. In this case, C, E, and G. So musically, they mean the same thing. Just like when people say the same thing, these chords, like the people talking, sound slightly different from one another. They're voiced differently. I like music. I like music. I'm here today in St. Gallen, Switzerland, giving a talk on the relationship of language and music. In preparation for the talk, I've been thinking a lot about how improvisers think about music. It's got me kind of thinking, like, what exactly is a chord? I was always taught that a chord was whenever you had three notes playing at the same time. God help you if you play two notes and call it a chord, because then some overzealous pedantic music teacher will be like, Only two notes is a

harmonic interval, not a full chord, but that ridiculous debate aside. I actually think that chords are a little bit more than just playing multiple notes at the same time. Hey, my name is Adam, and thank you for coming to my TED talk. Chord derives from the Middle English cord, a shortening of accord. When two or more singers sing harmonically consonant intervals like a major third or a perfect fifth, we say that they are in agreement with one another, they are in a chord. They're in chord. If we have one singer drop down an octave, so now the second version, and then it had everybody exchanged notes, everyone is now singing something different, the intervals between notes are different. Now, instead of a third to fifth, we have a perfect fourth and a major sixth. Even though literally nothing in these musical structures is the same, we hear them as being part of the same chord, even though all the notes are rearranged. If you think about it, this is actually fairly strange because it would be kind of like rearranging all of the letters

in a word and expecting to get the same sort of meaning out of it, and yet this is exactly how it is with chords. You get a sense of the C major-ness of it all, no matter the inversion. Why might this be? It might be because we generally process chords vertically as blocks of sound all at once, at least in modern styles. In Baroque music and earlier, harmony was a result of interweaving individual melodies, so you didn't really get chords as much as well moments of harmony. For more modern styles, harmony is a result of blocks of sound that you might call chords, and how you process those chords actually might depend on your musical training. A study from Columbia University that, well, I was actually part of and made a video about, found that experience as an improviser meant that a given musician was more likely to hear different voicings as being the same; they belong to the same category, the same idea. This is why when you give the same chord sheet to two different pianists, they'll likely interpret it two different ways, because

to them, it's the same piece of music. Though, there are circumstances where it's very important to play a specific voicing. Otherwise, the musical idea won't get across. For example, the way the E7#9 chord is voiced on Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze is very specific. It would be really strange to play an alternative voicing of E7#9, like for example this, that sounds weird. It does contain all the same notes of an E7#9, but something gets lost when you voice it in a different way. But it is an E7#9 chord, just voiced very strangely. Another example of this is when you hear these two voicings of a Dmaj9 chord. They sound so different, they might as well be different chords. So, even though maybe the idea of the chord is the same, certain voicings articulate the idea better than others. Improvisers treat the concept of chords more like grammatical structures, rather than individual words. They're categories under which other ideas can be filed for.

the purpose of improvisation so yeah the Purple Haze chord ISA nine needs to be played like this in order to be Purple Haze. But what if you were to improvise new music around the purple hey discord. Would you just keep playing that same voicing over and over again? No, you would elaborate upon it. All of a sudden the chord becomes a world unto itself. It's a scenario. This scenario of E seven sharp nine has a related vocabulary of scales, melodies, patterns, substitutions, etc. Fun aside, there's this interesting historical counter example of not playing the same voicing over and over and over again. On a one quart van Herbie Hancock plays the same voicing of B flat 7 over and over and over again on Miles Davis's take on freedom jazz dance. Go check it out. It's kind of weird but pretty cool anyway. Anytime a musician is confronted with a chord symbol either on a lead sheet or what-have-you, it doesn't always reference one specific voicing. Instead, there's all these interlocking meanings that go into that.

chord symbol. It's much more of this abstract concept that can relate to other things like scales and what have you. That improvisers use as a guide for their improvisation. If you're ever given a simple series of chords like D minor, D, C. That can mean so many different things depending on the musical context. There is so much music to be made in these three symbols. So to answer the original question, what even is a chord? Well, it's a lot actually.

What is a chord?

What is a chord?