I Bet the First Guy to Write a Tritone Was A F*cking Loser

Honestly. So stupid.

Here you have a piano laying out all the notes you can play. If you play all the white keys you have the major scale, an objective formula for making music that people like to hear. Or you can phrase it differently and play a minor scale with the same notes (or something? I haven’t passed basic music 2 yet).

But some fucking guy.

Decided, out of the 12 notes to combine with a given note, he would pick the absolute worst, most unpleasant, most dissonant one out of all of them.

Objectively.

Ugh.

Everybody’s gotta be a fucking pioneer.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s easy to accidentally play a tritone on most instruments, especially if you’re as bad at music as this guy was. But listening to that combination of notes and deciding to commit it to a written piece of music and expose other people to it on purpose is at best, speculative, and at worst, sadistic and malicious.

Now that we live in the 21st century, where keys don’t exist and all music is atonal and microtonal, it’s clear he was onto something, and that dissonance makes the consonance so much sweeter sometimes.

But that doesn’t excuse the charge.

It was a giant step for the human exploration of music, and a small step for the asshole that wanted to make people uncomfortable on purpose because they didn’t get enough attention from their parents.

Just imagine all the people that had to see or play DIY shows with that guy back during the Middle Ages or whenever. Hearing that note and having your brain recoil so badly you almost forget to tell the guy “nice set” afterward, despite the fact that he intentionally violated your eardrums right to your face.

Music needs people to take chances. And that’s okay. But picking the objectively worst pair of notes intentionally in a context where you want people to want to hear it, is an objectively horrible idea.

Ultimately, this attention-starved asshole did an amazing service to the future of music. And he probably wasn’t alive to see any of his influence. And that’s just what he deserves.