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What Is Music? 37an association through whatever visual, auditory and other sensory cuesaccompany it; we try to contextualize the new sounds, and eventually,we create these memory links between a particular set of notes and aparticular place, time, or set of events. No one who has seen Hitchcock’sPsycho can hear Bernard Hermann’s screeching violins without thinkingof the shower scene; anyone who has ever seen a Warner Bros. “MerrieMelody” cartoon will think of a character sneakily climbing stairs wheneverthey hear plucked violins playing an ascending major scale. Theassociations are so powerful—and the scales distinguishable enough—that only a few notes are needed: The first three notes of David Bowie’s“China Girl” or Mussorgsky’s “Great Gate of Kiev” (from Pictures at anExhibition) instantly convey a rich and foreign (to us) musical context.Nearly all this variation in context and sound comes from differentways of dividing up the octave and, in virtually every case we know of,dividing it up into no more than twelve tones. Although it has beenclaimed that Indian and Arab-Persian music use “microtuning”—scaleswith intervals much smaller than a semitone—close analysis reveals thattheir scales also rely on twelve or fewer tones and the others are simplyexpressive variations, glissandos (continuous glides from one tone toanother), and momentary passing tones, similar to the American bluestradition of sliding into a note for emotional purposes.In any scale, a hierarchy of importance exists among scale tones;some are more stable, structurally significant, or final sounding than others,causing us to feel varying amounts of tension and resolution. In themajor scale, the most stable tone is the first degree, also called the tonic.In other words, all other tones in the scale seem to point toward thetonic, but they point with varying momentum. The tone that points moststrongly to the tonic is the seventh scale degree, B in a C major scale.The tone that points least strongly to the tonic is the fifth scale degree, Gin the C major scale, and it points least strongly because it is perceivedas relatively stable; this is just another way of saying that we don’t feeluneasy—unresolved—if a song ends on the fifth scale degree. Music theoryspecifies this tonal hierarchy. Carol Krumhansl and her colleaguesperformed a series of studies establishing that ordinary listeners have