What makes older folk Central European/Middle Eastern music sound different from ‘Western’ music?

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I’ve never taken a music theory class or played a musical instrument, but I’ve been noticing a lot of similarities in the melodies of some disco or surf rock tracks. They feel like they have a more shared sound to folk music from other parts of the world and sound very unlike most of the music I listen to. What makes these songs sound more ‘foreign’ to my American ears?

Examples:

Disco- ‘Voulez-Vous’ by ABBA, ‘Rasputin’ by Boney M

Surf rock: ‘Jumping Someone Else’s Train’ by the Cure, ‘Misirlou’ by Dick Dale & The Del Tones

Foreign folk example: Vesna by DakhaBrakha

In: Culture

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hi!

All the songs you’ve listed (except Misirlou) are in “minor” keys, which tend to be favored by Middle Eastern or Central European cultures. I suspect the songs you’re comparing them too are in “major” keys, favored by more western music.

The difference between these two are the intervals between notes. Musicians tend to measure the distance between close notes in the number of half-steps between them, with a whole step being equivalent to two half-steps. What a half-step is, besides a unit of measurement, isn’t super important for the sake of this explanation. Below, I’ve represented the notes with the number (1 is the first note in the scale, etc…) and then put the distance between the notes in between. A major scale looks like this:

1 – whole – 2 – whole – 3 – half – 4 – whole – 5 – whole – 6 – whole – 7 – half – 1 (and then the scale repeats itself.)

A minor scale looks like this:

1 – whole – 2 – half – 3 – whole – 4 – whole – 5 – half – 6 – whole – 7 – whole – 1 (and then the scale repeats itself.)

This causes a huge difference in what the music sounds like. Additionally, some songs use scales that aren’t either of these.

Anyway, feel free to let me know if you have any more questions, I tried to keep it as basic as possible but let me know if you want more detail.

TL;DR The distances between notes are different in the songs you’re describing.

Edit: Misirlou uses a [double harmonic scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_harmonic_scale), which is different from both major and minor. The original ELI5 still stands, though, as the resulting difference is still because of the difference in the interval between notes.