The Tritone: The Devil in Music

or Just an Ugly Duckling?

That jarring two note intro to Purple

Haze, the unholy riff in Black Sabbath’s
Black Sabbath, the opening to the
Simpsons’ Halloween Specials. What do
these songs have in common? They’re all
based around a little thing called a tritone.
You might have heard it called ‘the devil’s
note’ or ‘the devil’s interval’ or maybe even
‘diabolus in musica’ if you’re a Slayer fan.

Think for a moment what these songs

actually sound like.

The words ominous, anticipating and

unsettling might come to mind, that’s
because of something classical musos call
dissonance. The tritone is a musical ratio
between two notes, which has been
employed throughout music’s history to
convey moods that require something a
little more sinister. For a simple interval, the
tritone has gained a dark reputation for
invoking the spirit world and conveying the
messages of evil. But how much of this is
just musical folklore or metalhead myth?

Photo by Chris Walter

The tritone is restless, dissonant and

foreboding, but is it really evil? Maybe
that’s something you’ll have to decide
that for yourself.

The Blasphemous Theory

As mentioned, the tritone is simply an
interval between two notes, formed from 3
whole-tone steps. So for a practical example
C to D, is one whole step, D to E, is the
second and E to F sharp is the third whole
step, so the tritone lies between C and F-
sharp. The two notes create a tension that
begs for resolve, such as another chord with
more pleasing intervals to release the
tension. For this reason, the tritone is
sometimes described as ‘dependent’.

The interval sits somewhere between a

perfect fourth and a perfect fifth and is
therefore also called an augmented fourth
(with a sharp) or diminished fifth (with a
flat) depending on context. In more
mathematical terms a perfect fifth is 3:2, a
fourth is 4:3, while the tritone is a much
more complex √2:1.

On paper, it really doesn’t sound too sound

evil, unless theory bores the hell out of you,
but when played with the right minor scale
you can get some really spooky stuff
happening. If you’ve got a guitar hanging
around, try this (if you don’t, then just skip
this paragraph I guess).

Start with hitting the low E string on the 8th

fret, the root C, now hit the 10th fret of the
A string, that’s the 5th, in this case, a G.
Two frets up from this is F, the fourth, all
sounds pretty normal, so far but bear with
me. Now play the root again and then hit
the note between those two, the F# on the
9th fret of the A string. How’s that?…
Sounds a little uneasy now doesn’t it. Now
bring the D string on the 10th fret into the
ensemble and try a chord with the low C, F#
and C (if you’ve got distortion hit it).

You’re playing the devil in music and could

be summoning occult spirits, so please stop.
And if you think it sounds a little scary,
don’t fear, you’re not the first to think so.

A Hideous History
If you have a metalhead friend you might
have heard them say something like
this: “Yeah man, back in Medieval days the
Catholic Church outlawed it because they
thought it was evil and if you got busted
playing it they would cut off your head.
Brutal right?.” Well, that’s what mine says
anyway.

A little dig on the internet, however, will

unveil that perhaps that’s a bit of an
exaggeration. It may not have been banned,
but it’s widely believed that the tritone was
definitely discouraged, at least in Medieval
Europe (it should be noted, however, that
dissonant intervals have existed in other
cultures for millennia without the blink of
an eyelid or raising of a brow).

Songs in those days were largely written to

praise the lord and to be sung by choirs and
congregations. The interval is known to be
particularly difficult to sing; they are some
pretty jagged notes. Even if you were a
monk with chops like Adele, why would
you want to sing a dreary sounding song
during mass, especially to an audience
expecting nice harmonious hymns?

That being said, there actually are a few

rare examples of tritones from that time,
from monks who were probably considered
a little bit rebellious. An example is Dum
Sigillum Summi Patris by Pérotin, a famed
medieval composer. This particular track
contains many tritones, so it’s going to be
quite brutal. Try giving it a spin if you think
you can handle it.

Dum sigillum summi patr…

Pérotin, Anne-Marie Lablaude, S…

MUESTRA DE AUDIO

Fast forward a few hundred years, when a

particularly strange German myth entered
the public consciousness. Based on the life
of the 16th-century alchemist, Johann Faust,
the curious tale tells of a highly successful
man who was not entirely satisfied with his
life. In order to gain otherworldly
knowledge, he sold his soul to the devil.

You might have heard of similar

transactions. This concept has come to been
known as ‘Faustian’ and was probably just
an interesting adage created to warn people
of ambitious excess. However, as the
Renaissance period began to bloom, the
story became an inspiration for a new breed
of ambitious composers.

The period also brought advances in theory

and notation, which were enforced by the
Catholic Church to allow ideas to be taught
and followed more accurately. Music that
was a little more ‘out there’ or hard to play
could still be followed by musicians,
assuming they had received the right
training and read the same notation.

So basically an odd ratio like the tritone

could be understood by all, especially
during an age where more and more
composers were willing to experiment with
new or strange ideas. The baroque
composer Guiseppie Tartini is famed for
cementing the Faustian legend in music. He
claimed the devil appeared to him in a
“dream” and kindly played him a beautiful
violin sonata.

Tartini made a pact for his soul in return for

some tantalising otherworldly knowledge.
He recounted the incident in French writer
Jérôme Lalande’s book, Voyage d’un
François en Italie:

“One night, in the year 1713 I dreamed I

had made a pact with the devil for my soul.
Everything went as I wished: my new
servant anticipated my every desire. Among
other things, I gave him my violin to see if
he could play. How great was my
astonishment on hearing a sonata so
wonderful and so beautiful, played with
such great art and intelligence, as I had
never even conceived in my boldest flights
of fantasy.”

“I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted:

my breath failed me, and I awoke. I
immediately grasped my violin in order to
retain, in part at least, the impression of my
dream. In vain! The music which I at this
time composed is indeed the best that I ever
wrote, and I still call it the “Devil’s Trill”,
but the difference between it and that which
so moved me is so great that I would have
destroyed my instrument and have said
farewell to music forever if it had been
possible for me to live without the
enjoyment it affords me.”

The violin sonata that Tartini scribbled

down, formed the now classic Devils
Sonata or The Devil’s Trill Sonata, and
yes, it contains many tritones. Tartini
actually advocated the use of a specifically
tuned tritone called the lesser septimal
tritone which is tuned lower to the ratio of
7:5, and sounds slightly more resolved.

This particular piece is most likely where

the tritone began its descent into darkness.

Violin Sonata in G Minor …

Giuseppe Tartini, Arnold Dabrowski

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So if Tartini started the tritone’s hellish

mythos, where then did its name come
from?

Diabolus in Musica was a term applied to

sinister sounding intervals since at least the
18th century although, as Denis Arnold,
states in his New Oxford Companion to
Music, the term was probably established
far back in the Middle Ages. Despite this,
the term likely referenced many dissonant
tones and was probably just a very old-
school way of telling your friend their
mixtape sucked.

Johann Joseph Fux, was one of the first to

link the term to the tritone, who cited the
phrase in his 1725 work Gradus ad
Parnassum. The ratio was said to be ‘mi
against far’, yes the same ‘mi’ and ‘far’
from The Sound of Music.

Regardless of who coined the term, the

legend was set, and compositions
surrounding the mythology became more
and more commonplace. 19th-century
composers studied and obsessed over the
ratio and tried to outdo each with their
sinister compositions. Franz Liszt was one
of the culprits, who created a series of
Faustian waltzes in which he claimed to
have “wielded the diabolos in musica
himself.” I must say the opening to
the Dante Sonata is particularly bleak.

You can’t help but think, had these musos

been born a couple of centuries later that
they would be diehard metalheads.

A Curse at the Crossroads

A couple of hundred years down the track,
tritones and devilry gained a new platform
through the mythology of the blues. You
may have heard the folk-legend of a young
Robert Johnson, who in his youth had a
strange chance encounter whilst living on a
plantation in rural Mississippi. He
apparently met the devil by his local
crossroads at midnight, and according to
legend, the devil asked to tune his guitar, to
which Johnson said something like, “sure,
why not, Lucifer.”

Proposing a generous trade, the devil

offered to give Johnson mastery of the
instrument in return for his soul. Faust
would be proud. Johnson sang of the
incident in his 1936 song Cross Road
Blues, which has become a classic blues
number, immortalised by generations of
blues legends like Cream and wedding
singers such as John Mayer.

Cross Road Blues

Robert Johnson

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In this regard, the blues has always carried a

hint of occult folklore, however, blues
music is intrinsically tied to tritones via the
‘blue note’. Part of the blues scale, the note
is related directly to the same lesser
septimal tritone that Tartini advocated.
Blues progressions are built on dominant
7th chords, which contain a tritone between
the 3rd degree and the lowered 7th degree,
which doesn’t actually get resolved in the
same way that it would in a classical
composition. For this reason, the tritone
makes the blues sound restless and gives it
the feeling of movement or moodiness that
is all too familiar.

It probably should be mentioned that as

music started to get a little heavier, another
bluesman by the name of Jimi Hendrix,
exploited the virtues of the tritone.
1967’s Purple Haze is a case example; the
jarring two note lick of the intro almost
sounds like a call to the spirit world.

Also in the late 1960s a few young boys

from Birmingham, UK, picked up on the
interesting properties of the tritone ratio.

Purple Haze
Jimi Hendrix

MUESTRA DE AUDIO

Making Metal
On their 1970 self-titled debut album, Black
Sabbath incorporated a tritone in the main
riff of their also self-titled track Black
Sabbath. It was a hook that would change
the way heavy music developed for years to
come and set the mood for the metal genre
as a whole, particularly subgenres leaning
to the side of doom. The initiative is
credited to guitarist Tony Iommi, who
despite not receiving classical training,
heard a certain phrase in a classical piece
that he just had to borrow.

The story goes that during a no doubt

civilised evening in, Iommi and Sabbath
bassist Geezer Butler enjoyed a classical
piece by Gustav Holst titled, Mars, The
Bringer of War from the 1914, Planets
Suite. Iommi was so inspired by the mood
of the tense orchestra that he picked up his
guitar and began playing along to Holt’s
epic.

He landed on a few notes, including the

godforsaken tritone and conjured a
rolling riff, apparently inspired by a dream
he endured of a slowly walking dark figure
– it definitely sounds fitting. Black Sabbath
went on to use the tritone in many of their
songs. Their follow up album,
1970’s Paranoid, employed faster
approaches to the sound, heard on the likes
of War Pigs and Paranoid.

BLACK SABBATH - "Bla…

As the 1970s progressed, the ratio came to

be widely adopted by many heavier acts.
Five years post In The Court of the
Crimson King, King Crimson’s 1974 song
Red used a garish tritone, accompanied with
a key change interlude, I guess it was the
years of prog rock. Bands like Rush, Judas
Preist and Iron Maiden took it to another
level, with quick heavy riffs that would
become a staple for some of the metal
world’s darkest heroes.

Metallica, Slipknot, Slayer – you couldn’t

name a metal band who hasn’t dabbled with
the devil. In fact, guess what Slayer’s 8th
studio album was called… Yea, Diabolos in
Musica, it’s practically a tribute album.

Bitter Peace
Slayer

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So it’s Surely Pure Evil Then?

There’s no question that the tritone has
stirred up its fair share of shit. A bit of a
hell-raiser you might say. It’s been the
foster child for the experimental, the
deviant and those working on the darker
end of the musical spectrum. But to call it
evil would shortsighted.

The simple fact is, human ears prefer

harmonies; which technically are simple
ratios that are easy to digest and understand.
Ears just find it harder to reconcile with
complicated fractions, and that’s fine, maths
isn’t for everyone.

Still, context plays a big part in the tritone’s

role, its tendency to arouse alertness has
even given it employment in police sirens.
Its relationship with the occult is a pretty
Western phenomenon and as mentioned, in
Eastern scales the ratio is seen as far more
normative, and that’s because they
emphasise resolve.

So it doesn’t always have to feel evil then.

When the dependent sounding ratio is
resolved appropriately the mood is closer to
one of mischief or anticipation. Artists from
Busta Rhymes to the Strokes have
incorporated tritones, all without being
accused of occultism. Maria from West Side
Story, it uses a big old tritone. That’s
probably as far from evil as you can get.

But what about probably the most famous

tritone of them all? Danny Elfman’s The
Simpsons Theme. Well, I’ll just leave this
here for you to decide.