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Coming from a small country leads to the necessity to read theory books in foreign languages, when one goes past 1.0.1. My reading mainly has been in Danish, German, and English. But I am missing out on a certain series of English terms.

Treklang/Dreiklang/triad obviously is about a chord composed of 3 different notes. Chords with 4 and 5 notes are very common in several styles: firklang/Vierklang & femklang/Fünfklang are known terms to me, but which are the English terms?

People with very good ears are said to be able to determine chords with up to 8 different notes. I cannot, but one chord with 8 notes would not be totally unlikely in some of my contexts: G13b9#9#11.

Klaus

Wikipedia offers this paragraph:

"Two-note combinations, whether referred to as chords or intervals, are called dyads. Chords constructed of three notes of some underlying scale are described as triads. They may be understood to be constructed from a stack of two third intervals. Chords of four notes are known as tetrads, those containing five are called pentads and those using six are hexads. Sometimes the terms "trichord", "tetrachord", "pentachord" and "hexachord" are used, though these more usually refer to the pitch classes of any scale, not generally played simultaneously. Chords that may contain more than three chords include suspended chords, pedal point chords, dominant seventh chords and others termed extended chords, added tone chords, clusters and polychords."

I used google to seach for this article: Music Chords with 5 notes term; it produced this URL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(music)

Hope this helps.

Thank!

Only I wonder whether tetrad, quintad, or hexad are terms in common usage among musicians?

Klaus

imperialbari wrote:Only I wonder whether tetrad, quintad, or hexad are terms in common usage among musicians?

Probably not, but it probably wouldn't be all that difficult to figure out since the "[Greek cardinal number stem] + ad" is a common convention in science and mathematics.