Once upon a time, my sophomore year in college in fact, a new song from Deep Purple, “Smoke on the Water,” prompted me to play with its strange chord structure on the piano installed in the dormitory ...

Everyone knows the sounds of Halloween: creaky floorboards, howling winds, the amplified sound of a beating heart. But back in the day, the devil was said to exist in a particular musical tone. For ...

Black Sabbath performs during their Heaven and Hell tour in 1980. The band helped revive the long-feared “Devil’s interval”—a dissonant sound once shunned by medieval choirs—as the backbone of heavy ...