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This paper attempts to justify the psychological ratings determined in an experiment reported by Bharucha and Krumhansl (1983) and Krumhansl (1990a, pp.192–195) for the 42 possible triad-progressions of the major key. The paper shows how a set of six musical factors can be used in a regression formula to generate an extremely close fit to this experimental data. Of these six factors, the most important is the psychological weight of the individual chords; this dimension alone accounts for .541 of the explained variance in the data. The remaining five factors pertain to chord-order, root progression by an upward or downward fifth, the possibility of a progression being misread in the relative minor, the treatment of the leading tone, and a condition concerning the juxtaposition of a subdominant chord (IV or II) with a dominant chord (V or VII). The paper ends with a derivation of the chord weights generated by the regression; this derivation is based on a series of hypothesized tone weights, and assumes that the psychological weight of a chord is dependent on the summed psychological weights of that chord's component tones. It is shown that the proposed tone weights exhibit a high correlation with two sets of empirically-determined tone weights, one reported by Krumhansl (1990a) and the other by Cuddy and Thompson (1992).

DOI: 10.1007/BFb0034115

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