Chromatic mediants

Ever listen to a piece of film music and notice how it’s constantly changing key? How does the composer know what chords to use to reinforce the emotion you’re seeing on screen? Well, one technique employed by film composers is a thing called chromatic mediant movement. This is where the chords in a passage have a specific relationship to each other, and are strung together in a way that evokes a particular emotion.

So what exactly are chromatic mediants? Well, when you harmonize a major or minor scale, you get a set of seven ‘diatonic’ chords that belong to that scale. The chords that occupy the third and sixth positions in the set are called the mediant and submediant chords. Meanwhile,