Tendency tone

Common card · No. 441457

In music theory, a tendency tone (or active tone) is a note or pitch which resolves or "tends" to a note one semitone higher or lower, being an ascending and descending tendency tone respectively. The most commonly used tendency tone is the major seventh resolving to the tonic, which has a special name of leading tone (also called subsemitone or leading note). A leading-tone triad is a triad built on the seventh scale degree in a major key (viio in Roman numeral analysis), while a leading-tone seventh chord is a seventh chord built on the seventh scale degree (viiø7). Walter Piston considers and notates viio as V07, an incomplete dominant seventh chord. (For the Roman numeral notation of these chords, see Roman numeral analysis.)

Read on Wikipedia