Topmusicanswers
How do you get negative harmony?
To create a Negative, or “opposite”, interval of C-G, we need to start at C and go down a Perfect 5th, or down 7 semitones. This gets us to F, and therefore the inversion of C-G is F-C, because they have the same interval distance between them. A Major 3rd above C would be 4 semitones up, which gets us to E.
What is Mirror harmony?
That said, the recipe is simple: mirror harmony, a.k.a. "negative harmony", is nothing more than chromatic interval inversion. You just flip everything upside down, "mirroring" pitches in the chromatic space.
Who invented negative harmony?
Fast forward another 50 years to the mid 1980s. A guy named Ernst Levy wrote a book called "A Theory of Harmony" in which he coined the term "negative harmony". It's essentially the pitch axis theory applied to chord roots instead of a melody.
