Why does music cause an emotional response?

[fudgefactorfive]

I had an excellent book that dealt with this, and someone borrowed it and didn't give it back, and now I can't remember what it was called, who it was by or even the outcome

It is odd when you think about it. Is there an equivalent of "music" in the senses of taste, smell, feeling? As in, real music, not just simple sounds?

Why can music make you feel sad or happy?

 

[DrRingDing]

Why can music make you feel sad or happy?

Associated memories or fantasisies?

 

[gentlegreen]

Leonard Bernstein - music all starts with the twang of the bow string or summat.

 

[Herbsman.]

If the musician is particularly good at conveying his / her sadness through their music, and you can relate to that sadness, then surely the music can easily make you feel it...

 

[fudgefactorfive]

If the musician is particularly good at conveying his / her sadness through their music, and you can relate to that sadness, then surely the music can easily make you feel it...

yeah

but how

and why

 

[Herbsman.]

'cos... err... you know

 

[Herbsman.]

I dunno. I dunno why we empathise with other human beings.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Psychoacoustics is part of it.

 

[obanite]

Harmonics satisfy our brain's desire for order in chaos?

 

[Dubversion]

isn't it all about tension > release?

certain combinations of sounds need to be 'resolved' in some way, and when that happens you get the relief of it happening?

something like that

 

[Fruitloop]

Couple of things:

Aspect perception - you see contours and gestures in music in pitch and rhythm in the same way that when you look at a painting you see both brush-strokes and a landscape or a face or whatever.

Vocal tone is a big indicator of emotion for humans and other primates, and their are clear affinities with musical tone - the sound of a cello in its middle range compared to a blast from a trumpet etc.

The real biggie is enculturation though - people learn to associate musical topics with particular emotions, and in a way the relationship is arbitrary in the same way that the sound of words is mostly arbitrary with respect to their meaning. Sometimes this produces big differences in what kind of music represents a particular emotion, for example in western culture death-music is mostly slow and funereal, but in some African musics death is represented by fast and increasingly frenzied rhythms.

The idea that music has some kind of affective agency goes back to the ancient greeks, where particular modes were thought to have different effects on the person, so much so that Plato wanted to ban the Lydian (I think) mode for its corrosive social effects.

 

[Fruitloop]

I reckon Dubversion's right that there's also a satisfaction from having expectations fulfilled, whether they're to do with the repetition of linear patterns or harmonic expectations that are concerned with the return to a particular tonic key. The latter requires more cultural knowledge than the former, although some level of harmonic expectations are ingrained in pretty much all western listeners, whether they're musically expert in other ways or not.

That's maybe a slightly different question to how music represents specific emotions like joy or nostalgia or whatever.

 

[fudgefactorfive]

Couple of things:

Aspect perception - you see contours and gestures in music in pitch and rhythm in the same way that when you look at a painting you see both brush-strokes and a landscape or a face or whatever.

Vocal tone is a big indicator of emotion for humans and other primates, and their are clear affinities with musical tone - the sound of a cello in its middle range compared to a blast from a trumpet etc.

The real biggie is enculturation though - people learn to associate musical topics with particular emotions, and in a way the relationship is arbitrary in the same way that the sound of words is mostly arbitrary with respect to their meaning. Sometimes this produces big differences in what kind of music represents a particular emotion, for example in western culture death-music is mostly slow and funereal, but in some African musics death is represented by fast and increasingly frenzied rhythms.

The idea that music has some kind of affective agency goes back to the ancient greeks, where particular modes were thought to have different effects on the person, so much so that Plato wanted to ban the Lydian (I think) mode for its corrosive social effects.

Brilliant, that's ringing some bells. I was going to ask how much of it is learned (but was wary of sending this off onto yet another nature/nurture debate when the answer, like every other N/N topic, is a mixture of both).

Plato's attitude rings some bells too - compare and contrast with the 50s establishment response to rock'n'roll ... people confusing causes with effects yet again!

 

[Fruitloop]

Yeah, I reckon the latter is to do with the many different ways that people use music - people use music on their own to process emotional experiences, groups use music as a means of mutual identification, political groups use music to try and instill particular habits and behaviours, etc etc. In a way they are maybe right to be frightened of new musical movements in the way the establishment here was frightened by rave culture, but more because the music is a surface indication of social change that's going on anyway than because the music itself is somehow corrupting people.

 

[dash]

Musical composition and performance are also displays of skill which convey hard-to-fake information about the composer or performer and some of the pleasure of music might be a reward for detecting that skill. Starting to appreciate a new genre of music involves learning what is skillful about it.

 

[perplexis]

Brilliant, that's ringing some bells. I was going to ask how much of it is learned (but was wary of sending this off onto yet another nature/nurture debate when the answer, like every other N/N topic, is a mixture of both).

Actually, I think there isn't very much of nature in it at all.
Nature is invovled only in as much as it allows hearing and sound processing/ However, it doesn't determine to any extent what melodies we find pleasant, let alone happy or sad (even though many have been tempted to say that it does, cf. Archimedes and his mathematical analysis of musical intervals [which are wrong anyway]). This is totally inculturated- think of the number of different musical systems in the world, the octave divided into 12 semi-tones is one but other systems use smaller (e.g. quarter tones), or other divisions between tones (e.g. 3 semi-tones in some Gamelan scales), then you have microtonal stuff like that employed in Ragas and middle-eastern music played on a 5-note scale ...
Familiarity with a system is an essential part of appreciating it aesthetically, the avant garde composers of the early 20th Century (e.g. Berg, Schonberg, Ligeti, and others) who produced "atonal" music were working outside of the accepted system and made stuff that can sound horrible and without melody (and by extension without any emotional valence that relates to the content) but one can get used to it and listen to it appreciatively, with "practice". Something like that anyway.
The emotions associated with music are a fascinating topic but it's pretty much impossible to divorce that which is learned from something that the music itself has engendered, given that appreciation of music is based so much on what you've been exposed to.

 

[dash]

Whole edition of the journal Cognition devoted to music:

http://tinyurl.com/h5k9k

 

[Stanley Edwards]

Music or, sound is one sense I really can't comprehend fully. That's probably why I enjoy it much more than visual art, good food, tactile stuff and the smell of my own farts.

I love music for it's pure escapist fantasy and full-on emotive drive. Add a few lyrics that cut and I'm in a utopia that is all my own and everyone else's.

I understand the basic rules. The highs and lows. The emotional releases. But, I haven't a clue why certain sound frequencies induce emotions on a spectrum that covers everything from unknown, to fear and dread to melancholy, to passiveness, to happiness to ecstasy and fantasy. I don't want to know either.

Music is the only thing I have ever found myself being superstitious about. A certain tune that I rarely hear moves so much that I'm convinced a bad price has to be paid for experiencing such delight. Nothing is for free afterall.

Intriguing that all the theories about the cognitive stuff of sound is way to generalised. Different drugs affect different people in different ways. Different sounds affect different people in different ways. It is that way. Our brains are all different

 

[golightly]

It is odd when you think about it. Is there an equivalent of "music" in the senses of taste, smell, feeling? As in, real music, not just simple sounds?

Smell and taste can often generate strong emotional responses but I reckon that's a lot to do with conjuring up powerful memories. I suppose the smells and tastes you get from some food can be a bit like 'music' in that they are a combination of stimuli that work together in a complex way to create a whole experience. Or is that just high falutin' bollox?

 

[fudgefactorfive]

Smell and taste can often generate strong emotional responses but I reckon that's a lot to do with conjuring up powerful memories. I suppose the smells and tastes you get from some food can be a bit like 'music' in that they are a combination of stimuli that work together in a complex way to create a whole experience. Or is that just high falutin' bollox?

welllllll ....

The perfume industry does use musical terminology to describe the way different perfumes are created, referring to "chords" and "base notes" etc. ... although I've always personally found that to be pretentious bollocks, though I'm biased, since perfumes and aftershaves nearly always make me feel nauseated. If smells were music, aftershave would be acid jazz. I don't think it's a fair comparison - smells don't change, evolve, have no structure in the way that music has.

Tastes are the same - sure, you can create a load of different tastes by shovelling different bits of a meal into your mouth at once, but again, without ongoing structure and form. I think someone describing a meal as a "symphony" or a "paean" that they had "composed" would be perceived by most people to be a ludicrously pretentious idiot.

I'd be tempted to guess that taste is a lot more "hardwired" - its biological function is to mark out things that are good to eat, whereas, are there sounds that are "good to hear" or "bad to hear"? Maybe - but you're getting into "inherited memory" territory there - I wouldn't like to argue that the sound of predators roaring or hissing, or that the crackle of a forest fire, is laid down "biologically".

 

[chupucabras]

Music is the only thing I have ever found myself being superstitious about.

I think this is the key to answering the question; music transcends ordinary experience and we humans love anything that transcends ordinary experience/'reality'. The theories mentioned on this thread that attempt to explain the emotional effect of music (tension/release, etc.) are very simplistic. Anyone who enjoys listening to music can easily determine that it's much more complicated than just certain chords, intervals, cadences, etc. having one specific, easily-measurable effect... The range and subtlety of emotions music can trigger is far greater than the combinations of notes, melodies and harmonies possible within western music theory or any other musical system. Things like the arrangement of the music, and the way it's produced all influence the emotional response, as does the personality of each individual listener.

So it's not necessarily that science can't explain it (ie. we're not venturing into religious territories here) but the number of variables involved is more than any human or computer could ever hope to cope with. Or maybe not...

But the point is, music causes emotional responses because it allows us to transcend ordinary experience. This is the same reason drugs are so popular and so widespread, why people enjoy sex and masturbation, why people like extreme sports... etc. etc....

 

[absinthe pirate]

So if people were to reccomend max 2 books on this subject...what would they be? This is something that's caught my interest now but something i know nothing about!

 

[fudgefactorfive]

this book that I lost was brilliant - i'm so gutted

had a lot of stuff in it about birdsong that was absolutely rivetting - so it was touching on the borderline between the study of perception and the study of linguistics, almost

all the good stuff is at the borderlines