Cheer up! Why does certain music elicit sadness?

September 16, 2016 10:13 PM

Does certain music (like film scores or classical music, not lyrics) elicit feelings such as sadness, fear, or inspiration because we are socialized to respond that way, or is there an innate explanation? Moonlight Sonata, for instance, is beautifully melancholy. Certain film scores prepare you to feel fearful or sad before anything scary or bad even happens.
posted by blackzinfandel to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

Minor keys tend to sound sad, and major keys tend to sound happy, though there are exceptions. Why is that? Possibly because of overtones.

Another comment in that thread links to this book, which argues that your emotional reaction to music is based on socialization.
posted by John Cohen at 10:25 PM on September 16, 2016 [3 favorites]

This is an incredibly difficult and contentiously debated question!

In my opinion, which is based on classical music theory. There is something innate to certain tones, not necessarily that they are "sad" or "scary" but that once established contextually in a song, they create feelings of completeness or incompleteness which we sense due to human beings desire for order. Here is one book (among many by this author) that goes into this theory.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:41 AM on September 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

Another theory is that this is entirely cultural, and that we westerners have decided that we get sad when we hear minor keys for the same reason that white denotes mourning in China: i.e. Total coincidence.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:43 AM on September 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

Now that I think about it, a wolf's howl sounds like a minor/diminished interval. I'll have to listen when birds chirp next time, because I want to say it sounds like a major interval?
posted by kinoeye at 6:43 AM on September 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

I find Moonlight Sonata so deeply depressing that it's unbearable. I've had arguments about this with people who find it joyful and uplifting (?!??!). I don't believe it's innate.
posted by a strong female character at 8:34 AM on September 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

This post about consonance may be relevant.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:49 AM on September 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

As a kid I found such great joy in certain songs on the radio that I asked my mom over and over WHY music sounded good. (Kind of another version of your question.) The only answer I ever came up with was that music has the power to make the listener feel what you are feeling. Maybe that's why so many musicians get in trouble with drugs. . .
posted by O. Bender at 12:47 PM on September 18, 2016

There's no way this is not social/cultural to a large degree, since many non-Western cultures' indigenous music uses quite different definitions of "scales" or even "notes" and different methods of organizing and structuring their music. Arabic music, for example, is 24-tone equal temperament - it divides an octave into 24 notes (versus Western music's 12); to put it another way, they have "notes" in their music that we don't even really recognize as "notes." And of course all these other cultures have music that evokes a variety of emotions. But, speaking as someone who's done a pretty fair amount of work with Arabic and Indian musicians (both traditional and pop), and a smattering of work with various East Asian and African musicians, there's nothing universally emotionally evocative about what they play - one song has everyone up and dancing and waving their arms in the air, the next song has everyone crying in their drinks, and the two songs sound almost entirely the same to my Western-music-raised-and-trained ears.

There may be something to the idea that cultures generally find certain relationships between notes more pleasing (as in John Cohen's "overtones" link) because of their mathematical relationship to one another, and tend to use them in "happier" music. But there's certainly no guarantee that, say, someone from sub-Saharan Africa would find Moonlight Sonata "beautifully melancholy" because of something inherent to the note choices that Beethoven made - coming from an entirely different native musical culture, for all we know they'd hear it as a happy sing-song.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:49 PM on September 18, 2016

Or to sum up what soundguy is saying: my musicology professor in school made us memorize the following phrase -

"Music is *not* an international language. It consists of a whole series of equally logical but different systems."
posted by bitterkitten at 1:54 PM on September 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Complex question, but yeah:

Socialization.

There are so many examples from non-western musics of minor-key music and sustained dissonance being considered triumphant, lucky, celebratory, uplifting, etc. (And that's before you even get into music in different tuning systems, as soundguy99 mentions.)
posted by kalapierson at 11:32 AM on September 21, 2016