Is Sad Music Actually Sad? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
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Be it Elliott Smith or Queen, classical or dub step, there's usually a clear understanding that some songs are sad, and some songs are happy. But what is it about the music that makes us feel these feelings we're feeling? You might think it has something to do with the notes or how our brain's natural response to these sounds, but you're wrong. Or at the very least incomplete in your thinking. We've just been culturally trained to respond to music in certain ways because if you ignore the lyrics, music itself doesn't actually contain any emotion at all. Watch the episode to find out more!
Sources:
Transylvanian Music: www.academia.ed...
Emotional responses to music: The need to consider underlying mechanisms - Patrik N. Juslin Daniel Västfjäll
Its OK To Be Smart "Why Music Moves Us" • Why Does Music Move Us?
TWEET OF THE WEEK:
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Further Reading List:
The Music in Our Lives - Kathleen Marie Higgins
Exploring the Habitus of Listening : Anthropological Perspectives - Judith Becker
TOWARDS A NEUROBIOLOGY OF MUSICAL EMOTIONS - Isabelle Peretz
MUSIC INDUCED EMOTIONS: SOME CURRENT ISSUES AND CROSS-MODAL COMPARISONS - Manuela M. Marin and Joydeep Bhattacharya
Music acquisition: effects of enculturation and formal training on development - Erin E. Hannon and Laurel J. Trainor
Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications - Patrik N. Juslin
Music:
":P" by Roglok (www.roglok.net)
"Carry On Carillon" by Roglok (www.roglok.net)
Elliott Smith - Needle In The Hay • Video
Wayne's world bohemian rhapsody • Wayne's World - Bohemi...
Dramatic Chipmunk • Video
Jake's first flight avatar soundtrack • AVATAR SOUNDTRACK 2009...
Disney Mulan - I'll Make A Man Out Of You | HD • Video
Scott Joplin - The Entertainer • Scott Joplin - The Ent...
Justice - Stress • Justice - Stress - † (...
Britten Lachrymae Op 48 for Viola and Piano - Ricardo Zwietisch • Video
Music & Lyrics By Stewie Griffin • Music & Lyrics By Stew...
BEETHOVEN - Symphony No. 2 - Leonard Bernstein (3-4) • Video
Eruption Guitar Solo--Eddie Van Halen • Eruption Guitar Solo--...
Elvis Presley - If I Can Dream Acapella (Vocals) • Video
Bruno Mars - Just The Way You Are [OFFICIAL VIDEO] • Bruno Mars - Just The ...
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As someone who has studied music for the past 4 years in college this would be my best scientific response to the question at hand. When a note is played you are not actually just hearing that single pitch but a combination of frequencies known as the harmonic series. There is a fundamental note, the one we perceive, and then an infinite number of frequencies above that pitch. The closer a note is to the fundamental pitch in the harmonic series, the more pleasing that sound is to us as humans. When we look at a major and minor chord built on the same fundamental (I'll use C) we can see how this plays out. C Major is spelled C E G, while C minor is spelled C, E flat, G. If we look at the harmonic series of C, E is the fifth note while E flat is the 19th. Being that E flat is so much farther from the fundamental note, it is inherently more dissonant than E. Dissonance is music is what creates negative feelings while consonant intervals and chords are more often utilized in happier music. Hope this explains a few things!
It really comes down to a simple thing.
They have already found that the brain responds to music similarly to how it responds to language.
And so think about it, most of the information we convey is not through words. It's the tonality. In western culture, someone who is upset or depressed has shorter intervals that could be easily be mimicked by the first notes of a minor scale.
Rhythm is pretty simple, too. Anyone who has studied poetry known that languages have rhythm. It's partially how you are able to organize distinct words for a mesh of sounds. You don't have to have a delay between every single word, because you separate each of the words using rhythm.
So music is basically what happens if you take verbal communication, get rid of the words, and distill what is left into a set of more pure tones and precise rhythms. In fact, birds, whose communication is based on exactly this principle, exhibit musical taste.
And that matches with the cultural component. Different cultures use different tonalities to convey different emotions, and each language has its own rhythm. The globalization of certain musical tastes may be due to the globalization of certain cultures and languages.
Yep, there definitely Are emotional responses hardwired in our brains that music can trigger and it relates some to language. Also, there is So much more to it that I can not even begin to start with it here...
Wow man your comment is pure gold!
Jonathan Weber u should have ur own channel
I take great pleasure in helping this comment remain visible.
There's a tribe in South America (sorry, I don't remember, it was covered in my ethnomusicology 101 10 years ago) in which all music is in the minor mode, and the difference between sad songs and happy songs is the speed at which they are played.
Hi! You are such a great presenter! I could not believe I got (and understood) every your word pronounced with such a high speed (as Im Russian for me it is really speedy). Besides the very interesting content... you are not only entertained me, you boosted my language confidence as well. Thank you!
I'm American and I find his speech Very speedy...not sure where exactly but this dude must be from the northeastern part of USA. It's not a problem, just very fast speech compared to what many of us in other regions are used to...
This video does not even scratch the surface of music and its emotional effects on people...I realize it can't be tackled in a video like this so not a criticism, just truth. These vids are like the philosophical equivalent of "story starters"....people can take the concept and go further with it. There is SO much to this concept it is just overwhelming...
A Clockwork Orange plays with this idea a lot. Particularly how the meaning of the Beethoven symphonies Alex listens to will change depending on the situation.
I would think that major vs. minor chords vs. dissonance is related to perky/mellow/grating in a way similar to the Bouba-Kiki Effect that appears in language. Most (or all) people accross would think that "kiki" probably refers to the shape with the sharp points, because it "sounds more like it", but it doesn't mean that sharp, pointy things have "k" or "i" in their names accross the globe. In much the same way, we might have "hard-wired" responses to harmonic vs. dissonant sounds, maybe even major vs. minor chords, which with increasing immersion in culture generally get overpowered by the meanings and responses the aquired culture defines.
I think one of the things that influences the mood of music is how the notes are being played or sung. Sometimes the techniques used by the musician to play the notes mimics human voice in certain emotions and people can empathize with that, thus creating the emotional response. The structure of intervals and harmony gives beauty to the piece but not necessarily informs the audience of the emotional content.
Just the musical part of Johnny Cash's Hurt could make Richard Simmons suicidal.
The best part of the video: "Sources in the description." Extremely refreshing to see, hear, and click.
hey! it is a nice video. i have an alternate theory. music is a language and just like words different musics are assigned different meanings through social evolution. just like words, they are there and only over the time they mean something.
gytdutufyfuyf means nothing and so does each keystroke as i type this comment.
In a major scale of music, the frequencies between the notes given in Hz divide into easier fractions for our brains to interpret than in a minor scale, thus the level of stress that we put on the brain to listen to the music has an effect on its mood.
yeah, but im pretty sure that joy division is inherently depressing as hell.
+Jolie Tomaselli Okay, but is that because of the music itself or because of the lyrics?
In some ironic twist, this video was uploaded right after me and my brother finished a very long conversations about major and minor chords, feelings in music, how power chords are neutral in therms of feelings, and a lot of other musical theory stuff. So good timing :)
That's a stupid point, because it applies to everything.
Nothing is inherently anything. Everything is a representation of the system it exists within, so in an alien mind, a sad song could sound like nothing at all.
***** The concept: "Blank isn't actually Blank". Fill Blank with any noun, and this applies because there is always an argument, a perspective, which describes the same object differently. Using Sad Music as a specific example as if it was special for that reason, is pointless.
*****
No, that works, I was going to say car, but it's a hard concept to describe. Yes, a car described with different variables may not be a car by someone (or something) else's rule-set.
Awesome episode! A related issue: is the emotion we feel when listening to sad music really the same thing as what we feel when we're genuinely sad? What I mean is that when listening to a sad piece or song, simultaneously to "feeling sad", I'm still enjoying myself and appreciating the beauty of the music. This seems very different from cases when I'm sad about a real event.
This video! It motivated me to do my final essay on emotion and music (: And thanks to this video I also found the best site ever made: academia.edu! Right now I'm discussing the BRECVEM-model by Juslin and Västfjäll in the essay, a model that explains the psychological mechanisms that play an important role in music induced emotions. Sounds pretty smart, doesn't it? haha (shut up let me value my own intelligence)
"I'm not crying, it's just raining on my face."
-the Tennant gif
nurture not nature
nurture not nature
nurture not nature
Why not both?
When I heard Bartok's 4th string quartet for the first time, I thought I could never listen to this kind of music, it sounded like cacophony. But after a while I started to get it, and now he's my favourite composer. Too bad nowadays people don't take time to get to know a musical piece better - if they aren't hooked after first few seconds, it's over. That's why we have so many almost identical songs today.
I wish he'd speak slower
And I wish the editing were slower paced.
I know this is extremely late but .75x speed
I wish he spoke faster
I must say that brake squeals and explosions DO affect me.
They're freaking awesome, and they fill me with joy.
Bulgarians do not listen to folk music in order to feel a positive or negative effects on them. The folk music was made to dance to. It's not intended to be listened on a daily basis and no one does it. There's many national dances called "horo" which dance to the exact folk rhytms.
Agreed! Nearly all listeners assume that Samuel Barber's 'Adagio for Strings' is among the most melancholic music ever written, and no doubt for countless viewers of 'The Mission,' it is indeed. However when Barber wrote it, he did not intended as such.
i believe that the emotions we feel when hearing music, are strongly affected by television, movies and so on.
growing up, i watched many movies and television series, and was "trained" by the images i saw to perceive the music in the background as "fitting to the situation".
so now when i hear a certain type of music it "recalls" the emotional images i have from my experiences.
Another quick example of this is the xx's self-titled album. One of the major musical motif's in this album is the use of silence as an instrument. The xx uses this silence to create a wide range of emotions, including sadness, nostalgia, and tranquility. This shows that while there may be a general association with sounds and emotion, it can be manipulated, showing that music doesn't have inherit emotional qualities to it, which is what makes music so interesting as a medium of self-expression.
I think this helps to explain why I'm not as moved by none lyric music as I am lyric music. This has been enlightening
I think that emotion and culture both play a part in how we perceive music, in that the more basic music is the more primal we perceive it but the more complex a piece becomes the more culture takes over
I read the title of this episode, and before even watching it I was thinking - no, it's beautiful.
The song "Hey Ya" by Outkast I thought was a happy song for a long time, because I was listening to the music instead of the lyrics. The Obediah Parker cover makes the music fit the lyrics, making it much more somber. To me, this proves that music can, inherently, have emotion.
I'm in a long-distance relationship with a girl who moves back in August. She's been fine for almost two years, and we've taken the song "I Will Wait-Mumford&Sons" to mean so much to us. Every time I hear it I feel happy and excited, but before we started dating it didn't mean much at all.
This ties in reasonably well with the way I respond to a lot of music in content such as cartoons, film or anime.
initially I may hate the music, but after finishing the content and enjoying it for other reasons I will actually go back and listen to the music and enjoy it this time around, simply because it reminds me of the emotion i felt at the time the music was played in the content, or at least thats what I think.
There's actually been studies on a specific device called an appoggiatura. It's apart of the formula for a "tearjerker" song. The appoggiatura is the note that clashes with the melody and then the resolve, which supposedly causes the reaction in your brain that makes you sad.
I would say our perception of music is based mostly on our culture and personal experiences. But as for sounds, bells, drums, bird song, traffic etc. can all have an emotional impact on the person hearing it.
As a musician, when I started ear training we were always taught minor=sad and major=happy, however after years of studying, and listening to minor and major chords over and over again minor chords I can no longer equate to sad, outside a context of a song, or moment because they just sounds like a different texture or colour than a major chord. It's sorta like comparing red and blue, one isn't sadder or happier, it just is, and within a context we can add all sorts of emotion.
I think that the emotions that we find in Music are memories, because we "tag" music to events in our life. Like the first time you hear a song through the radio or internet.
I was going to respond with an intelligent perspective, but, as the video went on, you touched on everything I would have said. I have a degree in music performance too. I HEART YOUR CHANNEL TO THE MAX LIMIT
I think that the best proof that we aren't hardwired to feel certain emotions when hearing a certain kind of music is how our memories linked to a certain song/melody entirely determine how we feel about it.
For example, many people consider "Mad World" a sad song, but to me it's a happy one because it reminds me of my childhood; on the other hand, I feel sad when I hear "Welcome to the Jungle" because I've heard it 5 times during a very crappy party.
Visual imagery was what turned me into Dubstep. I couldn't stand the genre until I saw "Dubstep Guns." Once I had a visual metaphor for the synesthesia to lock onto, it was beautiful beyond belief.
The other day I was sitting home alone at night listening to a song that made me feel like crying.
Today I was sitting in the park looking at trees thinking about how nice the blossom looks like and the song I was listening to made me feel really relaxed and... content? like not quite 'happy' but definitely not sad.
Then I noticed they were the same song. I think I just wanted to feel sad when I listened to it alone, but in the park I wanted to be happier, so I was.
i feel like experience of music is based on your previous experiences and current situation. "so you had a bad day" never affected me, until one day i was having a CRAPPY day, and i started bawling. some soft rock songs make a lot of people cry, but have never affected me,because my previous experiences with soft rock (my parents listening to it every day for several years) have turned me off to it.
you're right.They say "pumped up kicks" sounds like a happy song but I feel nostalgic when I listen to it
I like to think that the music's emotion does not come from the raw notes itself, rather the way the composer has put them together. The emotion for me, at least when I listen to music comes from seeing things from the composer's viewpoint, not the way it sounds or the way the lyrics sound.
I have aspergers, and one of the things that I noticed at a young age was that certain tones, sensations and sounds (car engines, jet engines, certain frequency tones, certain smells, sounds that denote "power", list goes on) give me the same cathartic emotional response as music would. Many things that most neurotypical people would find completely mundane and meaningless can send me into a full-on cathartic response. I've read other autistic people experience this as well.
Music that is supposed to be sad can be depending on who is listening to it. It also depends on what is going on around them as well. Certain music notes can create emotions within someone in which can make them happy, sad, angry, etc. . . but their surroundings play a major role as well.
The Buffy episode "The Body" was an amazing episode, probably the best of the series, that had no background music. At first it threw me off because it was different but in the end it allowed me to develop my own emotions to what was going on (without the "sad" music to queue my feelings.) It opened my eyes to how the music in movies really shapes the emotions I feel while watching.
I think that music, as an art (as opposed to a way to get money) can in fact convey emotion. It plays off of the "cultural training" as you put it in order to invoke feelings or, just plays off of the producer's feelings toward certain sounds in order to make what that person thinks (and they're not necessarily wrong) is equal to what they're trying to convey. Now, it may not be consistent but that's part of what makes it beautiful and truly emotional in my opinion.
I think part of imitation theory that breaks down when you include other non musical aspects of the world only break down this theory because they are ignored and not respected, and that it can indeed evoke similar feelings in people who are paying attention.
It can all be explained with the harmonic series: Major triads fit the harmonic series = consonant = happy. Minor ones clash, the minor 3rd being a more distant harmonic than the major 3rd = dissonant = sad. Also the other comments on Pentatonic scales and pitch sequences in speech are all very true- but those relations also stem from the harmonic series- it is a matter of physics that all sound resonates on the same basic principles and harmonic sequences.
Me, as a student of communications, have been constantly exposed to the question: "How can we subvert the system with our knowledge of media?"
I do believe your channel has found a , small but significant way to do so
Well done
I live in Transylvania and I never thought about this music thing. The fact is that we don't quite play this kind of music on such occasions. Even so, I think that there's a slight difference between music played on a wedding and the other played on a funeral.
I've read about this some, and I think it's deeply ingrained in the way we communicate. Speech has immense value in any culture and, given its vocal and physical essence, has produced a similar model of responding to music. Where music doesn't convey meaningin as straightforward and simple a way as speech usually does, the reactions are also more primal and emotional. One could also argue this about pictures, though they tend to often represent more specific, streamlined messages than music.
I mostly feel the emotions through the lyrics... Music is like an aid that helps me feel the emotions better.
Every time someone says "Plato" in a standard American accent, I think they're saying "Play-Doh."
I was conposing an original 4 bars sad chord melody, and my niece came to my room, I asked her is this sad or happy? she said is very sad. She's only 5 years old, which means humans recognize sad and happy at a very young age.
When the previews for Schindler's List came out I was stunned by the music. I didn't watch the movie until recently, but the music I have played many, many times. At first I wondered why I liked this sad music so much. After a time I came to realize I was actually feeling a tremendous power and excitement when I listened to the music. I have since found this is often the case when I listen to music in a minor key. Definitely not sad.
part 2.
Take the music of Everclear. Sad stuff, although you wouldn't know it without paying attention to the lyrics. And yet once you recognize the emotions of the song, you can almost hear the sadness in the music itself. This demonstrates how the author (Art Alexakis) uses music to express his unique perception of his life and his emotions, that a listener might not immediately recognize in the same fashion.
Fascinating stuff. Big fan of your work.
the opinion on music i've seen happens a lot with metal music, some find it depressing and angry, others hear it as liberating and powerful
Yes. Remember the Romantic era of music? Today, the most common type of music is called Pop, short for popular. But what was popular in the 50's sure isn't popular now.
What matters in music is orchestration, the key it is played in (aka, Major vs. Minor), the lyrics, the source of inspiration, and the percentage of descending notes vs ascending notes.
The Streets - dry your eyes
-
Is a sad song that makes grown men cry. Women less so, but when talking about songs designed to make you weep, this reaches inside your chest and rips your heart strings out forcefully with pliers, and it's fascinating as it's aimed at guys.
I have always found the most plausible explanation to be that we are conditioned from childhood to connect certain musical sounds and patterns to certain emotions. This explains why tonal structures are not universal in all cultures. For example, there are notes used in gamelan music that we literally never use in Western music - they are "between" our notes. However, we continue to change and redefine those meanings all the time, which makes for interesting music and an evolving context for it.
This kind of reminds me of a class on live musical performance I took where two Cello students had everyone in the class listen to the same piece of music twice, and attempt to create a visual representation of what they'd heard. It was pretty funny comparing the differences in each person's perception of the piece originally, and how drastically that could change as the same notes were interpreted differently. It's the interaction between a person and a piece that creates emotion.
Western music (with 12 notes) was thought up very well to express tension and release, but the general idea of "sad" or "happy" music mainly comes from social conditioning. Like the scores in movies, rock music can be used behind a building explosion or a chase scene, moments that increase your adrenaline. Or a slow minor melody played during the death of a character, you connect your sadness with this loss to the music self-consciously. This causes a connection between the two in our minds.
I discovered, listening to Captain Beefheart's music (which is sometimes so avant-garde and far-out you have no clue on how to interpret it), that sometimes the same song can sound sad or happy depending on the day, your own mood, the speed of the wind and the way light comes through the window.
Amazing video! There are 2 more mechanisms cited in the Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology (2016) : rhythmic synchronization and aesthetic evaluation :)
With the general tempo of Idea Channel I honestly do not believe they would transfer that well into 45 minute episodes, part of what makes Idea Channel as good as it is, is getting a point across in a somewhat short period.
"Effect is often confused with “affect”. The latter is used to convey the influence over existing ideas, emotions and entities; the former indicates the manifestation of new or original ideas or entities"
- wiktionary
To me (and I'm pretty sure there are others that feel this same way) the sound of an engine invokes an emotional response. The sound of a high performance, race engine, at the top of it's RPM range is joyful to my ears. The rumbling staccato of a V8 engine, the screaming V12, a tuned 4 cylinder engine, they all energize me and make me grin ear to ear. To others this is just noise, to me this is ecstacy!
For me it often has to do with when I was exposed to the music. Especially 12-16. Some bring on emotions because of what I associate them with. Sometimes it is a word, phrase or concept in music with lyrics. Points when the intensity or speed changes. One examples is Born to Run. There is a pause of several seconds, then 1,2,3,4 and the music picks up again.
Music didn't have any effect on me until grade 6 when I had to do a show and tell in music class about my favourite song the previous year. At that point I thought I was weird so I had to start searching for songs that I liked which was plenty hard since there was no RUclips back then and my knowledge of the internet was almost non existent. It took me 3 years (grade 5 to grade 8) to slowly find music I enjoyed. Just a story.
I think that our main emotions towards music stem from background "music" in movies, series, tv commercials, musicals, etc. As we as humans, easily emphatise with these people in these different characters in these situations, we can feel how they must be feeling which is usually combined with some kind of background music. So maybe if we had put what we find to be "happy" music now, during sad scenes, we would consider the music to be sad as well.
I don't find lyrics to be more moving than the music. "I Wanna Make it Wit Chu" by Queens of the Stone Age for example has such a laid back rythm that I can't help but feel relaxed the moment I start listening to it. They could be singing about anything at all - it just doesn't matter in this case.
Sometimes a single sound in music can send chills down my spine or evoke a deep-seated longing in me.. It's incredible. (David Gilmour is especially good at that imo)
Mike your enthusiasm is infectious.
The National come to mind. Their songs contain MANY major chords--almost exclusively so--yet their detractors are quick to call them 'dreary,' 'depressing,' 'grey.' I've never quite understood that; the band makes me smile more than any other.
Brake squeals and explosions do contain meaning. Think of it this way: when you see a phone ringing on the TV, you know that your actual telephone isn't ringing. The same applies to other sounds. If you HEAR an explosion but don't SEE it, the logical explanation is that an actual explosion is happening somewhere, which in turn induces fear.
literally youre a genius, love your channel
In a philosophical way music gives an emotion boost for the appropriate time to be emotional. Listening to life and death from lost is sad because we need to feel sympathetic to understand the emotions going along with the tragedy of the show.
its not the sadness itself that makes the music sad its the connection that we make to sad parts of our life ,and because sad music tends to have a slow pace such as the moments in our life that are more sad we can relate that to sadness.
for example a music that is very fast paced reminds us of hapiness because we think that good times pass really fast in comparison to sad ones but as you said it depends a little bit of our educational path trough music.
Let's think about this in a technical way. On the piano I can play a G chord, which contains notes that perfectly harmonize with each other. But the second I switch to a G minor chord, the notes don't harmonize any more. There's one note that's off in the mix and you can hear it. Think of the "wah wah" sound we get; the fluctuating frequencies when two or more notes don't harmonize well. I think that has something to do with it. If you look at the dance/pop songs they use major chords.
I was talking to a friend about this, how music can induce hairs to stand on end and give you that wonderful shiver . when comparing songs to this effect we found that we would get goose bumps at almost completely different times and or track but we did find that this could be done multiple times with the same piece of music, you could make a song base purely on these hair raising moments which technically sounds awful. But you can't help like because your programmed to enjoy those moments.
i think it lies purely on how we grew up, different social situations equals different ways of thinking, and i think this could potential effect our feels
Music evokes feelings and emotions, it does not contain those.
To get back to the Bruno Mars song, it used to evoke happiness during your dating time but now that you've broke up, it reflects the happiness you don't have anymore, thus evoking sad feels in you.
...And your mom still thinks its boring and predictable.
A sports analogy. In tennis, when a pro wants to approach the net, they tend to cover a bit towards the side that the ball is on, while leaving the cross-court shot more open. This is because people have a natural tendency to hit straight when they're rushed. But this doesn't always happen, it's simply the higher-percentage play for most people.
Similarly, I think that some chords are more likely to evoke certain responses in a vacuum, but this isn't true for everyone in every situation.
I think that the way in which our emotions are connected to music is detached by the very way that we rely on connections with past experience for things to be given meaning. From an early age we are taught to connect certain moods of music with certain events which are pre-determined and recognised as 'sad' or 'happy'. So when we hear a 'sad' song we connect the sad event which it is embedded within with similar sad events in our own experience, rather that the song directly.
Music=sound=energy.The energy flows through the air,hits the receptors in the ear & vibrates throughout the body,which fire more electrical signals to the brain.The chain reaction begins:dopamine,adrenaline,&oxytocin.-We are not 'in' this universe but 'of' it & as a result we are fine tuned to the rhythms and tones in nature.The story&history of the universe is our story&history also.When experiencing music we play our story in our mind's eye of who we were, are,and want to be.The emotions flow.
"Enjoyment comes from a balance of Recognition and Surprise - we enjoy things that we can relate to and have seen before, but we also like to be surprised. Total recognition is cliché; total surprise is alienating." - TVTropes.org
Memory and the reactions we have are what music really creates. Our mood varies day to day and some songs I listen on my music player become irrelevant or trigger feelings. In part, yeah. Music is not inherently sad, nor is it the same of "happy" songs. Both could either enthrall or piss you off at any given moment because of the individual.
I've seen a lot of comments here that say the lyrics convey emotion better than the series of notes do, to that I reply listen to the song "Way down the line" from Offspring, while reading the lyrics. The lyrics have a bit of a depressing realization tone to them but the music is represented in an upbeat rock and roll manner, when I listen to it, and many of my friends listen to it, we feel a lot more upbeat and happy than sad. Like the video says, it's how we interpret different notes.
I have to admit that the staccato, rapid-fire sounds and images in this video increased my stress level. I was interested in the topic but had to look away from the screen, and even then barely made it through. Cultural conditioning of a 47-year old who grew up without the internet and smart phones, perhaps?
I was left somewhat disappointed by this essay, which boiled down to a profound grasp of the obvious conclusion that individual response to stimuli is conditioned in part by cultural context. You gave only fleeting recognition to the fact that infants have been shown to respond similarly to similar music, which IMO opens a far more interesting line of inquiry: which musical patterns tend to generate a more universal response across cultures, and which are more dependent on cultural conditioning? And what might this reveal about our shared humanity?
I'm listening to this while I write an essay and I'm doing much better than usual. You should look into why that is... Great show by the way! I'm a massive fan!
In my music class we learned that in western culture we're trained to hear major chords/notes in songs as happy and minor chords/notes as sad. Its interesting because as a person who listens to metal ( which plays a lot with minor chords/notes) it sounds uplifting and awesome, but to some of my friends it makes them depressed
I know music can definitely convey emotions far more complex than the most simple. I've felt extremely complex emotions from a single chord change, in the right musical context of course; feelings which are extremely difficult to describe in words. I can put it no plainer than this 'feeling like you've forgotten something important but you shouldn't worry about it, it might be for the best'... yeah... I like music.
At my grandads funeral my dad picked a song to be played as they took the coffin away
"Bring me sunshine"
I haven't heard a song as sad since that day.
CRAIG!!!!!!!!
Also, great video. You might want to also take into account the amount of times someone has heard the song, because that can really affect how they feel about it. My favorite band of all time has one really famous song, and that song now has no effect on me, while the majority of their other songs do since I hear them less regularly. I became so sick of the Bruno Mars song that I began singing about how ugly people were in the same melody, despite really liking the song at first.
I'm sad when I hear some songs but it's not because it's sad songs. sometimes happy song makes me sad too. as most people said, I think your feeling reflects your emotion at the time you are listening to songs. and at some points I agree with him about that cultural situation affects the song's feeling. depends on your culture, you will translate songs in different ways.
To me, music is just another aspect of art, and like all art the intent of the creator is not necessarily the only interpretation that there is. Much like a painter that uses the colours, imagery and cultural tropes to depict sadness, it does not stop an individual from experiencing another message or feeling from that same piece.
So while a piece of music may be created to be sad or happy, it is ultimately up to the listener to find their own personal response to it.
This is so helpful!
I'm doing an assignment about multimodal communication, and this is exactly what I was looking for!
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Like a person who is from Bulgaria I can say - the only way to get the emotion behind certain folk song is to listen very, very carefuly the lyrics. Only then you can be sure that the song is sad. On the topic - maybe we are trained to percieve a type of song the way it is. People tell us that this or that song has 'happy' or 'sad' vibe and we accept it. Then we read that certain types of wave or tones in music make us feel different. So maybe we really are trained.
Music, even more generally, any art, such as paintings, poetry, and theatre, is a powerful language that can bind people from different cultures together. Obviously, the culture that surrounds you makes you more appreciative of a certain type of music. For instance, my parents come from Israel and love classical piano and opera. As a result, I enjoy Middle Eastern and classical music more than most people in America, whom are more attracted to rap and dub step.
Reminds me of the Kuleshov Effect. The practice that context is what creates emotion using a blank stare and various context clues. What you feel is more than what you do, especially when a range of acceptance effects your intake of new data.