Why do people listen to sad songs? – 05/20/2023 – Science

When Joshua Knobe was younger, he recalled recently, he met an indie rocker who sang “sad, heartbreaking songs that left you feeling devastated.” He found a YouTube video accompanied by her song that dealt with suicide. “That was the theme of her song,” Knobe said. “I was perplexed, because at the same time I had the impression that the music had immense value.”

That’s the paradox of sad music: we generally don’t like to feel sad in real life, but we enjoy art that makes us feel that way. Countless scholars, since Aristotle, have tried to explain the phenomenon. Perhaps music offers us a catharsis of negative emotions. It could be that there is an evolutionary advantage to this, or possibly we are socially conditioned to appreciate our own suffering. Perhaps the body produces hormones in response to the fragmentary discomfort provoked by the music, creating a feeling of solace.

Today Knobe is a philosopher and experimental psychologist at Yale University — and he’s married to the indie rocker who sang those heartbreaking songs. In a new study published in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, he and some colleagues tried to shed light on this paradox by asking exactly what sad music is.

In his research over the years, Knobe has found that people often form two conceptions of the same thing, one concrete and the other abstract. For example, people can be considered artists if they exhibit a concrete set of qualities, such as being technically talented with a paintbrush. But if they don’t exhibit certain abstract values ​​– if, for example, they lack creativity, curiosity or conviction and if they simply recreate masterpieces of the past for a quick profit – then we can say, in another sense, that they are not artists. Perhaps sad songs had a similar dual nature, Knobe and his former student Tara Venkatesan, a cognitive scientist and operatic soprano, thought.

Research has found that our emotional response to music is indeed multidimensional. When we hear a beautiful song, we don’t just feel happy, and we don’t just feel sad when we hear a sad song. A 2016 poll of 363 listeners concluded that emotional reactions to sad songs broadly fall into three categories: grief, including powerful negative emotions like anger, terror, and despair; melancholy, a mild sadness, a yearning or self-pity; and sweet sadness, a pleasurable hint of comfort or appreciation. Many people interviewed described a mixture of the three reactions. (The researchers titled their study “Fifty Shades of Blue”—with “blue” also meaning sadness.)

“Throughout our lives we learn to map the relationship between our emotions and the sounds we produce,” said musicologist Tuomas Eerola of Durham University in England and one of the researchers in the “Fifty Shades” study. “We recognize emotional expression in speech, and most cues are used similarly in music.”

Other scientists, including music psychologist Patrik Juslin of Uppsala University in Sweden, argue that these findings shed little light on the value of sad music. He wrote in a scholarly article: “They simply shift the burden of explanation from one level – ‘Why does the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica evoke sadness?’—to another level, ‘Why does a slow tempo evoke sadness?’

Rather, Juslin and others propose that there are cognitive mechanisms with which sadness can be induced in listeners. Unconscious reflexes in the brainstem; synchronizing the rhythm with some internal cadence, such as the heart rate; conditioned responses to particular sounds; triggered memories; emotional contagion, a reflective appraisal of the music—all these factors seem to play a role. Because sadness is such an intense emotion, it’s possible that its presence can elicit a positive empathic response: feeling someone else’s sadness can make you emotional in some way.

“You’re feeling lonely, feeling isolated,” Knobe said. “And then you listen to music or read a book and you feel like you’re not so alone anymore.”

To test this hypothesis, he, Venkatesan and George Newman, a psychologist at the Rotman School of Management, set up a two-part experiment. In the first part, they delivered one of four song descriptions to over 400 participants. One description was of a song that “conveys deep and complex emotions”, but was also “technically very flawed”. Another described the song as “technically impeccable” and “does not convey deep or complex emotions”. The third song was described as deeply emotional and technically flawless, and the fourth as technically flawed and unemotional.

Participants were asked to indicate, on a seven-point scale, whether their song “embodies what music really is.” The aim was to clarify the extent to which emotional expression in general – whether happy, sad, angry or any other emotion – is important to music on an intuitive level. Overall, participants reported that the deeply emotional but technically flawed songs best reflected the essence of the music. Emotional expression was a more important value than technical perfection.

In the second part of the experiment, involving 450 new participants, the researchers gave each participant 72 descriptions of emotive songs that expressed feelings, including “disdain”, “narcissism”, “inspiration” and “lust”. By way of comparison, participants were also given directions describing a spoken interaction in which a person expresses feelings. (For example: “An acquaintance is talking to you about how your week was and expresses nostalgia or melancholy.”) Overall, the emotions that respondents felt were deeply rooted in “the essence of music” were those that make people feel feel more connected to each other when they talk: love, joy, loneliness, sadness, ecstasy, tranquility, grief.

Mario Attie-Picker, a philosopher at Loyola University in Chicago who helped lead the research, called the results important and compelling. After analyzing the data, he proposed a relatively simple idea: maybe we listen to music not to feel an emotional reaction –many participants reported that sad music, despite being artistic, did not give them great pleasure—, but for the sense of connection with others that it provides us. When this applies to the sad music paradox, the bottom line is that we appreciate this type of music not because we like sadness, but because we value connection with other people. Knobe and Venkatesan immediately agreed.

“I already believe that,” Eerola said when he was told about the study. He’s already found in his own research that especially empathetic people are more likely to be moved by sad music they haven’t heard before. “They’re willing to go into that kind of fictional sadness that the music inspires in them,” he said. These people also have more significant hormonal changes in response to sad music.