Why do we like listening to sad music? – 05/22/2023 – Balance

When Joshua Knobe was younger, he met an indie rock singer who painfully performed “heartbreaking stuff that made people feel really sad,” he recently recalled. One day, he came across a video on YouTube, with the song of that singer, which had a suicidal motive.

“That was the theme of his song,” he said, adding, “So I was baffled by that, because I felt it also had enormous value.”

That’s the paradox of sad music: we don’t usually like to be sad in real life, but we like art that makes us feel that way. Countless scholars since Aristotle have tried to explain this. Perhaps we experience a catharsis of negative emotions through music. Perhaps there is an evolutionary advantage to this, or perhaps we are socially conditioned to appreciate our own suffering. Perhaps our bodies produce hormones in response to the music’s fragmentary uneasiness, generating a feeling of solace.

Today, Knobe is an experimental philosopher and psychologist at Yale University — and he’s married to that indie rock singer who belted out killer songs. In a new study, published in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, he and some colleagues sought to tackle this paradox by asking what sad music is.

Over the years, Knobe’s research has found that people often form two conceptions of the same thing, one concrete and one abstract. For example, people can be considered artists if they exhibit a concrete set of characteristics, such as being technically gifted using a paintbrush. But if they don’t demonstrate certain abstract values ​​– for example, if they lack creativity, curiosity or passion and simply re-create old masterpieces for a quick profit – then, in another sense, they are not artists.

Perhaps sad songs have a similar dual nature, thought Knobe and his former student, Tara Venkatesan, a cognitive scientist and operatic soprano.

Indeed, research has revealed that our emotional response to music is multidimensional. You are not only happy when you hear beautiful music, nor are you simply sad with such music.

In 2016, a survey of 363 listeners found that emotional reactions to sad music fell into three categories: distress, including powerful negative feelings such as anger, terror, and despair; melancholy, a mild sadness, longing or self-pity; and soft lamentation, a pleasant twinge of consolation or appreciation. Many respondents described a mix of all three. The researchers called the study “Fifty Shades of Blue” (in English, “blue” can mean blue or sadness).

“Throughout our lives, we learn to map the relationships between our emotions and how we express ourselves,” said Tuomas Eerola, a musicologist at the University of Durham in the UK and a researcher on the study. “We recognize emotional expression in speech, and most cues are used similarly in music.”

Other scientists, including Patrik Juslin, a music psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, argue that such findings shed little light on the value of sad music. He wrote in an article: “They simply shift the burden of explanation from one level –’Why does the second movement of Beethoven’s Heroica symphony arouse sadness?– to another –’Why does a slow tempo arouse sadness?'”

Instead, Juslin and others have proposed that there are cognitive mechanisms by which sadness can be induced in listeners. Unconscious reflexes in the brainstem; synchronizing the rhythm with some internal cadence, such as a heartbeat; conditioned reactions to certain sounds; triggered memories; emotional contagion; a reflective evaluation of the music – everything seems to play a role.

Perhaps, because sadness is such an intense emotion, its presence can elicit a positive empathic response: sensing someone’s sadness can affect you in a prosocial way.

“You’re feeling lonely, you feel isolated,” Knobe said. “Then there’s an experience where you listen to music or pick up a book and you feel like you’re not so alone.”

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, they gave 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 of a “technically perfect” song that “doesn’t convey deep or complex emotions”. The third song was described as “deeply emotional and technically perfect”; and the fourth as “technically flawed and unemotional”.

Subjects were asked to indicate, on a 7-point scale, whether their music “embodies what music is about”. The aim was to clarify the importance of emotional expression in general – happiness, sadness, hate or whatever – for music on an intuitive level. In general, participants reported that songs that were deeply emotional but technically flawed best reflected the essence of the music; emotional expression was a more prominent value than technical proficiency.

In the second part of the experiment, involving 450 new participants, the researchers gave each of them 72 descriptions of emotional songs, which expressed feelings such as “contempt”, “narcissism”, “inspiration” and “lust”. For comparison, they also gave participants instructions that described a conversational interaction in which someone expressed their feelings. (For example: “An acquaintance is talking to you about his week and expresses feelings of melancholy.”) In general, the emotions that respondents felt had deep roots in “what music is” were also the ones that made people feel more connected to each other in conversations: love, joy, loneliness, sadness, ecstasy, tranquility, suffering.

Mario Attie-Picker, a philosopher at Loyola University in Chicago who helped conduct the research, found the results compelling. After considering the data, he came up with a relatively simple idea: maybe we listen to music not for an emotional reaction – many respondents reported that sad music, while artistic, was not particularly pleasant – but for the feeling of connection with others. Applied to the sad music paradox: our love of music is not a direct appreciation of sadness, it is an appreciation of connection. Knobe and Venkatesan quickly boarded.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves