Of Music and Emotions

Have you ever listened to the music in horror movies? What about the music in inspirational or Disney movies? What kind of music do you listen to when you are sad? What kind of music do you listen to when you're happy? Since we are all human beings we all experience joy, anger, sadness and other feelings like those. We all have a ton of emotions that control how we act and what we say. Our emotions are triggered by many things. One of those things is Music.

Music has the ability to change the emotional and physical status of people, whether they are in bad moods, good moods, or sad moods.

There is a beautiful passage in a book called "Home of the Gentry", by Ivan Turgenev, where the protagonist of the novel listens to a piece of music being played on the piano that touches him to the core of his soul. I will quote part of this passage, since it describes very eloquently the almost mystical power that music wields over the human mind, a power which I find fascinating.

"The sweet, passionate melody captivated his heart from the first note; it was full of radiance, full of the tender throbbing of inspiration and happiness and beauty, continually growing and melting away; it rumoured of everything on earth that is dear and secret and sacred to mankind; it breathed of immortal sadness and it departed from the earth to die in the heavens."

The tremendous ability that music has to affect and manipulate emotions is undeniable, and yet largely inexplicable. As a musician, I will attempt to shed some light on music's ability to produce emotional responses in the brain.

One great problem that arises in trying to understand music's emotional power is that the emotional content of music is very subjective. A piece of music may be undeniably emotionally powerful, and at the same time be experienced in very different ways by each person who hears it. The emotion created by a piece of music may be affected by memories associated with the piece, by the environment it is being played in, by the mood of the person listening and their personality, by the culture they were brought up in: by any number of factors both impossible to control and impossible to quantify. Under such circumstances, it is extremely difficult to interpret what intrinsic quality of the music, if any, created a specific emotional response in the listener. Even when such seemingly intrinsic qualities are found, they are often found to be at least partially culturally dependent.

Several characteristics have been suggested that might influence the emotion of music. For example, major keys and rapid tempos generally cause happiness, whereas minor keys and slow tempos cause sadness, and rapid tempos together with dissonance cause fear. There is also a theory that dissonance sounds unpleasant to listeners across all cultures. Studies have shown that infants as young as 4 months old show negative reactions to dissonance.

One recent experiment measured the activity in the brain while subjects were played previously-chosen musical pieces which created feelings of intense pleasure for them. The musical pieces had an intrinsic emotional value for the subjects, and no memories or other associations attached to them. Activity was seen in the reward/motivation, emotion, and arousal areas of the brain. This result was interesting partly because these areas are associated with the pleasure induced by food, sex, and drug abuse, which would imply a connection between such pleasure and the pleasure induced by music.

These kinds of experiments show that music has the power to produce significant emotional responses, and they localize and quantify these responses within the brain.

Another quantifiable aspect of emotional responses to music is its effect on the physical aspects of human body. There is evidence that music can lower levels of stress, and is also good at inducing sleep (this of course depends on the kind of music). This is outwardly visible in terms of music's ability to relax, to calm, and to give peace. Music is often used in the background of hospitals to relax the patients, or in mental hospitals to calm potentially belligerent patients. It is also reported that music can cause the release of endorphins, and can therefore help relieve pain.

Love for and appreciation of music is a universal feature of human culture. It has been theorized that music even predates language. There is no question that music has grown to be an important part of human life, but we can only guess why. How does music succeed in prompting emotions within us? And why are these emotions often so powerful? The simple answer is that no one knows. We are able to quantify the emotional responses caused by music, but we cannot explain them.

May be, that is why music sometimes becomes synonymous to magic.