Music Generates Feelings That Are Only Weakly Bound to the Music | Hacker News Reader

Music Generates Feelings That Are Only Weakly Bound to the Music

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159 pointspjdorrell66 comments

Tangentially related, but I have stopped taking pictures on hikes nowadays. I just listen to an instrumental piece of music a couple times and when I play it back a couple weeks or months later, I am able to vividly recall the experience which I could never do from photos.

I wish we could do the opposite because every time I listen to the cool music I discovered in high school I'm unfortunately teleported back to all the emotional distraught of those years.

I've found that the associations I have with a song do get weaker the more I listen to it in another context, so it may be possible to disassociate those memories by forcing yourself to listen to those songs enough times.

But I've only noticed this with songs that conjure relatively benign associations. Stuff from times and places I really don't want to evoke I also avoid.

> Stuff from times and places I really don't want to evoke I also avoid.

There are songs I can't listen to like before anymore after some conversations (eg lightning crashes by live) or some time (Champagne supernova by oasis).

But likewise, there are places I don't have the energy to hang around anymore.

This sucks. I live with music but when I feel really bad, I no longer listen to music, to avoid tainting it. Now, days when I feel bad are quiet.

Though I mostly enjoy travelling back in time through music, including to high school. Fortunately these years were not traumatising for me. Specific songs are particularly strong for that.

Some songs are strongly associated with specific emotions that were not very enjoyable at the time, but are strangely comforting...ish today. I hope someone gets this and formulates it better / differently. This is probably a kind of nostalgia, but not really in the sense that it was better back in the day.

The first time I ever heard the Numa Numa song was when I was 10 and had the flu. I was puking in the hallway and had intense nausea for hours. My classmates kept playing the song because it was the new viral thing.

It took me over 10 years before I could listen to the song without feeling sick. It's fine now though.

Maybe there are ways to build up tolerance to the music by combining it with activities that do not allow the mood to catch on because they are too incompatible? Like running or working out vigorously while listening to this music? Maybe the link between the music and the memories would wear of with time?

I'm not a therapist but this sounds like something I would try on myself if I were in this situation.

I do this with code and architecture, or any complex system really... It works pretty well! It's similar to physical space having a sort of memory... except it's mental space.

Yes, I do see some specific pieces of code I wrote up to 13 years ago when hearing some songs. Although It's not on propose.

I like listening to ambient Fallout music while working on the Fallout-like game I volunteer for. Seems to actually work pretty well.

Back in 2005 I was gifted both Guero (by Beck) and Guild Wars on my birthday and ended up listening to the album on repeat while playing the game and I really vivid visual flashbacks to that game's art style whenever I hear that album.

As a child I was gifted an album (cheesy christian rock, but it's what my parents would buy me) and a full set of the Chronicles of Narnia. Album went on repeat while I read the first few books and now they are forever, deeply linked in my memory.

I read the Lord of the Rings while listening to the 1492 OST on a tape. That album is the real and best soundtrack of the book and the movie to me.

Jimi Hendrix and Morrowind for me

Switchfoot and Morrowind.

along the same lines, red hot chili peppers and halo 2 on Xbox live for me!

also morrowind since somehow I managed to accrue 250+ hours of play time on that despite spending about 16 hours out of every day that I wasn't at school (those days were more like 8-10 hours ಠ_ರೃ) playing halo 2 online.

Ultimate early 2000s combination: Linkin Park and Tribes 2.

For me, it's Morrowind and Morrowind. The in-game music was amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xULTMMgwLuo

Ultima 7 and Kate Bush's "The Red Shoes" for me, in the winter of '94.

World of Warcraft and Edguy's "Rocket Ride" album. I still listen to this band, but no other album has same "pull" for me.

That's funny. It was Odelay and Kingdom of Drakkar for me.

Quake 3 Arena, Music for the Jilted Generation

oh my god

It's fun deciding to imprint yourself in that way, it feels like a conscious decision to re-wire. That said, the most deeply-seated ones are the ones I didn't really decide on.

I always associate The Smashing Pumpkins with Doom because of this. By coincidence, one of their songs actually has a Doom sound effect in it.

Not a coincidence actually!

DOOM had Smashing Pumpkins in it first: the cheat IDSPISPOPD ("smashing pumpkins into small piles of putrid debris") gives you the chainsaw due to some inside joke. The Smashing Pumpkins sample is a nod to this.

Doom 1 and Body Count (Ice-T's metal band's first album) for me.

Morbid Angel - Covenant and Diablo II for me.

Baldur's Gate and Bob Marley over here.

I also have experienced this "musical recall", but I don't think vivid memories completely replace photographs. No matter how well you can recall a memory, there's still the task of communicating that memory to others. Photographs and videos greatly help with this.

No, but photographs can destroy vivid memories, or at least commingle and taint in ways that make them impossible to distinguish from the original memory. I avoid looking at photographs of events I've personally experienced. Taking photographs is disruptive in a different way, but it's difficult to take photographs and not look at them later.

> No, but photographs can destroy vivid memories

If anything, our brains taint and alter memories over time, which causes them to be misaligned with photographs. The photograph doesn't lie. The brain lies to us and often.

Sure, memories fade and become distorted. But that's precisely the problem with photographs: they're intensely vivid. So every time you look at a photograph you're creating, transforming and reinforcing an experience you never actually had, accelerating the loss of aspects of your personal experience.[1] Photographs aren't the only way to do this: simply hearing people recounting stories can do this, but photographs are just an immensely powerful and almost instantaneous way to have such vicarious experiences.

I'd rather have my own memories, however faded and worn, though there are strategies (like music association) that can help minimize that. Nonetheless, however distorted, they're principally distorted by my own emotions and desires; they're faded by my own lack of interest; they're mine, which I'd argue is the very definition of a personal memory.

Many people couldn't care less. And that's fine. And if you don't know (or believe) this happens to you, then I suppose it doesn't matter, either.

[1] I want to say that losing the personal visual memory might be related to losing the memory of other aspects, like the emotional experience, but that's more of a fear than anything I'm confident I've experienced personally or have read in the literature.

You're saying looking at a photograph is like overfitting your brain to a specific aspect of a memory. I don't see how music association is any different in this regard. Looking at a photograph of a memory represents the memory in a certain basis. Listening to a song does the same thing, just on a different basis. So this idea of overfitting or potentially losing part of the original memory is not unique to photographs.

I would guess that having as many associations as possible is the healthiest for any memory. This is also the principle behind mind palaces and other memorization techniques.

Works really well with podcasts for me. My memory of daily experiences is generally incredibly poor, when I first experienced nearly photographic recall after re-listening to a podcast I almost cried. It's a cruel joke that this capability is in there but I can't seem to activate it on my own.

I've taken to playing certain songs for certain scenarios. My favorite example of such being Blast Off (Human Pyramids) played just as my flight is taking off, that windup taxi and the acceleration to flight. I've kept that particular song pure specifically because I've captured the essence of traveling/vacation in that 5 minute period.

I visited Washington DC on a band trip in high school about 15 years ago. Right before I left, I bought Five For Fighting's CD: The Battle For Everything. I listened to it the entire time I was there (as I only had a CD player). Anytime we were on the bus, I was basically listening to that CD.

Now, If I ever hear any of the tracks from that album, I have a flood of memories that come back, and I think that is the reason why I remember that trip so well.

I have a really strong memory for that kind of stuff yet minor details like what time my flight is I have to re-check constantly. I can also recall music itself pretty much verbatim regardless of the complexity but not the lyrics. Fingerstyle guitar pieces I heard years ago are still burned into my brain yet I couldn't sing you the same song if it had lyrics. I would just remember the notes.

Entirely baseless speculating here, but I wonder if music as notes, instruments and structure aren't stored in memory more similar to spatial memory which I also find to be rather permanent.

For me, it's LSD and "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" by The Incredible String Band.

The problem I have with recalling memories/feelings through msuic, is that the recollection gets weaker every time I listen to it. So there are a number of songs I listened to often to relive a particular moment, but listening to them now only vaguely recalls that moment, and additionally also has the association of reliving the moment later. Reliving the reliving of a moment is less vivid than the initial reliving, unfortunately.

It has been well-known in psychology for many decades (as well as film and TV production, and certainly advertising) that emotional states become indelibly associated with other things being experienced at the same time, despite there being zero "causal" connection.

The same way getting food poisoning after eating a certain dish (and vomiting it back up) can make you avoid the dish for years, even when cooked at home or at other restaurants where it's no more likely to make you sick than anything else.

Our "emotional" brain draws connections completely independently of our "rational" brain. There is extensive literature on this.

So this is one small example of that broadly established phenomenon.

He/she is right on that count, but then goes on to say that the emotions are not transferred to real world happenings, imho that's wrong.

> indelibly

almost never true, when discussing memories.

> Music-generated feelings only transfer easily to imagined perceptions

Not trying to be difficult here but what does this mean? What is an imagined perception vs a real one?

My take on this is, you're watching a movie that takes place in the winter. Wintry music is playing. All of a sudden the "cold" music along with the scene of an icy blizzard gives you a slight chilly sensation.

Afterwards you go outside and it's a blazing hot summer day. You put on the soundtrack to the movie but in this case, it doesn't make you feel any cooler. Or conversely it's freezing cold outside, but even so the wintry music doesn't actually make you feel any colder than you already do.

In the situations described above, the music was able to affect your imagined perceptions, not your real ones.

“Hot” and “cold” are not, as far as I know, feelings that music can express.

https://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+radioactive+the+firm

4 seasons by Vilvaldi might be the first example that came to mind that hot and cold was express in a piece of music.

I used to work in a machine shop in Florida that had no air conditioning. Summer time was always barely bearable. A woman who worked there would sometimes complain about the heat, sweat beading on her forehead. I'd think of a certain piece of music (this was ~25 years ago, so I don't recall what music now) and goosebumps would pop up on my arms. I'd tell her I really didn't see how she could be hot, because... "Look, I'm actually a bit chilly." Even though it quite amused me, she never seemed to be amused, though at some level, maybe she was. She kept coming back to complain after all even when she knew what my response would be.

I can, for the most part, now produce goose bumps without thinking of any music. I just feel the feeling that produces them (lovejoycompassion*awe), and they pop up, often accompanied by a lump in the throat and/or catch in the breath.

The subconscious has little ability to distinguish between imagination and reality, in the sense of, e.g. one who has a fear of flying will display the same physiological manifestations whether he's boarding a plane, or just imagining boarding a plane. The subconscious reacts the same to the perception regardless of whether that perception is through the mind's eye or the physical eye. This is how NLP works. By inducing the reaction in a safe space, it can be minimized or eliminated. Once minimized/eliminated in the office (or wherever), it remains minimized in the triggering circumstance.

An imagined perception is a perception that depends on the perceiver making some effort to suppose that something is true. It could be a daydream, or it could be when you watch a fictional film, which requires you to imagine that it is real, even though you know that actually it is not real. Real perception is when you are perceiving something that you know is real.

Whenever I listen to Joy Division I think of Emacs Lisp.

I assume because of the track "She's Lost Control [because she tried to remap it to caps lock but screwed up XKBOPTIONS]".

Reminds me: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-forgetting-pill apparently recalling a memory rewrites it in your brain, and taking certain drugs causes the memory (or emotions) to not be rewritten, or lose emotional intensity. This may be a PTSD treatment.

I wished there was a study on the emotional perception of music and mindfulness meditation. Whenever I did mindfulness meditation for an hour, if I'd listen to music after that I'd be a lot more sensative towards the feelings experienced by it.

This article makes some excellent hypotheses about music that I think everyone can anecdotally confirm.

To explain the attributes of the brain some of these hypotheses allude to, in terms of programming, imagine you have a class. It consists of a list of data members and some member functions that are called by the user (the brain) in order to parse given (sensory) inputs.

For each sensory input, a separate object is created, and so the returned outputs, after some computation, are inherently associated with the object. So, it happens that when you see a blue circle, the member functions are crunched using the .shape and .color data members, that are set to circle and blue respectively, say in the constructor of the ``blue circle`` object.

Suppose this model for processing all kinds of sensory inputs; we might have to imagine complicated classes, lots of member functions so that all kinds of sensory inputs can be parsed. The author makes the interesting claim that there are additional arguments in the member functions that are influenced by whether there is music at the time of sensory object creation.

These arguments distort the outputs (the parsed sensory inputs). The member functions are black boxes, but common experience gives us some insight, based on the observed correlations of inputs and outputs (eg. "sad story" as a sensory input without music is parsed as "sad story", with Bach's Chaconne, is parsed as "extremely depressing, weirdly poignant story").

One other claim that is made in the article, that is very interesting, is that there is a feedback, through evolution. Suppose the brains of human beings have performed Bayesian updates on the outputs of the black box member functions. When the Bayesian brain creates music, does it harness its updated function so as to amplify desired effects?

If I’m following this logic, the article seems to present a false equivalence between perceptions and feelings.

When we hear music, we perceive things like pitch, timbre, duration. We don’t perceive sadness in music. Rather, certain types of music tend to cause certain types of feelings in listeners. The parts of music we do perceive are strongly bound to the music in the way the author defines. That’s how we can pick out individual instruments or have a conversation while music is playing.

Feelings are, well, more layered and do combine with those created from other perceptions. They also can last beyond the immediate perception.

Theres a great radio lab episode [1] about music, language, perceiving sound, and the connection between music and emotion. It’s such a fascinating topic.

[1] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91512...

I'm not so sure. An audience feels the music much more intensely if the artist is feeling it. If the artist merely performs it, the audience doesn't feel it nearly as much.

Great radio lab episode!

re: hearing something awful becomes pleasant with repetition The first time I heard this (composed using non-chromatic scale with 16 pitches to the octave) was somewhat uncomfortable, but after hearing it a few times, it became quite pleasant.

https://kylegann.com/FracturedParadise.mp3

The explanation: https://kylegann.com/Fractured.html

And "feeling" it usually just means intuitively adding satisfying and interesting expression to the performance while in a flow state, which at the end of the day is just slight changes in the tempo, rhythm, dynamics, durations, etc.

We're not feeling the "feeling it". We're just enjoying the new and potentially song-improving alterations that often come from a performer getting deep into a performance. If you were to take a pre-recorded piece with those exact same alterations, with no live performer (but could hypothetically make the audio quality the same as a live performance), I bet the audience would feel it just the same when you play the recording. All that matters is what the music sounds like.

You're not a singer. ;-)

True, but I do play piano a bit.

Conveying emotion probably has many extra factors when it comes to vocalizing, so I'd agree on that point.

IMO song lyrics are using music as a carrier wave, and we may associate the music with the feelings expressed in the lyrics. That's a bit tainted ...

When it comes to purely instrumental music I won't usually attach emotions to it ... unless it was designed to be 'programmatic' or 'paint a picture' by the composer. Even then, there's no need to play along. I don't buy the "major = happy, minor = sad', that can be more than a little naive.

Instrumental music is a rich, rich language, and - for me at least - it often arouses emotions I've never felt before. I'm not so sure that it 'generates' those feelings; I suspect that it CONVEYS them. Which is why the greatest music (in any culture) endures for centuries.

> It is quite possible that music has evolved as a mechanism of generating feelings that can be transferred to other things... and that original purpose has become obsolete.

I don't think it's obsolete at all - it's intonation. Music is just hacking intonation perception.

How you say something completely affects its meaning. You use a different voice for happy news or sad news or serious things or loving things or sarcasm. A good actor could make the same phrase mean 100 different things.

I often think about this with voice recognition and claims of 99% accuracy. Yeah but it didn't get ANY of the intonation, and that's where most of the information was.

I just went to a concert and heard a number of deeply moving pieces that I had never heard before in my life and were very different from what I normally listen to.

I think it's also definitely true that a good musical soundtrack enhances any movie/tv show/game/etc. even if you're encountering both for the first time. Without the music, it just isn't nearly as frightening/exciting/romantic/funny/ triumphant/etc..

Basic concepts like "sense percept" (eg. color, shape) and emotion (sadness) are mixed here. Emotions affect perception in general.

Seems flawed and easy to debunk. What you see can also deeply affect emotions. Sunny day versus cold cloudy day.

That's why very "literal" lyrics can ruin a song.

This is why film music is a thing!

This must vary from person to person.

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