Why We Like Sad Music
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3682130/
> Three types of musical excerpts of approximately 30 s each were used.
> Forty-four people (25 females and 19 males) participated in our experiment (mean age of 25.3 years; SD = 6.6). Seventeen of these individuals were professional musicians or college students who were majoring in music (the “musician group”; n = 17). The other 27 participants were working people or college students who were not majoring in music (the “non-musician group”; n = 27).
> The participants evaluated both perceived emotion and felt emotion by responding to 62 descriptive words and phrases on a scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 4 (very much) using the numerical keypad.
First, let's get a leading example of "sad" music, the music for the death of Siegfried from Wagner's opera 'Götterdämmerung', damnation of the gods, the fourth and final opera in Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8wHteSOwW4
So, why does it make people feel better?
Well, to lead up to the answer, that music is art as in the common definition the communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion. So, that music communicates the emotion of a big loss.
Now why would one want to hear that? Because the music clearly says that many other people both understand that emotion and have experienced it; so, a listener with such a loss and emotion is not alone; their loss is not nearly the first such; many others have been there before; the listener's loss is not unique and, thus, comparatively not as bad as they might have feared; so that's good news for the listener, and they feel better. That's why!
Glad you 'got it'. It's not really psychology but just Art 101. E.g., there's a good reason Wagner wrote that music; it's been darned effective for well over 100 years; lots of people 'get it', enough to keep opera companies going around the world.
"You mean you can make such sounds with a symphony orchestra?"
"Yes, Virginia!".
The music can sound like what it feels like to have a great loss, a dear child, a loved spouse, a company founded that failed, a case of cancer, and much more. Great losses are so common that the music can 'reach' nearly everyone in a large audience.
It's like, if you showed people a horizontal wavy line and a straight vertical line and asked which is sad, people might pick the wavy line. Does that explain anything about fine art?
Get Lucky by Daft Punk, the feel-good song of the year, is in F# minor.
The researchers in the study talk about the disconnect between perceived and felt emotion, and how listening to sad music induces ambivalent or pleasant emotions, but leave out the consideration that the listeners were given the music to judge, instead of seeking out music they wanted. I would argue, the emotions felt, by the listeners, were a result of successfully identifying and differentiating the music's "feelings" from their own. (That music is sad, but I am not. Success.)
I don't usually like to roll my eyes at the objects of scientific study, but this conclusion is so obvious that it causes me to question the authors' emotional literacy.