When Joshua Knobe was younger, he knew an indie rock
musician who sang sorrowful, “heart-rending things that made people feel
terrible,” he recalled recently.
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At one point he came across a YouTube video, set to her
music, that had a suicidal motif. “That was the theme of her music,” he said,
adding, “So I had this sense of puzzlement by it, because I also felt like it
had this tremendous value.”
This is the paradox of sad music: We generally don’t enjoy
being sad in real life, but we do enjoy art that makes us feel that way.
Countless scholars since Aristotle have tried to account for
it. Maybe we experience a catharsis of negative emotions through music. Maybe
there’s an evolutionary advantage in it, or maybe we’re socially conditioned to
appreciate our own suffering.
Maybe our bodies produce hormones in response to the
fragmentary malaise of the music, creating a feeling of consolation.
Why so sad?
Knobe is now an experimental philosopher and psychologist at
Yale University — and is married to that indie rock musician who sang those
heart-wrenching 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 all about.
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 could be considered artists if they display a concrete set of
features, like being technically gifted with a brush.
But if they do not exhibit certain abstract values — if,
say, they lack creativity, curiosity or passion and simply re-create old
masterpieces for quick profit — one could say that, in another sense, they are
not artists. Maybe sad songs have a similarly dual nature, thought Knobe and
his former student, Tara Venkatesan, a cognitive scientist and operatic
soprano.
Certainly, research has found that our emotional response to
music is multidimensional; you’re not just happy when you listen to a beautiful
song, nor simply made sad by a sad one.
Fifty shades of blue
In 2016, a survey of 363 listeners found that emotional
responses to sad songs fell roughly into three categories: grief, including
powerful negative feelings like anger, terror and despair; melancholia, a
gentle sadness, longing or self-pity; and sweet sorrow, a pleasant pang of
consolation or appreciation. Many respondents described a mix of the three.
(The researchers called their study “Fifty Shades of Blue.”)
Given the layers of emotion and the imprecision of language,
it’s perhaps no wonder that sad music lands as a paradox. But it still doesn’t
really explain why it can feel pleasurable or meaningful.
Some psychologists have examined how certain aspects of
music — mode, tempo, rhythm, timbre — relate to the emotions listeners feel.
The link between emotions and sounds
Studies have found that certain forms of song serve nearly
universal functions: Across countries and cultures, for instance, lullabies tend
to share similar acoustic features that imbue infants and adults alike with a
sense of safety.
“All our lives we’ve learned to map the relationships
between our emotions and what we sound like,” said Tuomas Eerola, a
musicologist at Durham University in England and a researcher on the “Fifty
Shades” study. “We recognize emotional expression in speech, and most of the
cues are used similarly in music.”
Other scientists, including Patrik Juslin, a music
psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, argue that such findings clarify
little about the value of sad music.
He wrote in a paper, “They simply move the burden of
explanation from one level, ‘Why does the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica
symphony arouse sadness?’, to another level, ‘Why does a slow tempo arouse
sadness?’”
Instead, Juslin and others have proposed that there are
cognitive mechanisms through which sadness can be induced in listeners.
Unconscious reflexes in the brain stem; the synchronization
of rhythm to some internal cadence, such as a heartbeat; conditioned responses
to particular sounds; triggered memories; emotional contagion; a reflective
evaluation of the music — all seem to play some role.
Maybe, because sadness is such an intense emotion, its
presence can prompt a positive empathic reaction: Feeling someone’s sadness can
move you in some prosocial way.
“You’re feeling just alone, you feel isolated,” Knobe said.
“And then there’s this experience where you listen to some music, or you pick
up a book, and you feel like you’re not so alone.”
To test that 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 gave one of four song descriptions to more than 400
subjects. One description was of a song that “conveys deep and complex
emotions” but was also “technically very flawed.” Another described a
“technically flawless” song that “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.
The subjects were asked to indicate, on a 7-point scale,
whether their song “embodies what music is all about.”
The goal was to clarify how important emotional expression
in general — of joy, sadness, hatred or whatever — was to music on an intuitive
level.
On the whole, subjects reported that deeply emotional but
technically flawed songs best reflected the essence of music; emotional
expression was a more salient value than technical proficiency.
In the second part of the experiment, involving 450 new
subjects, the researchers gave each participant 72 descriptions of emotional
songs, which expressed feelings including “contempt,” “narcissism,”
“inspiration” and “lustfulness.”
For comparison, they also gave participants prompts that
described a conversational interaction in which someone expressed their
feelings. (For example: “An acquaintance is talking to you about their week and
expresses feelings of wistfulness.”) On the whole, the emotions that subjects
felt were deeply rooted to “what music is all about” were also those that made
people feel more connected to one another in conversation: love, joy,
loneliness, sadness, ecstasy, calmness, sorrow.
Mario Attie-Picker, a philosopher at Loyola University
Chicago who helped lead the research, found the results compelling.
After considering the data, he proposed a relatively simple
idea: Maybe we listen to music not for an emotional reaction — many subjects
reported that sad music, albeit artistic, was not particularly enjoyable — but
for the sense of connection to others. Applied to the paradox of sad music: Our
love of the music is not a direct appreciation of sadness, it’s an appreciation
of connection. Knobe and Venkatesan were quickly on board.
“I’m a believer already,” Eerola said when he was alerted to
the study. In his own research, he has found that particularly empathetic
people are more likely to be moved by unfamiliar sad music. “They’re willing to
engage in this kind of fictional sadness that the music is bringing them,” he
said. These people also display more significant hormonal changes in response
to sad music.
Sadness just feels so right
But sad music is layered — it’s an onion — and this
explanation prompts more questions. With whom are we connecting? The artist?
Our past selves? An imaginary person? And how can sad music be “all about”
anything? Doesn’t the power of art derive, in part, from its ability to
transcend summary, to expand experience?
One by one, the researchers acknowledged the complexity of
their subject, and the limitations of existing work. And then Attie-Picker
offered a less philosophical argument for their results: “It just feels right,”
he said.
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