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Emotion in music

The New Neo Posted on by

Among my drafts I have an enormous number of fragmented ones about the connection between music and emotion. It’s not something I really understand, but I keep trying to write about it nonetheless. I think some people are immune to that connection or at least less likely to be affected emotionally by music. But I certainly always have found music emotional, and some music far more emotional than other music.

By “emotional” I don’t mean a unitary thing, either. Happy, sad, excited, nostalgic, regretful, calm – those are just a few of the emotions music can stir. And I also have noticed that some music is what might be called Apollonian and some Dionysian, and that this distinction is present across and within many genres.

This isn’t going to be the definitive post on any of this. But it’s perhaps a short introduction to what I hope may become a series.

I know that there are a bunch of videos at YouTube in which Oliver Sacks explores some of these issues. Here’s one that I found quite intriguing (I haven’t watched most of them yet):

Apparently the brain knows.

Which brings us to the Bee Gees – doesn’t everything? I came across the following reaction video yesterday to their song “More Than a Woman.” I’ve cued up a small part of it in which the two music-loving Georgian brothers (not the US Georgia; the other one) discuss their reactions to the song and to the Bee Gees in general:

They’re not alone in that reaction. There is a set of people who react emotionally in this way to the Bee Gees (I’ve heard some people liken them to a pleasant drug), just as there’s a set who react as Sacks did to Bach. It’s not everyone, of course, but both groups are sizeable.

And there’s some overlap between the groups. Me, for example. I react that way to certain pieces by Bach and to certain songs by the Bee Gees – which may seem odd but hey, that’s the way it is for me. Some day I may try to explain it, but for now I’ll merely note it.

Comments

Emotion in music — 47 Comments

  1. For me I don’t get emotional from the music alone only if it is combined with lyrics I can personally relate to. For some reason this song is one that has always got to me even when it came out in the 1990s but as I have gotten older it really can hit me if I’m in the right (or wrong) mood.

    Patty Loveless ‘How Can I Help You Say Goodbye’

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoNKCVduyYM

  2. Well, perhaps it is not all superficial context and associations, then.

    And to reflect for a moment, most of us have in fact heard a radically unfamiliar piece of music, very unlike anything which we had formed dispositions toward, only to be enormously intrigued or affected by it.

    As for the Back vs Beethoven, I would never have identified the first piece as Bach. Nor the second as Beethoven. I expected the stereotypical organ music or classical guitar for Bach and the 5th for Beethoven.

    But I strongly agree with Sacks. The Back piece as performed is mesmerizing. The Beethoven as pleasing as ditch water.

    As for the Brothers Grim, well, I have said enough about them in the past. But no sounds they have ever emitted have appealed to me any more than, say, the sound of a muffler scraping along the pavement, or some whiny guy whining his whine to his fed-up girl friend.

    I would pay good money for a device capable of filtering their sounds out of my aural existence permanently; if, that is, you could throw in The Carpenters, Neil Sedaka, Paul Anka, any boy and girl Swedish quartets dressed in space dance outfits, all of Disco, and finally Buck Owens and all those other similar sequined Grand Ole Opry clowns. Oh, most of the 70’s too. Did I mention Motown? Make that an 80% erasure there.

    So yeah music rouses an emotional reaction in me. But maybe not always a good one.

  3. I’ve enjoyed classical music from a fairly early age. I’m not much of a fan of Bach ( the Goldberg Variations leaveme disinterested). Whereas I hold Beethoven only second to Mozart. That said, Bach’s “Air on the G String” is ineffably exquisite.

    Yet my absolutely favorite classical symphony is by none of the above classical composers. For me nothing surpasses Fritz Reiner leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade”. That piece stirs my soul in an unmatched manner. Given my political and cultural views, it might seem unlikely but I’m an unapologetic romantic.

    I do think our soul determines our emotional reaction to a piece of music. We are not just blood, bones and electrical impulses. Our bodies and minds are the tools we use to interact within this physical universe.

  5. A miniaturized stealth PET Scanner would come in handy for individuals in the upcoming unpleasantness.

    Or a person’s browsing history, chat metadata and clickstreams going back 20 years.

    Would have been interesting to see Sachs’ brain processing the Crab Canon to compare activation for first the very simple theme and then same running forwards and backwards simultaneously.

    Polyphony can be very satisfying.

    I’d pay good money to stick Ann Applebaum and Max Boot in that machine and see which of the Horst Wessel Lied, Russian National Anthem or an Appalachian string band triggers them the most. I’m betting with Xenophon’s Ten Thousand here: Thalatta! Thalatta!.

  6. Interesting on the brain scans. Like Sachs, I like Bach, and only tolerate Beethoven. And I don’t even tolerate the BeeGees. To each his own. 🙂

  7. The comparison between Bach and Beethoven was not exactly fair — the Bach selection was, I believe St. John’s Passion. Or possibly the Mass in b minor. I cannot sit through either one without becoming very emotional. At times my eyes fill with tears, and at other times I want to shout with joy. Both are masterful examples of Bach’s work.

    The Beethoven I did not hear enough of to recognize, but I don’t think it was any of his symphonies. His work contains a lot of very good pieces, but none (in my estimation) with the complexity of Bach. In any case, the comparison should have been to something like his seventh symphony. Many say his ninth is the best, but I find myself getting impatient sitting through it, something I never do with Bach.

    As for The Bee Gees, their music is complex and pleasing to the ear, but is not anywhere near as emotive as just about anything Bach wrote.

    Most everyone’s taste differs, and in large part it depends on what you heard as you were growing up.

    I would also say that the selections were too short to do any more than tickle a memory. If anyone invited me to have my brain scanned while listening to Bach, and then turned it off after 90 seconds, he or she would incur my wrath. You don’t just turn off Bach!

  8. Kate:

    Some people love the Bee Gees and some can’t stand them. But some people in the latter group actually are only familiar with their disco/falsetto era. They had many other styles of singing and genres of music that are very different. Some people hate the disco stuff and find they love the other stuff.

  9. For Pete’s sake, compare one of Bach’s solo ‘cello suites to one of Beethoven’s better piano sonatas (both single instruments). Do not bias the results, especially since Sachs admits he prefers Bach! This one-to- one, selection-dependent comparison is nonsense, run of course by “neuroscientists” who are in fact psychologists. I do not hold them in high esteem; they generate BS, depend on it.

  12. It was dissatisfying that the Bach and Beethoven pieces weren’t a fair comparison between B&B.

    However, the test was not a competition between the two but a check to see if Sacks’ conscious status reports while listening to the pieces matched the brain activity displayed.

    At that level the test was a success. Sacks’ brain was much more lit up when he said he was enjoying the music (Bach) than his meh reaction (Beethoven).

  13. Kate:

    That’s not unusual.

    Most people only know their disco stuff, and although it was wildly popular (I like it, for example) a lot of people hate it. I prefer their normal voices, which are beautiful, and their harmonies. They wrote over 1000 songs and performed over forty years, and the disco era was only a few of those years and a small percentage of those songs.

  14. I think the fragment of Beethoven was just a tiny sampler of what they actually gave him to listen to in the study.

  15. For me nothing surpasses Fritz Reiner leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade”.

    Geoffrey Britain:

    Brother! I sometimes feel guilty for liking R-K’s “Scheherazade” so much. I may have over-listened to the major Bach and Beethoven, but I can always cue up “Scheherazade.”

  16. Cicero:

    As I wrote above, I’m pretty sure that was only one small snippet of the many selections they played for him. At any rate, whether I’m correct about that or not, I think the most interesting thing by far about the study is that Sacks reacted emotionally even to the Bach selection that he couldn’t tell was Bach.

  17. Re: Fritz Reiner…

    Geoffrey Britain:

    Mother told me a story about my stepfather, who played bass in several of the top American symphonies. I managed to verify it online:
    _________________________________________

    In Fritz Reiner: A Biography, author Philip Hart writes about the idiosyncratic way Reiner wielded the baton, using small, close-to-the-chest gestures. “Musicians who poked fun at him for his tiny beat rarely got the chance to do so again. When a double bass player brought a telescope to rehearsal once for a better view of Reiner’s ‘vest pocket beat,’ he was summarily fired.”
    _________________________________________

    That was the sort of thing my stepfather did. He was a life of the party guy. He did enjoy poking fun.

    Reiner may have fired my stepfather, but he had been discovered by Stokowski and never had trouble finding work.

    He was a beatnik who hung out with jazz musicians. He hardly ever practiced outside formal rehearsals. I couldn’t tell, but he must have been a true prodigy to hold down symphony positions while leading a disorganized life.

  19. I find I “Like” various pieces. I like to search among baroque and renaissance, and I like the Air on The G String, Fur Elise, moonlight sonata.
    Some country gospel I like.
    Some folk, although in many cases, it depends on the artist. But mostly, it’s the story, not the melody or performance.
    I don’t know if that’s what it would take to get my brain scan to light up.
    This, for example, is astounding harmony. But….the song is the song and I’ve heard a dozen artists. More to the point, I know a couple of folks to whom it would apply. So….lights?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibn8zdOwjy8&t=140s

    If I feel emotion, it’s because, for one reason or another, the song is associated with something important. “taking me back” is not, afaik, what the article was about.

    One guy said Womens Air Force uniforms in front of a Lancaster and the song “We’ll Meet Again”. Said his computer got recolonized. Kind of a good song in the context. Which included Bomber Command losing 50k guys, 45% of their air crew. Not sure what part of my brain would light up here.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sThuGZcEtuU

    WRT the Garland piece, I am reminded of something an entertainer said of the variety shows of fifty years ago–Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, etc.–never follow “When You Walk Through A Storm”.

  20. huxley,

    What resonates is what stirs the soul.

    Richard Aubrey,

    I too like a variety of music, though I’m particular as to exactly which pieces. But I rarely if ever connect an emotional reaction to something of past importance. For me its simply what stirs me, what resonates. Louie Armstrong famously said, “if it ain’t got that swing, it don’t mean a thing” For me its not rhythm so much as it has to musically resonate with me. Occasionally lyrics resonate, especially with country music but it’s the instrumental side where my soul resides.

    Though I do deeply enjoy a lot of singers, the melody in the song has to resonate. Some examples; The Great American Songbook. Simon and Garfunkel. Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors”. Connie Evingson’s “Gypsy in My Soul”. Chris Isaak’s “First Comes the Night”.

  21. Thanks to Neo (and The Bee Gees) our home has been flooded with beautiful love songs for many months now. I can report back that this is potent stuff! Perhaps their music should come with a cautionary label. Things have gotten markedly more lovey-dovey around here!
    I don’t mean it’s aural viagra…but hugs, squeezes, pats, little notes, and the occasional whispered “How deep is your love?” It’s nice!
    My husband is a devoted fan of opera and classical. It stirs his emotions in a big way – as it has since he was a small child. Me, not so much. We’ve often resorted to his/hers headphones throughout our many years of marriage.
    Now, with The Bee Gees, we’re listen together…plus all of the fun interviews and videos on YouTube.
    So yes, I’m reporting a definite subliminal effect…the subtle influence of musical “love messaging.”
    But, as Neo has noted, there’s an even more direct and immediate pleasure…it’s what she refers to as The Bee Gees’ “pleasant drug” effect. Beautiful melodies with the 3 distinctive voices whooshing together…hitting those close harmonies…it’s a thrill.
    If falsetto-disco isn’t for you, try “Blue Island,” “Come On Over,” “Run to Me,” “Rings Around the Moon,” & “Greenfields.”
    The more you listen, the more you’ll want to listen….

  23. Geofffrey Britain

    I think I was unclear. With a couple of exceptions, I am only stirred by music which is associated with something in my past.

    For example, working with the music director for my father’s funeral, the fourth in the family with military honors, the last piece could have been “Amazing Grace”. While I think it’s overdone, I still couldn’t see getting through it, as the Honors hit me pretty hard as it is. Sensing my hesitation, I presume, she suggested “For All The Saints”. Perfect, but now it carries baggage.

    Worked with a field project in a dicey area and “Gentle On My Mind” was big that summer. Two women in the group were exclusive with somebody not in the group, and each misted up at the song on the radio. Didn’t see the connection–not my business–but when I hear it now, I’m back.

    So I figure that reaction is “stirring” my mind. From what I get of neo’s piece, just liking a song isn’t the phenomenon. Nor is being taken back.

  24. Barry Meislin,

    Till now I was unfamiliar with Cage or his 4’33”. I just wasted 5 minutes of my life watching a bit of pretentious performance ‘art’.

    Arguably, silence between the notes may define the music but in and of itself, silence is not music. Typical modern nihilistic artistic snobbery; if you don’t understand it and support it, you’re a barbarian.

    4’33” is a put down of music itself, while pretending to be solely contemptuous of getting dressed up to perform classical music.

    Cage’s 4’33″s cousin in the visual arts is painting a canvas evenly black with a roller brush, framing it and claiming it to have great artistic merit. Artistically, it represents everything that is wrong in today’s world.

    I can’t tell you how I really feel about it because I just did 😉

  25. Ruth,

    I shall check out those songs, none of which I’m familiar with, the streaming service Qobuz makes doing so easy. Also anyone who has a Qobuz account or Roon, etc. I encourage to read the Bee Gees ‘biography’ it is eye opening and confirms what neo has been saying about them.

  26. Well said! G.B. (with admirable echoes of Samuel Johnson’s “I refute it thus!”, no doubt…though, personally, I find that 4’33”—if one has the patience and/or the ability to doze off quickly—does have a tendency to grow on one…)

    Not to worry, though; there’s always 3’29″…
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrkVyXFsx6Y

  27. You should read the book “Musicophilia” by Sacks. He talks about different people experiencing music differently. I didn’t completely understand it, but it helps explain why some people are completely indifferent to music that I love (or even hate it).

  32. I like to put on a recording of 4’33 when I have listened to too much “busy” music. It’s very restful. You can play it over and over.

    8>)

  33. I’ll venture on a mild defense of 4’33”. I always took it as a joke, and to my taste a rather amusing one. But someone who knows a lot more about John Cage than I do says that it’s actually meant to have a serious effect: to get people to truly listen to the ordinary sounds around them. So, no, it’s not music in any meaningful sense, but as a mental exercise it’s worthwhile. And I recommend it if you’ve never tried it–just sit still for a few minutes and pay attention to every sound that reaches your ears. You don’t need to play 4’33”. 🙂

    Alas for me, I have tinnitis so can never experience the silence which should be the background for all the individual sounds.

  34. Mac, you are correct that 4’33 is actually an interesting piece. If nothing else, it thoroughly squelched the attempt to define music as “organized sound.” It can also be a useful concert item. When the German government cancelled all public concerts several months back the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic chose to make a political point by performing 4’33 as an encore. It’s on YouTube and worth watching, though he does rather rush the performance.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWVUp12XPpU

  35. Neo-
    Well, it is Sunday, a day on which I should be especially non-argumentative. BUT–
    You claim “As I wrote above, I’m pretty sure that was only one small snippet of the many selections they played for him.”
    I have reviewed your essay and find no such disclaimer.
    Being “pretty sure” about something is different than knowing something as a fact.

    You overlook the fact that Sachs prefers Bach to Beethoven. Bias there, Oliver?
    In fact, both Bs were astonishingly creative. I love their musicality equally. Both were also very accomplished instrumental performers, though I do not believe Bach could play cello nearly as well as organ, despite his 6 Suites for solo cello, the easiest of which I could never master.

    The pianoforte was a pretty young instrument in Beethoven’s day, and he was an incredible pianist as well as composer for the instrument.

    Personally, I have never cared for Sachs. When he went into a neurology training program in the 1960s, neurology had only a very few primitive treatments at its disposal. I declined an invitation to become a neurology trainee then at a first-rate institution.
    Good neurologists were then in fact more neuro-anatomists than clinicians. Sachs’ visibility is due only to his successful publication of bizarre case reports, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales” being one.

    Sachs did not advance neurology as a medical scientist or as a clinician, but as a tool to make money for himself. Yes, he was a fine, descriptive writer and made buckets of money with that skill. But that is writing, not treating or curing! That is writing, not medicine!

  36. Cicero:

    Usually when I am referring back to something I wrote in a post, I say something like “as I wrote in this post.” In this case, I was referring to a previous comment of mine, which was above the one in which I was addressing you. When I wrote the comment to you I thought that the previously one of mine was literally directly above it, but there actually was one short comment someone else (huxley) was writing in-between. My comment to you was here at 8:27. The comment above to which I was referring was here at 8:15.. That previous comment reads like this in its entirety: “I think the fragment of Beethoven was just a tiny sampler of what they actually gave him to listen to in the study.”

    I’m not in the habit of claiming to write things I didn’t write.

    I happen to like both Beethoven and Bach. And the reason Sachs is in here was mainly for the video, which I find interesting in particular because his brain appeared to respond to the Bach differently even when he didn’t know which excerpt was Bach and which Beethoven. And of course the fact that he prefers Bach would be likely to influence what’s going on in his brain. The post is about emotional reactions and preferences in music. No one is claiming that Sacks was some definitive scientist in the sense of which you speak, but he was a really good writer with a knack for bringing stories of neurology to the general reader, and an insatiable curiosity and keen intelligence.

  37. Neo,
    I stand corrected as to your comment.

    But nowhere can I find evidence that Sachs was a fine neurologist (or, neuro-anatomist, in his early and mid-life medical days, when they could tell what part of the brain was dysfunctional, but not do hardly anything about it except treat seizures, and use steroids for myasthenia). To further my point, neurosurgeons still today often call themselves surgical neurologists because they can and do intervene, as they did then!
    Sachs was a fine story-teller, but he used patients to his advantage… did he help them in so doing? Just a thought of my cynical mind. His popular writings of their cases made him a rich man.

    Not mentioned is he trained in SanFran in the hippie era, ate a lot of LSD as a young MD, and was actively gay. What a great time to be in SanFrancisco!

    Yes he reads well.

  38. Speaking of music, here’s something different and fun….James O’Keefe, of Project Veritas, will be playing the lead role (‘Curly’) in an outdoor production of of Rogers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!. The production is ‘in solidarity with artists who’ve been cancelled. (Yes, O’Keefe does have previous singing and performing experience)

    Roseland, Virginia, August 19–September 5. I’m going to go if schedules pemit.

  40. Ruth:

    Glad to be of service!

    The Bee Gees wrote more songs about love than any other group I can think of. It’s really interesting that your opera-loving husband likes them, too. In particular, Barry and Robin have very powerful voices when they want to sing full-out, although sometimes they prefer to use almost whisper voices or falsetto.

    I love their interviews. Charm and humor galore.

  41. I’m going to selfishly use this occasion to spout some thoughts, some of which are relatively unfinished.

    I think that “emotion” in music is overrated. I see these YT compilations with titles such as “most emotional parts of playlist or soundtrack XYZ” and I just roll my eyes. The ’emotion’ being described or targeted is usually one of the crudest – picking out the music that most excites or something like that. There is rarely any subtlety in the selections, as I see them.

    This brings up another point that I only just thought of while writing that sentence: when we speak of a certain piece of music as ’emotional,’ do we mean that it expresses emotion X or that it is meant to induce it instead? Perhaps we should make this distinction. And then, of course, what really is an ’emotion’ in that context? Like I was trying to indicate above, a piece of music can get the blood pumping and the limbs jouncing in a certain way, but that is not the same thing as emotion properly understood.

    Further, there are dimensions of human experience and life that are not touched at all, or at most only glancingly, by the last five centuries or so of Western music. We seem to be very caught up in this notion that music has the function of producing an ’emotional’ effect; if it does not do so, either by intentionally avoiding it or by mere failure to achieve its intent, what is such music then? For example, there is nothing particularly spiritual about ’emotion’, so that whole dimension is lost. It is as if our society, our culture, is becoming incapable of processing the very concept of “music” independent of a more or less crude ’emotional’ reaction.

  42. @Philip Sells:

    “It is as if our society, our culture, is becoming incapable of processing the very concept of “music” independent of a more or less crude ’emotional’ reaction.”

    Mass Man, Good Sir. Mass Man. And ever-increasingly that greatest of horrors: Mass Woman.

    Plus Soy.

    My Apple News feed is endless emo clickbait.

  43. Phillip Sells

    Couple of points: First, as has been noted in the comments, music does induce emotion. In some cases, such as my own, more or less independent of the music, due to one or another piece’s associations with real-world happenings.
    Others have said it directly influences their emotional state.

    But if it didn’t induce emotion–maybe one song in ten, say–who’d have the slightest interest in the sound? You’d have paid money to go to a concert which meant nothing? The pleasure in hearing music which is beautiful is itself an emotion, but where does the beauty come from? Not all agree which music is beautiful, which means the assessment is an emotion, not some objective set of points.

    But emotion varies. For example, the old hymn which starts “God of our fathers….” heavy on the trumpets I like a good deal for a number of reasons, one not least being the number of nice church people who cringe at it. It is to laugh. Not a worthy emotion, but not invisible.

    Who’d have bothered over the last umpteen tens of thousands of years?

  44. For me, I can be emotionally moved by “just the music” but it’s generally pretty rare, and often when it happens its due to adding thoughts of my own that the music might engender in me, but then the “being moved” is more from the thoughts than the music… though I’ll still credit the music since it was the source of the thoughts.

    I’d say I’m usually more moved by wonderful lyrics and/or a visual presentation though. For example…. this tune I’d heard and enjoyed on its own, but then someone put it against a movieplex ad and now just remembering it will at least get my eyes wet, so it was very much the video that gets me in combination with the music — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf8F8lc5Nb4

  45. The comments on how certain music invokes remembrances of times past is very true.
    Looney Tunes and Alan Sherman between them have forever altered my perception of many fine symphonic pieces.

  46. @AesopFan:

    “The comments on how certain music invokes remembrances of times past is very true.”

    All other things being equal, the strongest musical memory associations are probably late adolescent / early 20s for a bunch of reasons left as an easy exercise for the reader. Open to confutation.

    Smell and taste take one back earlier — the famous Madeleines and Tea, etc. I’ve noticed that a particular floor polish or disinfectant odor returns me to my first day at school more than half a lifetime and world away.

    “Looney Tunes and Alan Sherman between them have forever altered my perception of many fine symphonic pieces.”

    The Cambridge Buskers have forever sabotaged the woodwind windup in final movement of B’s 9th for me. Can’t get image of two guys with squeezebox and recorder thrashing it out of my mind.

  47. That music adds impact to things, I can never deny. But good music by itself will rarely be everything either.
    Most pieces widely acclaimed good, or emotional, or moving are far less impact on their own. The reason, I’ve decided, is that all to often they feel like an accompaniment. Whether or not they’re meant to be, they manage to be incomplete alone.

    The incomparable work of art known as Star Wars Original Trilogy has one of the most striking accompaniment problems I’ve ever experienced. The Imperial March, for example- it’s nice, but it was Vader’s stride as it played on screen that gave the piece its famous impact. And I say this having a copy of the CD, and having watched the Trilogy a week before.
    Alone, the March is nice, but nothing more. It certainly doesn’t make me want to keep listening. No more than the rest of the collection does.

    In contrast, this piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daFi4MScfl8 Overtaken, from One Piece still feels like an accompaniment, but it’s an accompaniment that makes me stay put to listen as it builds on itself.

    On occasion you find pieces that are complete and carry a whole story in the listening; but the only one I’m sure of is most of an hour long
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAw87rrzBhY
    Journey, by Austin Wintory. Soundtrack to a game played without words or plot, or interaction, and complete in its own right

    And since everything I’ve mentioned so far has been instrumental, here’s something vocal in a conlang and assembled out of multiple parts of other music:
    https://soundcloud.com/jarico17/the-elder-scrolls-complete
    It starts slow, soars when the great brazen horns of the empire join the barbarian choir, then adds in more instruments and harmonies without loosing the original melody

    Two vocal pieces in english by the same musician:
    https://soundoftheaviators.bandcamp.com/track/godhunter
    https://soundoftheaviators.bandcamp.com/track/travelers-song

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