How Does Music Evoke Emotion?

Music is remarkable in its ability to evoke profound emotions — chills and thrills — in listeners. And being emotionally moved by music is an inherently pleasurable experience. Most music listeners use emotional expression as the most important factor in valuing music and the decision to buy a song (Juslin, 2019). How does music move us?

1. Conditioned response

We hear certain kinds of music as sad because we have learned to associate them with sad events like funerals. The feeling is not the music, but what it reminds us of. When a particular piece of music becomes associated with specific moments in listeners’ lives, it tends to evoke emotions such as joy or sadness. Thus, if I first heard Chopin’s Waltz in E minor during a particularly sad period of my life and you first heard it in a particularly happy period of yours, it might, on later hearings, remind you of happy events, me of sad ones. Thus, by association, making you happy and me sad.

2. Nostalgia

Music is the number one trigger for nostalgia. Listening to a song that was played a lot during a significant life event (e.g., music from your teens) many years ago can trigger a deeply nostalgic emotional experience. The feeling is not the music, but in what it reminds us.

3. Music as an expression of emotion

Music embodies expressive qualities like melancholy and cheerfulness. Musical sound can imitate or represent emotions, such as sorrow, joy, fear, and hope. For example, the rapid, skipping tempo, or the loud level of sound make music cheerful. In contrast, a slow tempo or dark minor tonalities make music sad. Similar to music, cheerful people’s voices are energetic, and sad people tend to speak in soft subdued tones of voices.

4. Surprise

Like reading fictional narratives, a great deal of our pleasure in the experience of fictional narrative is the pleasure we take in wondering what is going to happen. Listening to a song that has been listened to many times before holds no surprise, because one ‘knows the story.’

5. Musical pleasure

Music is merely a sequence of tones arranged over time. Each of these sound events in isolation may not be considered particularly rewarding; yet somehow their temporal dynamics can induce some of the most intensely pleasurable responses known to man, creating “highs” that have been famously described as like those of powerfully addictive drugs (Zarorre, 2015).

6. Collective emotion

When people go to concerts or make music together, their emotions are in part influenced by the emotions of other people present in the context through rhythmic entrainment and emotional contagion. Entrainment occurs when our bodily movements lock in to synchronize with music. Synchronizing with others and with musical rhythms is fun. Being in sync with another person produces positive attitudes toward them. This process of synchronization may help to explain group bonding, such as adolescent subcultures listening to specific forms of music (Kraus 2021).

In sum, music has the potential to evoke profound emotions in listeners. This potential is one of the primary motives for engaging in music listening. Listening to preferred music may be a more effective way of reducing feeling of stress and increasing positive emotion than relaxing without music.

References

Juslin PN (2019), Musical Emotions Explained, New York, NY Oxford University Press.

Kraus N (2021) Of Sound Mind. MIT Press.

Zatorre RJ. (2015). Musical pleasure and reward: mechanisms and dysfunction. Ann N Y Acad Sci.