Photo: Jim Croce – Time in a Bottle | By Oliver Whang, New York Times / Pocket | 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. 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.
Dr. 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, Dr. 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 recreate 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 Dr. 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. 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.
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Go here to read the full article BEFORE you write your next song:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/science/behavior-music-sadness.html?
Oliver Whang is a reporting fellow for The Times, focusing on science and health.
A version of this article appears in print on Section D, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Sad Songs Say So Much About Connection.
Photo: Jim Croce – Time in a Bottle | From his Facebook page (no credit listed)