Quote:
Originally posted by tiberry
...why DOES a piece of music seem to elicit a certain mood based on the sound, key, chords, scale, etc??
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Actually music does not cause emotions in people but simple acts as a catalyst. What that really means is that people apply their own emotions to the music they are listening to and feel how they want to feel.
The reason being that ten people can listen to the same song and ten different emotions can arise. Some are similar, some are opposite. Basically we feel what we want to. Of course this is primarily in the aesthetic and subjective sense since most people cannot quantify music from an objective sense,..ie ( that sucks,..that sucks because I don't like the singer,...that sucks because the secondary dominant modulated to an incomplete cadence,..)
Minor chords are often related to 'sad' songs while major chords are associated with 'happy' songs. However this is a vague rule usually because a song in a minor key can be upbeat and happy while a song in a major key can be a sad song in ballad form.
A great example I used once in a very long musicology paper was the Beatles song 'Yesterday'. This is very brief but the gist of the song is longing for yesterday.
The point was that 2 people can hear the song at the same time and have the opposite emotional response. Perhaps one person just came out of a relationship and was hurt hears that song. That person is likely to be sad or angry.
But someone else who may have just found their soulmate hears that song, smiles and is happy because yesterday wasn't so good and today is better. We dictate our emotions to cater to what we hear and what we want to hear.
If I had the time I'd post a paper regarding music and emotional responses I did in a strip club. Very interesting. Some strippers leaned towards the lyrics while some were more inclined by the music and not the lyrics. However they all agreed that an emotional release dictated their mood by the music they chose to listened to. Very Interesting.