The temporal patterns of music mimic our emotional lives
CHARLES DOMINIC
When I hear the saying “actions speak louder than words”, I think to myself that sometimes music can speak louder than anything. Strings of poetry integrated into a structure of sounds are perhaps one of the greatest ways to say your deepest thoughts. Music
is a language of emotion. It can represent different feelings and barge into the soul with no boundaries or limitations. People are always challenged by the fact that “no one understands them” or know how they “really feel”, so they turn to music. In times of distress, we all
do. Often times we may even notice and even believe the song was written for us. This is what I call the musical epiphany or the “sign”.
It is powerful enough to seep into the minds of people the idea of a moment, when used
as a background score. It has the power to
stop your tears as well as bring a downpour of your outpour. For many, music is a lifeline, an emotion, it gives them a sense of being. No biggie that the music industry is a multi-billion dollar industry!
Music has the capacity to imitate emotions. The temporal patterns of music mimic our emotional lives — The introduction, buildup, climax, and closure. A slow tempo will naturally represent sadness, while a more upbeat tune
is more courageous and happy. The slow beat resembles sadness and slowness you may expect in an individual with depression, while an upbeat tone will represent someone full of energy, bathing in what we call joy.
Emotional Empathy
Emotional empathy or emotional contagion is when perceiving an emotion can sometimes provoke the same emotion. If you’re heading to work while listening to a sad playlist featuring Adele, the odds are, you won’t be so hyped when you walk into your office. We have the ability to empathize with music and be influenced by its components. This is important to consider when shaping our perceptions or our mood to start the day.
If you’re dealing with a breakup or a negative event in your life, instead of reinforcing this mood, you may want to change your playlist to something upbeat for a brave come back.
The Auditory Cheesecake
Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist, likes to label music as an “auditory cheesecake”. This means that music is a cocktail of recreational drugs that we absorb through the ear to trigger multiple pleasure circuits at once.
Like other rewards such as food and money, pleasurable music activates the pleasure and reward system. When we stick to a certain song or beat, we like it to be repeated endlessly, since we almost can’t get enough of it. The bottom
line is that just like we need food or water when we’re hungry or thirsty, music is needed to satisfy our emotional desires for connection and meaning.
Nostalgia
Music is also a way to express emotions during personal events in a person’s life and connect those events to memories. Hearing a song played on a radio or television can trigger memories of events long past. Listening to music that was often played during a significant life event, such as a family celebration, or perhaps a breakup may leave some prints. It can trigger a deeply nostalgic emotional experience, and a musical scar. The feeling is not the music but the experience it reminds us of.
This is also relevant to lyrics associated with a song. If one speaks of sadness and longing, it will be marked by ones who have lived such miseries while another one about the power of being positive, may speak to ones who see the world in the eyes of the good. Perhaps music reinforces what we long to remember.
Admiration
Turns out there is a reason why people cry when they listen to Ludovico or Yiruma. Music will often make us feel like crying because we experience a sense of awe and admiration. Music makes us feel. Anything that will make us experience or stir emotions that really dive into our interpersonal space, will make us curious or amazed.
In response to these emotions, we experience goosebumps and even a motivation to improve ourselves and to improve society. Perhaps
songs, lyrics, and chords are their own forms of saying hello, goodbye, or to presumably reinforce the ‘unsilent’ silence we wish others could understand.
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