{"id":2102,"date":"2011-05-21T15:01:03","date_gmt":"2011-05-21T20:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2102"},"modified":"2011-05-21T15:01:03","modified_gmt":"2011-05-21T20:01:03","slug":"why-does-sad-music-make-us-happy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2102","title":{"rendered":"Why Does Sad Music Make Us Happy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few days after writing my Sad Song blog, about how a tune by The Cars pulled me out of the dumps on a very trying and frustrating day, I read an interview in the May Scientific American<\/a> with a hearing specialist and surgeon who is performing neuroscience research on musical creativity. I.e., what goes on in the brain when a songwriter sits at a piano sit at a piano searching for a pleasing series of notes, or when a bunch of performers improvise and exchange riffs. The pace may be different in these two situations, but the overall process of creativity is about the same. But just what is that process all about?<\/p>\n

The interviewee, Dr. Charles Limb, mostly said that more research is needed before anything definitive can be said. So the article is more about investigating an unanswered question than about explaining a new scientific discovery. Another interesting question that Dr. Limb asked towards the end of the article \u2013 and again left unanswered \u2013 is \u201cwhy do we love sad music? Why does it make us feel better and not worse?\u201d Hmmmm, that’s a darn good and interesting question, especially given how I resolved my Friday the 13th blues earlier this month. We don’t seek out other sad and depressed people when we’re feeling down; that just makes us feel worse (most of us, anyway). But we certainly do love our sad songs, and maybe movies and paintings too. What’s the difference?<\/p>\n

If a scientist like Dr. Limb can’t give a good answer, I certainly can’t. But heck, that never stopped me before. In light of my Friday the 13th experience, I will posit that sad music seems like a way of \u201ctalking about it\u201d, getting it off your chest. If you’ve got a handful of unneeded $100 bills in your pocket, you could go see a therapist and get her or him to listen to your blues. But other than family and friends \u2013 and even among them, only a small percentage at best \u2013 you won’t get a lot of sympathy if you start dumping your woes with, say, the next thirsty co-worker at the office water cooler or coffee table. They’ve got their problems too. <\/p>\n

But humming a sad song at least makes you feel like you’re doing something expressive with an unwanted emotion; and it reminds you that someone else, i.e. the song-writer, felt what you do. So there’s an expression factor combined with a sympathy factor. Now, how much better can the average shrink or kindly friend or spouse do? (Yes, I know that shrinks are supposed to help you get at the root of your sadness so that you can change yourself and stop whatever else was generating your unhappiness. But I myself believe that the psychology paradigm of ‘therapeutic intervention’ is VERY over-rated, more faith-based than anything else). <\/p>\n

I wonder if Dr. Limb and his fellow audio-creativity researchers will arrive at something like that. I recall reading about recent neuroscience research showing <\/a>that music is \u201cheard\u201d in the brain in regions that have much to do with coordinating body movement (i.e., motor cortex and cerebellum). In a way, when we groove to a catchy tune, we feel something akin to what we feel when moving our bodies. Well sure — to walk or dance or just lift a fork, there has to be a certain rhythm between the thousands of little muscles all over our skeleton frame. When we walk down a street, it seems quite a bit like good music (at least if we’re “swinging down the street so fancy-free”, if you’re old enough to remember the song “Hey There Georgie Girl”). When we trip and stumble, there is something off-key and staticky about it all. <\/p>\n

And think about dancing \u2013 it seems like such a natural response to music for most people (not in the same way for me, but I’m a different story in that regard). Yes, I believe that there is a lot of overlap between body expression and music, and humming a sad song allows the emotive expression of feelings that our social group doesn’t want us to otherwise express. <\/p>\n

Hey, you want to hear all about my latest problems and worries? No? OK then, fire up the CD and punch up a melancholy song, maybe some classic cheese like Barry Mantilow’s \u201cCan’t Smile Without You\u201d. Oh, and an honorable mention to Elton John also for his \u201cSad Songs Say So Much\u201d from 1984. <\/p>\n

(Even though Elton sold a re-worked version<\/a> of it to Sasson Jeans, which aired a commercial taking advantage of the close pronunciation of \u201cSasson\u201d and \u201csad song\u201d; and also the usefulness of the opening verses, i.e. \u201cput them on, put them on, put on those [Sasssss – sons] . . .\u201d)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few days after writing my Sad Song blog, about how a tune by The Cars pulled me out of the dumps on a very trying and frustrating day, I read an interview in the May Scientific American with a hearing specialist and surgeon who is performing neuroscience research on musical creativity. I.e., what goes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,26,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2102"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2105,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2102\/revisions\/2105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}