Sad music can often be described as slow, soft and somber music. Studies show that most individuals tend to enjoy this type of tune when feeling sad or despondent.
Emotions such as sadness, loss and loneliness are universal experiences that we all deal with every day. A soothing piano or violin in the background of YouTube videos can create an impactful mood which resonates with viewers.
1. It Creates a Powerful Mood
Many listeners find sad music can evoke strong feelings of loss and even induce tears, particularly if its content carries sentimental significance for them. Yet, most listeners find these songs enjoyable.
Reasons may include natural homeostatic balance. For instance, when people experience emotional distress, their bodies need other emotions in order to feel balanced again – sad music provides such variety that helps restore equilibrium within our systems and bodies.
Researchers have discovered that when people listen to sad music, certain parts of the brain become active – specifically the OFC, nucleus accumbens and insula. These same areas become activated when experiencing other stimuli with homeostatic benefits, like eating an enjoyable meal or experiencing affection from another.
Sadness brings its own form of pleasure: its ability to tap into various emotions. According to one study, when people listen to sad music they experience three main categories of feelings: grief, melancholia and sweet sorrow – three main negative emotions like despair while sweet sorrow provides more positive sensations like comfort or pleasure.
Filmmakers who use sad music can create moods that resonate strongly with audiences while at the same time being pleasurable listening experiences, creating more authentic and immersive film viewing experiences for viewers.
Sad music in films can help set the mood and maintain smooth transitions between scenes, as well as increase viewer empathy for characters’ emotional struggles. Evocative sounds such as PremiumBeat library’s vast selection can add the finishing touches for drama or romance projects alike; get started today and search our sounds library!
2. It Enhances the Emotional Impact of a Scene
Sad music quickly stirs deep emotions within its audience and helps maintain an emotionally charged atmosphere between scenes, so it is often used in cinematic productions depicting deaths or major tragedies. By having access to royalty free sad music for use during such scenes, audiences will quickly get into the right mindset for an emotionally charged scene, leading to greater responses.
PremiumBeat’s powerful search engine makes locating royalty free sad music easier than ever, enabling you to narrow your options based on genre, instrument and mood filters – and quickly identify tracks with cello, piano or violin instruments which convey sadness most effectively. Furthermore, our site lets you focus in on tempo as an indicator of whether a song sounds sad or happy.
Studies have also demonstrated how song tempo can impact how you feel, altering both depression and elation levels. Slower pieces often provoke feelings of sadness while faster pieces tend to bring greater feelings of happiness.
Other elements that contribute to how a song sounds include its musical mode, which refers to the arrangement and order of musical notes in a given key. Songs composed in major keys tend to sound happy while those in minor keys often sound melancholic. Timbre, or the sounds produced by particular instruments, can also influence how a song feels; for instance, flute sounds usually connote more joyful feelings than piano tones.
Some individuals may find pleasure in listening to sad music because it triggers psychological processes that are inherently pleasurable despite feeling sad themselves. This phenomenon is known as “tragedy paradox” and warrants further study.
Evoking emotional responses when listening to sad music may actually mask its pleasure; similarly, watching films based on true stories may both distressing and fulfilling at the same time.
3. It Stirs a Sense of Empathy
Studies have demonstrated that sad music evokes empathy, an emotion associated with sympathy and kindness. This may explain why many viewers of dramatic films find themselves crying along with their characters on screen.
People may use sad music to reflect on negative experiences and emotions they’ve encountered in life, which may help them process them or at the very least simply temporarily distract from daily struggles. However, it is important to differentiate between this form of natural mourning and more serious rumination that could indicate clinical depression.
Studies have demonstrated that listening to sad music can bring pleasure while other studies demonstrate it can actually heighten feelings of loss and sadness. It remains difficult to explain this paradoxical result, although some researchers speculate that learned associations may play a part. Or it could simply be caused by dampened displeasure of negative emotional responses induced; both processes are part of natural homeostatic regulation processes that act on homeostasis in our bodies.
One factor that might contribute to these contradictory results is the tempo of music. Sad songs tend to feature slower tempos than their happy counterparts, creating an atmosphere of melancholia or sadness for listeners – they could feel as though they are taking a slow walk to mull over personal issues or mourn the passing of someone they care about.
Recent research looked into how different factors – social context and personal characteristics – impact this effect. They discovered that participants who are sensitive to other people’s suffering were more likely to respond emotionally to sad music; conversely those more depressed or inclined to compare themselves negatively were less likely to enjoy listening to such material.
These findings add to an expanding body of research indicating that our pleasure from music can often depend on perceptions of social situations. When selecting background music for any project, keeping this factor in mind may significantly change how people react to its scene.
4. It Enhances the Visual Context of a Scene
When watching movies in which characters encounter emotional hardships and struggles, sad music can accentuate those scenes by setting the film’s mood and helping create continuity as scenes change from one scene to the next. Additionally, this musical accompaniment helps maintain coherence and flow as you transition between scenes.
Music can evoke nostalgic and melancholic feelings associated with bitter memories or events (e.g., mourning the death of someone close or an unsuccessful sporting match), making some types of sad music pleasurable even though these pieces don’t actually induce sadness in listeners. For this reason, people find some types of sad music enjoyable even though these pieces don’t cause them to experience it themselves.
The reason behind this baffling paradox can be found in how our brain processes emotional stimuli. Negative-valence music triggers specific regions in the OFC, nucleus accumbens, insula and cingulate; similarly these areas also activate when processing other homeostatic stimuli like food, sexuality and attachment – suggesting that pleasure we experience from sad music stems directly from its ability to regulate emotions while stimulating positive ones as indicated in the graph below.
As shown by blue arrows, personality, social context, and learned associations all play an integral part in our enjoyment of sad music. Additionally, mood also plays an integral part in whether or not certain types of music are pleasurable to listen to (purple arrows).
Although research on this subject suggests people find certain forms of sad music enjoyable, not all researchers agree on why this occurs. A few theories offer explanations.
Levinson’s theory posits that people enjoy art-induced sadness because it offers multiple psychological rewards: catharsis – purging away negative emotions, apprehending expression – the satisfaction of understanding and experiencing emotions expressed through music or literature, emotional resolution – knowing our mood has been or can be managed, expressive potency – the pleasure of expressing emotions directly, and emotional communion – connecting to fellow listeners through emotional empathy.
PremiumBeat has you covered if you need royalty free sad music! Our search engine allows you to narrow down tracks by genre and instrument to quickly locate exactly what you need.