Recent research has examined the motivations for listening to sad music. People frequently report listening to sad music as a means of seeking comfort or accepting difficult feelings and situations.
Huron and colleagues have observed that the frequency with which an instrument is judged to convey sadness correlates with specific acoustical properties known to contribute to sad expression in speech, though these features are subject to external factors affecting them.
1. It’s a distraction
Music can be an excellent medium for communicating emotions, with different musical genres evoking various moods. Sadness is perhaps the most frequently associated with music as an emotion that spans across cultures and experiences. Sad songs tend to feature lower overall pitch and slower tempo accompanied by minor mode usage and darker tones; though these characteristics might not immediately bring joyous thoughts, some musicians produce music which provokes both positive and negative responses simultaneously.
Music that portrays emotions helps people manage them in different ways, with different motivations for doing so. Listening to sad music may serve as a means of validating the feelings being experienced (Chen, Zhou and Bryant 2007; Heflick & Van den Tol 2016) while validating these emotions through music could prevent maladaptive ruminations or other harmful coping strategies from developing further.
Music can provide comfort and companionship during times of trouble and distress, its emotional impact being well-documented for years now. Music’s positive effects can have an immediate and tangible effect on mood, memory and stress levels – which explains why many spend considerable time listening to it; sad songs especially are known for providing comforting companionship during tough times.
Studies have also demonstrated how music can serve to distract from tasks at hand, and to reduce arousal levels in the brain by stimulating dopamine release – associated with decreased arousal and improved concentration – this arousal reduction may explain why people may seek comfort in listening to sad music when feeling down rather than when in better spirits.
Studies have proven that students find it easier to revise when the music is turned off; studies show that they are less distracted while studying in silence, with improved results than listening to music during revision. Unfortunately, some students fail to recognise how their choice of music could hinder results and continue listening regardless; it could be that their mood improves with what leads to effective revision, or just simply they enjoy hearing music!
2. It’s a technical component
Sad music can often be explained through melodies, harmony, dynamics and other musical characteristics; however, instruments also play a part in how sad music is perceived. Studies have revealed that certain instruments tend to better suit certain emotions – for instance violins tend to be used when creating happy songs while trumpets often make for melancholic tunes – the answer lying within their respective timbres.
Researchers have explored whether an instrument’s ability to evoke sadness correlates with its capacity for producing certain acoustic features that contribute to sad speech’s prosody. To conduct their study, musicians were asked how well each instrument was able to convey this emotion, with results being compared with various acoustical properties known to contribute to prosody and perceived emotion of an instrument such as its low pitches, small pitch movements, minor mode use, dark or dull timbre and ability to produce muffled articulation.
The results revealed a strong relationship between certain acoustical factors and an instrument’s capacity to induce sadness, particularly instruments with voice-like qualities; perhaps these aspects play a critical role in how sad music is perceived by its listeners.
Notably, these results also revealed that an instrument’s frequency in being used to play sad music was less strongly correlated with its capacity for producing an emotive tone than with how often they’d been employed to do so. This could be related to its availability; some instruments might be easier or quicker for beginners to find than others or its compatibility within ensemble groups or combinations of sounds being blended together more smoothly than others.
This research has laid the groundwork for future studies that explore how different characteristics of songs affect their emotional impact. Previous work has found that listening to sad music induces different thoughts than happy music in the brain, such as increases in self-referential processing (including reflection on personal goals or mind wandering) as well as activity within regions of DMN associated with these activities.
3. It’s a coping mechanism
Sad music may often have negative connotations; however, research has demonstrated its ability to be comforting. Hedonic qualities associated with sadness in music can have a calming effect and listeners may feel more empathy towards it when its emotional components evoke similar responses in them – known as emotion contagion.
Unfamiliar instrumental sad music can create different reactions in its listeners, including relaxing sadness, moving sadness and nervous sadness. Each experience may carry different implications for them as their perception is affected by various factors including its acoustic characteristics, its emotional context and listeners’ personalities.
Listening to sad music has long been touted as an effective means of relieving negative moods or situations, providing comfort, consolation and acceptance of what may otherwise be an unpleasant situation or mood. Unfortunately, when this method of coping is used maladaptively (leading to feelings of depressed depression and/or ruminating), its usage increases the chances of experiencing depression.
Studies have demonstrated the impact of one’s mood on their musical taste preferences. One such study demonstrated how people who were intentionally forced into feeling sad were more inclined to favor music that evoked sadness; similarly, participants encouraged to imagine painful events experienced greater aversion towards expressively happy music than those not deliberately forced into feeling down.
Theory suggests various explanations as to why certain instruments evoke certain emotions. One such theory states that an instrument’s chord structure or melodic interval size could affect its capacity to provoke sadness. A similar concept has also been applied using harmonic overtones, tone color and timbre features as examples of elements to consider when crafting emotional experiences using music.
Participants of one experiment rated various instruments’ ability to evoke feelings of sadness. Voice was judged the most effective instrument at doing this, followed by ocarina, viola and violin respectively; other options like cymbals triangles and wood blocks were much less likely.
4. It’s a distraction
Listening to sad music can provide an effective way of relieving boredom and increasing concentration for those who find other distractions challenging to deal with, yet can also cause psychological issues like depression, anxiety and an increase in suicide risk. However, excessive exposure can result in physical consequences, including depression, anxiety and even an increased risk of suicide.
People listen to sad music for various reasons, from self-regulatory reasons such as regulating mood to validating emotions and providing solace. Research has proven the therapeutic use of music can improve emotional and cognitive functioning by modulating neural activity associated with certain states; for instance, those experiencing negative mood tend to prefer listening to sad songs due to their ability to illicit mood-congruent responses (Friedman et al. 2012).
Studies have demonstrated that listening to mood-congruent music increases both valence and arousal levels, leading to improved task performance. Conversely, incongruent music produces the opposite response, decreasing mood and arousal levels as well as poorer task performance (Trost et al. 2014). Furthermore, this relationship between mood and performance largely depends on whether an individual knows about or recognizes its composition (Trost et al.).
Music may influence both our arousal and mood depending on our level of trait empathy, with those possessing high trait empathy being more likely to simulate expressive cues portrayed by musical pieces they listen to, potentially increasing engagement with interventions designed to improve mood or performance through musical manipulations.
However, not all listeners are conscious of the effects that their choice of music can have on their mood and performance. Perham and Currie conducted a study where participants who listened to music when revising reported not realizing their memory performance was inferior than those listening to silence when revising.
Many students might continue listening to music when revising, either due to thinking it enhances their mood or as a method for increasing concentration. We should remind these students that quiet can provide unexpected advantages that could enhance both mood and performance when studying.