Sad music is a genre of background music commonly used to evoke feelings of sorrow or melancholy in film scenes, television shows, video games or other media platforms. It typically features slow mournful melodies with minor key harmonies to convey melancholy or reflective moments effectively.
2. No royalty
Royalty free music can fit seamlessly into any production, whether that means background horror flicks, video blogs or corporate presentations. However, licensed music can cost thousands – the rights holders often charge multiple royalties whenever it is broadcast or sold. Tunetank’s royalty-free tracks do not require royalty payments so that your focus can remain solely on producing an amazing production!
3. Easy to download
Create and license music for any kind of project requires planning, effort, and budgeting. Licensing hours of copyrighted music or hiring musicians to compose custom pieces can take both time and money; thanks to platforms like Soundstripe however, finding royalty-free sad music for video or audio projects has never been simpler or more cost-effective!
When selecting music for visual projects, it is crucial to take mood and tempo into account. According to music professionals, piano, cello, violin and human voice are the best instruments for sad music – licensing these instruments could help your project evoke melancholy or sorrow in its audience.
Royalty-free sites such as Epidemic Sound, Envato Elements and Artlist offer an impressive variety of sad background music for royalty-free licensing. Filter by genre, tempo and mood to quickly locate the song that best matches your project needs; plus they offer trial periods so that you can give the music a test run before purchasing it!
Sad music should match the pace of your resting heart rate and convey emotion effectively, so your audience can connect with and relate more fully to your project.
Mubert, Artlist and SoundCloud all offer royalty-free sad songs with various instruments and moods available for download. Their platforms span various genres such as acoustic, classical and soundtrack/cinematic and feature slow and reflective melodies complemented by minor key harmonies for more melancholic atmospheres; for example composer Adrian Walther’s songs Endgame (67 BPM) and Azure (70 BPM) provide ambient with low energy sounds that you might want to try listening to.
4. More complex
Sad music can often be described as slow, soft and somber music that elicits emotions associated with sadness; although these may initially seem negative feelings, transient sadness has also been associated with positive responses; research shows that sad music may elicit catharsis as well as other pleasant sensations. Furthermore, sad songs have long been used as soundtracks in films and television programs in order to enhance emotional depth and suspense.
Why does music evoke such strong, complex emotions in listeners? A recent study conducted at McGill University suggests that its appeal lies beyond simply negative emotions. They found that effective sad music can elicit both satisfaction from enjoying its qualitative aspects as well as feelings of power that allow listeners to imagine themselves sharing those of its composer.
Results also demonstrate that the most effective instruments for conveying sadness are those that best mimic human speech and music. Therefore, they must be capable of manipulating pitch, loudness and timbre to mimic vocal and musical expressions of sadness. Interestingly, cello or violin were highly rated instruments when it came to conveying sadness – these bowed string instruments possess unique abilities to bend pitches within melodies to produce microintervals similar to what the human voice uses when producing expressive emotions such as sadness.
Other acoustic features were also significant predictors of an instrument’s sadness capacity, including low energy features that characterized it. Unfortunately, these characteristics were highly intercorrelated and didn’t capture the multi-faceted emotions involved with sadness as an experience.
5. A more useful distraction
This survey’s findings indicate that listeners use sad music for various emotional needs, including mood regulation and consolation. Our findings reflect previous research highlighting musical validation as a means of alleviating negative emotions such as sadness (Saarikallio 2010; Thompson Reece and Di Benedetto 2014). Furthermore, listeners select songs depending on their mood or situation; sad music might even serve as a form of distraction from rumination or acceptance-based coping in difficult psychological circumstances (Van den Tol and Edwards 2016).
We explored which rewards were specifically linked with listening to sad music, using principal components analysis. Four dimensions were revealed. Dimension 1 examines the reward of imagination, which comes from engaging imaginative processes like visualizing themselves in situations depicted by sad music. Dimension 2 refers to the benefits of emotion regulation as reward, such as experiencing satisfaction from reaching various self-regulatory goals such as mood enhancement or venting. Dimension 3 emphasizes empathy as its reward, with pleasure derived from associating with feelings portrayed by sad music. Dimension 4 represents a reward with no “real-life” implications, or pleasure from enjoying music without extra-musical or contextual implications. We found that enjoyment of sad music was affected by personality factors and trait empathy – particularly people prone to rumination and lack of emotional stability were more likely to appreciate such music.