This is my first question on this board. please excuse my poor English skill since English is not my mother tongue.
Recently I listen to some sad songs and it makes me feel sentimental and sad even some kinda depressive. Is there anybody could tell me what’s the magic of songs? Is it dangerous to listen to them too much?
It’s a great question, but one I’m not sure has a factual answer, as opposed to an opinion based on gut feeling. I know a few years ago the Sarah MacLaughlin album was popular but I was going through a really tough time and listening to it made me feel downright suicidal almost.
But like I said, that’s only my personal opinion and experience and hopefully someone might have links to some sort of actual psychological data on the subject. I’d be interested to see it for sure!
Welcome to the boards.
I don’t have any scientific data, but I am a music education major, so I have listened to and performed a LOT of different kinds of music.
Music can have an extraordinary power to convey emotion and feeling, along with a story. It can make a person feel happy, sad, nostolgic, patriotic, bored, and any other emotion known to man. I enjoy “sad” songs myself, and there certainly isn’t any danger in them, in and of themselves. If you feel sad, a sad song could make you sadder, or a happy song could pick you up. I’ve never heard of anyone having negative effects from listening to sad music. I suppose if you listened to it 24/7 it could make you depressed, but that can be fixed by puting on something upbeat every once in awhile.
It’s unclear whether there is something inherent in minor tonality (sad sounding music) that evokes sad emotions or whether we have just always used that particular kind of music to portray sadness and sad events, to the point where we associate it that way. If we had always used major tonalities to convey sadness, I wonder how it would sound to us today? I personally think it’s a combination of being referential and inherent in the music. I don’t see anything wrong with listening to sad songs. If you’re like me, maybe it’s just a phase.
I read a scientific study in Nova magazine some years ago that listening to too much country music not only causes you to cry tears in your beer, it is a factor in clinical depression. Or something like that.
Back in the 1930s, the song “Gloomy Sunday” by an Hungarian* bloke named Reszö Seress was blamed for causing several suicides.
In the 1960s in America, Peggy Lee’s song “Is That All There Is?” was widely considered the most depressing thing people had ever heard.
Plato’s Republic warned of the effect that songs could have on a population and recommended that the government strictly control the types of songs that would be allowed. Hmmm…
*Yes, I know you don’t use “an” before “Hungarian,” I just did that to satirize the writers who use “an” before pronounced h, like “an historical…” 
I have had several experiences with feeling sad and listening to sad music. Listening to Garbage, Dido and The Cardigans would often make me feel sadder, or more depressed than usual, and I’m a guy! These groups put out some of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard, as well as upbeat ones, but still depressing. It kind of was an addicition for me because I’m heavily into music, and changing emotions that go with it. The cure was to simply put on some D12, Eminem or Dre, with some Korn and RATM.
thanks for your kindly reply.
it is said that the music one choose to listen to can reflect the listerner’s “current emotion” or those so-called “deep-seated feelings”. I agree with BellaVoce, there a story behind every song or piece of music. Sometime we have some kind of feelings that we don’t know how to express and then music do the job for us. When we recognize that the music express the exact feeling in our hearts, we probably like to listen to it again and again.
PS: I am an “English major”(perhaps it sounds odd to you , but that’s my major in college) in China and I’ve learned a lot from this board.
I don’t have a cite at hand, but one of my professors used to explain the difference between (for example) vision and hearing in envoking an emotion was due to the anatomy of the brain.
His point was that because the autitory nerve and brain centre’s are much closer to the centres that control emotion, the effect of music on emotion is much stronger than that of pictures.
This is going to be long, please bear with me
In German, major is called Dur, and minor is Moll, which comes from Latin “hard” and “soft” respectively. That would suggest that in older times, the moods of major and minor were perceived differently. But it gets more complicated.
Until the advent of the tempered tuning system (where all 12 semitones of an octave are equal), there were other theories on how to tune an instrument. With tuning there is a certain problem: you can only have one single scale that sounds perfect (i.e. every interval is in accordance to the natural row of harmonics), so you either do it that way, having all the other scales sound more and more off tune, the farther away they are from the scale you choose to be the main one (mediated). Or you compromise, and make every scale equally off tune, which is what we have today (tempered).
So, in old times, they had every scale sound intrinsically different, while we today have all major scales sound alike, and all minor scales also alike, only difference being the pitch*. The “main” scale that was chosen to be tuned perfectly was usually C major. G and F major still sounded near perfect, but a little different. D and B flat major were less perfect, but still OK. Scales as far away from C major, like C# minor, or G flat major would sound absolutely off key and horrible in our ears, and it’s no wonder they weren’t so popular even then. All these scales sounded so different from one another that theorists began to assign certain moods to them. Eventually these moods were associated throughout Europe with their respective scales, and composers began writing pieces that wanted to express a certain feeling in the key that was corresponding to it. So it’s no wonder that funeral music is often in B minor, or coronation anthems in C major.
Some examples from what each scale was supposed to represent (from memory):
C major: magnanimous, triumphant, imperial
G major: joyous, innocent, soft
D major: severe, dignifiet, pious
A major: mischievious, playful, hard
F major: sad
B flat major: soft, lovely, amorous
E flat major: heroic, magnificent
A flat major: melancholic
A minor: gay, not very sincere
C minor: dramatic
B minor: the scale of death!
Note that associations varied through time and geography. Anyway, you see here that there was a much greater variety of feelings that could be expressed by key alone. Of course the more complex keys were avoided, but after people started tuning their instruments in the tempered system, we see obscure keys like C sharp major and F minor more and more frequently.
People started experimenting with the temperate system as early as the 1700s, but it only became common after the 1850s.
But let me ask you: what is The Simpsons opening score? Is it major or minor? Or how about the Scottish song Auld Long Syne?
Major and minor is not all there is! They are just 2 facets out of a system that knew 7 different types of scales: the ecclesiastic scales. Major was derived from the ionian scale (from C to C, no “black keys”), and minor from the aeolian (from A to A, no blacks). The others were: dorian (based on D), phrygian (E), lydian (F), mixolydian (G) and locric (B). Each had a variation (hypodorian, hypoaeolian etc…), making a set of 14 genders of scales. They usually did not transpose them however, because that would make them sound imperfect. But theoretically they had a set of 168 (!!) different scales at their disposition, each one of them sounding different than all the others.
During the transition from the renaissance to the baroque era, ionian and aeolian established themselves as the most popular scales (the reason is interesting, but I don’t to make the post too long :)), and the obsolete ecclesiastic scales were just occasionally threwn in to make a point or for flavour.
And the answer to my above question: The Simpsons tune is mixolydian, a scale that pretty much is typical for American film music. No Hollywood score can do without it.
Auld Long Syne is pentatonic, a scale that seems alien to western music, but if you look closer it’s present in Scottish, Russian, Hungarian, and of course east Asian traditional music. It contains no semitones, just five pitches, distributed asymmetrically in the octave (if you play only the black keys on a piano, you have a pentatonic scale).
OK, I’ve bothered you enough, so here’s two more snippets and then I’m going to shut up :
Schubert wrote many many depressing pieces. And every time he wants to get away from mere depressed and go into the cruel, he suddenly introduces the original theme in a major key. The devastating effect of the sudden change to major is IMO clear even for a person who grew up learning that major is happy and minor is sad. Check the Winter Journey to hear for yourself.
Mahler did something similar, but with a difference: while Schubert never used the major keys as if though they were “happy” (such an idea would be alien for his time), Mahler, who lived some 4-5 generations later, already was influenced by that happy-sad-tonality of the two genders of keys. He still manages to turn depression into devastation by inserting a passage in a major key. Listen to the funeral march of his first symphony. The trick is: just because major is so happy (he’s sure to write an accordingly happy tune too of course) it sounds as if it were mocking the previous sad tune, adding insult to injury.
The opposite is true too of course - there are many examples of music in minor that are “happy”. Russian folk music is probably the most impressive example.
Please forgive any misspelled or unclear terms, as English is not my primary language.
*In theory! In reality there is always a difference, depending on the instrument. On a piano, scales with many black keys will sound mellower, while scales with few black keys will sound brighter, because the black keys are shorter, and thus convey less force to the string. For violins there is a difference between scales that use open strings (scales that contain E, A, D and G) or scales where no open scales occur, because you can’t play a vibrato on an open string (unless you are one of these people who use the bow to make a vibrato).
Welcome to the board hazeleyes. I have been to Shenzhen a few times and it is a beautiful place.
It is not only music but movies or stories or anything which can put you in the mood. Just a few days ago I saw the Korean movie THE HARMONIUM IN MY MEMORY which is a story precisely about how music can bring memories and it made me choke up at the end. I recommend it.
Welcome to the SDMB, hazeleyes from China! Your English writing skill is excellent, don’t worry about it. Keep writing.
Actually, Apollon, the Simpsons theme is Lydian, with the sharp fourth. So is part of the Jetsons theme.
Mixolydian is like the major scale but with a flat seventh. Heard in countless folk, rock, and blues tunes. I’d be willing to bet that since the late 1960s there have been more Mixolydian rock songs than Ionian.
The flat seventh has come to predominate. The rebirth of the modal. It all started with Miles Davis Kind of Blue. Another popular mode, revived by Miles on that album, was the Dorian: like the minor but with a raised sixth and flat seventh. Think of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.” The Dorian accomodates the blues scale better than probably any other mode, which explains why it’s used in modern jazz and rock so much.
Each of the ancient Greek modes was believed by the Greeks to have its own distinct emotional character. These concepts are ignored by modern modal composers.
In classical music, the key of E Major was believed to signify Heaven. F Major was considered the key of Nature.
Once I was tripping on LSD and I put on a Cat Stevens album, Catch Bull at Four (the one with the Chinese Zen Buddhist illustrations about a kid trying to catch a bull).
Side A was full of the most joyous, ebullient, happy, ecstatic, cheerful songs you could ever wish to hear. Cat Stevens was working magic on the human soul with those songs. He really was a genius. When the side finished (this was back in the days of 12-inch vinyl phonograph records, that’s how old I am, kiddies), I felt so wonderful, warm & fuzzy inside, just glowing all over with love and wellbeing, I had to hear some more. I turned over the record and played Side B.
The songs there were so miserable, downer, depressing, gloomy, and painful, I couldn’t take it. I pulled the needle from the record before I sank into terminal despair. Then I understood the album’s setup: he was exploiting the duality of the two-sidedness of the vinyl LP format. I felt that Cat Stevens had played a trick on the listener. I looked at the back of the album cover and there he was laughing, enjoying his joke on me. Way to go, Cat.
YES! Couldn’t have said it better myself.
ARGH!!! :smack:
Of course it is! It was just a typo, really. Honestly. You have to believe me! LOL
Thanks for correcting that.
ooops… I’m not allowed to edit my post
It’s surprising to see so many replies !
I haven’t seen THE HARMONIUM IN MY MEMORY before, maybe one day i can buy a DVD to have a look at it. It seems like the movieONE FINE SPRING DAY, which is also a Korean one.
last weekend I saw tow movies, one is called
THE PIANIST , another one is Amadeus. Music in these two movies are really wonderful. I enjoyed them very much, though my knowledge of music is poor. Thanks to Apollon and Jomo Mojo for making up a music lesson for me.:). And thaks to all of you for the warm welcom:)