Where does a feeling in music live, the song or you? The science of sound
There are times when, feeling down, I reach for the saddest music I know. I put on Lana Del Rey, the reigning queen of melancholy
There are times when, feeling down, I reach for the saddest music I know. I put on Lana Del Rey, the reigning queen of melancholy, and something in my heart lifts. You might expect that kind of music would sink my mood further. Instead, it steadies me, comforts me, even delights me. And it is not just my own small contradiction. It is one of the most fascinating puzzles in the science of sound, and the answer reaches deep into the brain. Lana Del Rey, the reigning queen of melancholy, whose saddest songs can leave a listener feeling strangely lifted. Read Full Story So where does a feeling in music actually live, in the song or in the listener? In this instalment of Science of Sound, we follow the path a piece of music takes, from pure physics, into the body's chemistry, and finally into emotion, to understand why the same song can break one heart and gladden another. WHAT THE EAR HANDS THE BRAIN Every feeling music gives you begins with physics. A note is simply air vibrating, and the rate of that vibration, the frequency, is what we hear as pitch. Fast vibration is a high note, slow vibration a low one. Stack a few qualities on top and you have the whole toolkit. The first is tempo, the speed of the beat. The second is timbre, the texture of a sound, the quality that lets you tell a flute from a violin on the very same note. The third is the relationship between notes. Pitch, tempo, timbre and the way notes sit together, this is the whole toolkit a composer works with. (Photo: Unsplash/Pexels) When two notes vibrate in a simple ratio, such as one string moving exactly twice as fast as another, they blend smoothly, which we call consonance and hear as pleasant. When the ratio is awkward, the two sets of waves clash and beat against each other, and that roughness is dissonance, which we hear as tension. Before music is ever a feeling, it is pure physics, nothing but air trembling at a certain speed. (Photo: Unsplash/Pexels) The last is mode, the family of notes a melody is built from, and what the West loosely calls major, often heard as bright, and minor, often heard as dark. These are the building blocks or bricks, and crucially, they can be measured. They are the same for every person in the room. The mystery is how identical vibrations become joy in one body and sorrow in another. THE RULES THAT SEEM TO CROSS EVERY BORDER Some of those bricks appear to mean the same thing almost everywhere. In a striking experiment, researchers played Western piano music to the Mafa, an ethnic group of people in the mountains of northern Cameroon who had little or no exposure to it. The Mafa still picked out the happy, sad and fearful pieces well beyond chance, just as Western listeners did, leaning on the same clues: faster music read as happy, slower as sad or fearful, according to a 2009 study by Fritz et al. published in Current Biology. Speed alone can carry a mood, the rush of a fast song, the ache of a slow one.
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